English

I personally agree with SharePoint Survey Result posted here. In fact that I see many organizations tend to migrate Lotus Notes to SharePoint, manually – using crafted custom code or using some adequate tools. However, seems that those available tools or most of developer forget that “Lotus Notes is always timezone and daylight saving aware while Windows & Unix is not aware of those details”. And not to mention to any tools, we’ve found commercial tools are not aware of this daylight saving problem.

So what will happened then?
This problem will only affect to DateTime field in Notes. If we are not aware of this, the migrated data will show +2/+1 hour difference from the actual time. This is true, because Lotus Notes will save the raw data along with timezone/daylight information – while the migrator will just ignore it and convert to GMT based on local client settings.

How to prevent daylight saving problem?
Here are checklist before running data migration procedure from Lotus Notes to SharePoint,
1. Clean up your data view (for example, create a view in Lotus Notes which takes DateTime field and show it using formula) 2. Make sure you have consistence setting on operating system (for the migrator) and Notes server, before running data migration
3. Make sure that you have consistence setting on SharePoint Server, before running data migration

Bahasa

Saya setuju dengan apa yang dimuat di SharePoint Survey Result. SharePoint sudah mulai menjadi tren dan bergerak untuk menggantikan Lotus Notes. Hal ini ditandai dengan maraknya proses migrasi dari Lotus Notes ke SharePoint , baik secara manual, menggunakan program sederhana maupun dengan menggunakan aplikasi komersil. Akan tetapi, hampir semua aplikasi tersebut dibuat tanpa memperhatikan satu hal penting bahwa  “Lotus Notes selalu memperhatikan zona waktu dan daylight saving, sementara Windows & Unix tidak ”.  Dan tanpa menyebut nama tools, kami menemukan bahwa banyak aplikasi komersial yang dibuat tanpa memperhatikan masalah daylight saving.

Jadi apa yang akan terjadi?
Masalah ini hanya akan muncul jika kita memindahkan kolom DateTime dari Lotus notes. Jika kita tidak memperhatikan masalah ini, maka data hasil migrasi akan memiliki selisih antara 1/2 jam dari nilai waktu yang sesungguhnya. Masalah ini muncul karena Lotus Notes akan menyimpan data asal secara spesifik termasuk informasi zona waktu dan daylight saving – sementara aplikasi data migrasi akan mengabaikan informasi tersebut dan langsung melakukan konversi ke GMT berdasarkan konfigurasi dari zona waktu client.

Bagaimana cara mencegahnya?
Berikut ini beberapa hal yang harus dicek sebelum melakukan prosedur migrasi data dari Lotus Notes ke SharePoint,
1. Perbaiki data view di Lotus Notes (misal, buat view yang mengambil nilai dari kolom DateTime dan menampilkannya dengan menggunakan formula)
2. Pastikan bahwa konfigurasi region/timezone di sistem operasi (tempat migrator dijalankan) sudah sama dengan konfigurasi region/timezone di server Lotus Notes
3. Pastikan bahwa konfigurasi regional di SharePoint Server sudah sama dengan konfigurasi region/timezone di server Lotus Notes

English

In SharePoint development world, Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) is incredibly helps our tasks. However the default installation package only allows us to installed in 32bit OS. Previously – if you want to install it in 64bit OS , you have to do manual installation step which include extracting – modifying and re-package again. Now finally the CTP of VSeWSS 1.3 has been born to the world – and it support installation on 64 bit OS.

Some other new exciting features include:

• Command line build option for TFS and MSBuild integration
• SPSolGen now supports exporting from publishing site
• Automatically remove conflicted features
• Increase visibility of hidden features that VSeWSS creates
• Add fast update to deploy only the DLL or changed files to solutions
• Possibility to build WSS without deploying
• New item template for RootFiles deployment
• WSP Feature Dialog Improvment – ex. merge feature, possibly to define scope, receiver etc

It’s an CTP but worth to try ? Download it here! If you have any feedbacks, just drop the email to the team before 26th January 2009.