Recently, I was asked what it would take to move a Lotus Connections deployment to new hardware. Not sure if this is valuable to anyone else, but I figured I would document it here just in case anyone else needs it.
Note: The awesome people at ISSL put this together, and with their permission, I'm including here.
The estimated duration will depend on several factors. Regardless, you will have to perform a full install of an empty system in the new environment to prepare for the migration. Other estimates are dependent on how the different environments are configured:
Pilot Version to Production Version: If the source environment is Lotus Connections Pilot Version, you will need to follow the detailed instructions in the information center to perform the data migration: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltscnnct/v2r0/topic/com.ibm.connections.25.help/c_pilot_migrate_overview.html
I have done this migration with one customer - it took about a day or two to complete, then there were a couple of days of setting up administration/product configuration specific to the new environment
Production Version to Production Version, same DB type, same LDAP: This is the simplest migration possible, which basically involved copying the shared file system and performing a native DB restore of the Connections databases, which should take a few hours. if there are any administrative or product configuration differences, they may take a couple of days to complete.
Production Version to Production Version, different DB type, same LDAP: A bit of a blend of the two migrations listed above - instead of using native database restored, you would either use the DB Wizard or manual scripts and migration utilities to move from the source DB type (ex.: Oracle) to the destination DB type (ex.: DB2). This type of database migration ay add a couple of days to the overall effort - and you have to be especially careful to validate that the scripts/utilities complete successfully
Production Version to Production Version, same DB type, different LDAP: This is a very complex migration if there is pre-existing data. There is no supported way to migrate data from one LDAP type to another and retain all of the non-Profiles user data. If they want to take this approach, it could take several weeks to design, develop and test the raw SQL scripts to perform the data conversion