Ya gotta love when someone's hired and just imposes their favorite applications upon the corporation, independent of whether it's the right solution for the business. I can imagine that the discussion around the proverbial water cooler (do corporations even have water coolers any more?) isn't very favorable or positive.

Well, I can't help you make the case that you should keep Lotus Notes as your primary communications application in your company, but I can share that there is a pretty slick Windows application that does make it a breeze to convert between the major email, calendar and communications packages, including your conversion of Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

Since I don't have Notes running on any of my systems, I contacted Jim Beveridge of Connected Software and asked him to supply me with some screen shots so you can see how easy it is to accomplish. The specific application in question is Address Magic Personal PLUS, which lets you also convert all of your email messages in your Lotus Notes archive. If you just want to convert your address book, the less expensive Address Magic Personal is doubtless a better fit.

Here's the process, starting with a screenshot of Jim's address book in Lotus Notes:

That's our baseline, right? Now, firing up the Address Magic application, here's what we see first:

As you can see, the app helpfully lets you extract your email and address book / contact list from AOL, AOL Communicator, CompuServe (does anyone still use that?), Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Outlook (in case you're going in the other direction), Hotmail, Opera, Outlook Express, and much more.

The first step is to get familiar with the "Next >" button: you'll be pressing it quite a few times in this process.

Since we're just converting the Address Book, that's the selection here. Again, press "Next >" to continue to:

At this point it's time to scroll through the impressive list of source formats understood by Address Magic and pick what we want, in this case Lotus Notes, and press, you guessed it, "Next >":

If you're a Lotus Notes user, you know that your address book and other information is organized into folders. The next step, as you can see, is to choose which folder should be used for the address book you seek to export. Then...

In this scenario, we're exporting to Microsoft Outlook, as you can see.

Confirm your settings:

and we're ready to go, by (confusingly) clicking "Finish" to get started with the conversion. (maybe "Do it!" would be a better button title? :-)

Now you get to see the goofy program graphic as the conversion happens:

and finally:

Done!

Just to show that it worked, here's the same address book in Microsoft Outlook:

Either Address Magic Personal PLUS or the less expensive, address book only conversion utility Address Magic Personal should prove a great solution to your conversion challenge, and will hopefully make your conversion from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook quite a bit less painful.

Good luck with your new boss!