Thomas Hampel

 12 November 2015
Your first step towards the cloud is to build a hybrid environment e.g. to support a proof of concept in your environment.
In most cases customers would like to move a few users to the cloud to experience the onboarding process, confirm seamless coexistence of on-premises and cloud environments, and explore new features of the cloud such as IBM Verse.

Although IBM provides a full training course for setting up a hybrid environment, I still would like to (with friendly support of Hagen Bauer) provide a checklist for customers to support this process and getting started as quickly as possible.

Warning:
This checklist may not be perfect, you should still read the documentation and talk to your certified IBM expert of choice.
It is supposed to be a checklist for customers, not for certified onboarding specialists that will move your IBM Notes mail to IBM Cloud.
Suggestions and ideas for further improvement are always welcome.

Overview
This is a graphical overview of a hybrid environment. On top are your (On-Premises) servers, at the bottom are cloud servers and in between (red) the internet.


Steps

• Check your inventory! Are current servers available? Are they accessible? Are they placed in the network zone they are expected to be?
  See graphic above and verify positioning of:
  #1 = Domino Administrator Client
  #2 = On-Premises Mail Server
  #3 = On-Premises Directory Mail Server
  #4 = Passthru Server in DMZ
• Complete this table with data from your environment. Make its correct and complete.
• Configure your Firewall for inbound and outbound traffic.
  Check twice, and verify Firewall settings once again before claiming to be done. A mistake at this point will cause headaches later on.
• Make sure your passthru server is using the same root certificate as your HUB and MAIL server?
  Can the Admin client (see #1 in the graphic above) access the passthru server?
• Create a new OrgUnit based on your current Domino certificate. This certificate will be used later on for all your Domino servers in the cloud.
  Example: "/SCN/Company" or "/Cloud/SRV/Company"
• In your current environment, does your Global Domain Document meet those requirements?
• Make sure you still have the SmartCloud activation email available. The one that contains the SmartCloud activation link.
  Oh, and make sure the link has not expired.
• In the SmartCloud Notes account initial setup, did you choose "Hybrid Account" ?
  If not you need to request a full reset of your account by contacting support@collabserv.com
• Define a name prefix for your cloud mail servers. Choose a short but remarkable prefix and dont pick something too fancy.
  Example: **Cloud-**/SCN/Company
• Are you prepared to create new and modify existing DNS records for your company domain?
  Make sure you have control over your DNS records.

Conclusion
All of the above steps are part of the documentation, but not in a single place. I hope you can make use of this reference in your SmartCloud onboarding project.
Feedback is very welcome, so drop me a mail or send a tweet

References:

• Course: Hybrid IBM SmartCloud Notes
• Worksheet: Configuring the SmartCloud Notes Account Settings (PDF)
• Hagen Bauer - Checklist for SmartCloud Notes POC (German)
• IBM Connect 2015 - ID105 Extend Your Security Into the Cloud with IBM SmartCloud Notes