Yet, it shouldn't have happened. There are excellent tools for migrating from Notes to Outlook. After all, this is a very lucrative market opportunity for Microsoft.

Microsoft has a tool suite called the Application Analysis Envisioning Process (AAEP) for Lotus Notes applications. Here's how Microsoft describes it:

The Application Analysis Envisioning Process (AAEP) for Lotus Notes applications provides a process to identify and classify Lotus Notes applications, understand their core components and functionality, and provide accurate guidance for recommended target solution. The primary goal of this process is to encourage a standard approach that can be used to define migration and target solution recommendations, as well as estimate migration costs and timelines.

Microsoft also offers the Microsoft Transporter for Lotus Domino, described as:

Transporter Suite configures Directory and Free/Busy interoperability between Lotus Domino 6 or 7 and Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and migration of users, mail and applications from Lotus Domino 5, 6 or 7 to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

The company also offers Microsoft Application Transporter 2006 for Lotus Domino, which even includes a Flash demo showing how the whole process is accomplished.

Further Microsoft resources for Notes and Domino migration can be found at their Resources for Interoperability and Migration from Lotus Domino page.

There are a number of other products that perform Notes to Outlook migration. These include Transend Migrator, XitNotes, Quest Notes Migrator for Exchange, OptimusBT and quite a few others.

For Ms. Perino to imply that years of email messages were lost simply because a migration didn't go well vastly understates the scope of what had to go wrong for the migration to fail.

• There would have to have been a complete failure in backup strategy and execution
• There would have to have been a complete failure in executing message migration

But there's one fundamental factor that neither of these conditional failure factors include: the human factor. By Perino's statement, there are 1,700 White House employees, presumably each with email. Back in 2002 or 2003, when the email migration is said to have taken place, every single email user there would have had to not notice that they didn't get their old email messages when the migration was complete.