On the subject of migration tool investment by the vendors, migration tools are considered a marketing expense. You build free tools when you're trying to quickly gain market share from your competitors. Once you have the market share, there's less need since the prospective customers will want to move to your product for many other reasons. You also face an increasing competition for the development dollars. On day one, /all/ the customers want migration tools. On day 1000, <2% want migration tools and >98% want some other feature.
I'm not apologizing for Microsoft's lack of updated tools - in fact their consistency on this has been quite good for my company. They never did do an HP OpenMail to Exchange or Steltor/Netscape Calendar to Exchange tool, so the ones we did are still viable products. In terms of cost, $1200 for 700 users seems pretty cheap compared to the number of hours spent looking for a solution. Migration tools are rarely cheap from third parties because they're generally expensive to maintain and support and because the third parties don't have the Exchange/Outlook/Windows revenue to shore up the bottom line. Compared to the total cost of the project, $1200 is probably a drop in the bucket. Compared to having to abandon the data, I suspect $1200 is infinitesimal. Creating Outlook personal DLs is a pain in the neck. I know because we had to implement it in our products. You can script it using the Outlook Object Model, but you still have to be careful of the size limitations of an Outlook DL (125-135 entries depending on entry type and address size) and handle adding additional nesting if there are too many for one DL. There are some examples of using the DistListItem object at www.outlookcode.com. Andy Ps - please add appropriate grains of salt to the validity and intellectual honesty of this answer. I have been accused of being an MVP, which may have compromised my ethics and ability to think for myself. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Greg Deckler Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 11:41 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Day 2 Lessons Learned: GW6.5 to Exchange 2000 OK, some more specifics from the front. ENVIRONMENT - NetWare 6 Server, SP3 - GroupWise 6.5 PO, SP1 - Exchange 2000 Server, (Version 6.0 Build 6249.4, SP3) Migration Workstation - Exchange 2000 Administrative Tools, no SP's - NetWare 32-bit client - GroupWise 6.5 client, not SP1 - Outlook 2000, no patches - Terminal Services in Application Mode What is migrated: - Cabinet -> Cabinet - Calendar -> Calendar, after logon and import - Contacts - NO, but can use OrgToOut (DL's, see below) - Trash - NO - Mailbox -> Inbox - Sent Items -> Sent Items - Drafts -> Drafts - Junk E-mail -> Junk E-mail - Documents - NO, not surprising as this is a different paradigm - Checklist - NO - Work In Progress -> Work In Progress Day 2 was largely beating my head against the wall. Could not get GBMT to work with either the 5.2.6 GW client or the 6.5 GW client. I can export users to a file, but cannot reset passwords or set proxy rights. This is not overly distressing since migrating users using their own accounts is working consistly. No real explanation that I can come up with other than I guess something is different in 6.5 that allows this to work. Also, since this is only about 700 users, manually doing this after resetting passwords from the GW Admin interface is a possibility. Sucks if you're the guy that has to do it, but doable. I emailed the creator of GBMT to see if there is an update that might do the trick, but have not heard back and am not really counting on it. Spent the morning trying to get this to work without success. Spent the afternoon beating my head against the wall with converting personal DL's. This one is important to the client because they got burned on this going from Exchange 5.5 to GW6.5 so it bites that I have not been able to get what I consider to be a good solution for this. Contacts work just fine using OrgToOut, but not PDL's. OrgToOut is my own tool that takes CSV files from things like Lotus Organizer and GW and converts them to a format that can be imported into Outlook. If anyone wants a copy, let me know and I'll fire it your way. Exporting the GW address book (Frequent Contacts in GW6.5) to a .NAB file exports the groups, but there does not appear to be a CSV import for PDL's in Outlook. If anyone knows the format or if it is possible to import PDL's into Outlook from a CSV, I would be most appreciative of any insight. Next, I tried VCF format. Again, GW VCF exporting exports the groups and, in fact, exports all of the Frequent Contacts to a single VCF file. However, Outlook VCF import appears to only recognize the very first entry in the VCF file, which it imports successfully and then ignores everything else. So much for VCF being a standard I guess. <sigh> So next I ran Outlook against the GW server, the thought being that I could copy the DL's out of the Contacts folder in GW into a PST or something. Unfortunately, Outlook sees the contacts in the Contacts folder, but not the PDL's. <deep, deep sigh>. So THAT won't work either. Next, tried to run the GW client (5.2.6 and 6.5) against the Exchange server AND the GW server, the thought being that you could copy the PDL's from GW to Exchange via the client, but couldn't get this to really work at all. Checked into available tools to do this and there are some out there that support PDL's but they want an arm and a leg for them. The cheapest would be about $1,200. Ouch. What a rip, there are all kinds of free tools from Novell and others to do the reverse, go from Outlook contacts and PDL's to GroupWise. Microsoft is falling down on their migration support here. Their tools are old and stale and nothing much useful seems to have come out of them lately. So, the current plan; one that I know will work but involves a little bit of effort is to run the following command from the command-line: FIND "G>" *.nab > GROUPS.TXT This identifies all of the .NAB files that contain groups so that you can manually go in and recreate them for the user. Not pretty, but it'll work in the event that I cannot come up with something better. If anyone knows of something better, by all means please share the knowledge. I'm thinking of writing some VB tool that could parse the CSV file and recreate the groups, but that will take a bit of work and I may not have time to get it working before the client has to migrate. The nice thing about this approach is that it can all be done prior to the migration if we can get the users to export their Frequent Contacts to a file. That's it for Day 2. Day 3 tasks are: - Grant "Migration" account mailbox rights to all Exchange mailboxes in preparation for probably having to go into many of the mailboxes and create PDL's and import Calendars, Tasks, etc. - Check into mass changing of GroupWise passwords. Client was already planning this anyway. - Check into mass setting of proxy access from GW Admin. Probably not possibly and apparently not necessary, but would be good to check into anyway. - Update Rocket configuration to support individual passwords, just in case. This is a 2-minute configuration change and the passwords will be a known entity. - Work out communication schedule to end users - Copy up .BAT tools for use with OrgToOut - Finish up any details, documentation and create action plan for moving forward _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&; lang=english To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&lang=english To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
