Groupwise to Exchange Migration
Discussion
GregE240 said:
PS - you have my deepest sympathy.
GW - MSX is the worst migration I've ever had to do.
Fortunately i am not involved with the migration myself, but i am the IT manager for a department of 100 people and am looking for a way of safe-guarding my staff email archives... As Central IT dont seem to be thinking about that.. Blinkered Vision.. We only do servers not desktops (external contractor drafted in to complete the process.)
Thanks
Steve
Steve,
At the customer we did the GW - MSX migration, the customer decided to implement KVault to complement Exchange 2003. In this way, mailbox data 30 days old or younger was kept in the Exchange mailbox, and older data was archived into KVS. This creates a stub in the mailbox, which, upon clicking, retrieves it from the vault.
We found import speed into KVault peaked at around 1GB/hour. However, using Exmerge and shoving the PSTs straight into Exchange, we were regularly seeing 12-14GB/hour. Given we sometimes had 30GB of archive data per night to import, you can see it was easier to get it all into Exchange, and then let KVS sort it out. In this way, users the following morning had access to all of their data. Obviously if we had less than say, 12GB of archive data, we could just set it importing into KVS.
One caution though - we found KVS was much fussier on PSTs than Exmerge was.
I think with a good (Gbit) connection to your Exchange server, you should see a good throughput of data if you use Exmerge.
HTH,
Greg
At the customer we did the GW - MSX migration, the customer decided to implement KVault to complement Exchange 2003. In this way, mailbox data 30 days old or younger was kept in the Exchange mailbox, and older data was archived into KVS. This creates a stub in the mailbox, which, upon clicking, retrieves it from the vault.
We found import speed into KVault peaked at around 1GB/hour. However, using Exmerge and shoving the PSTs straight into Exchange, we were regularly seeing 12-14GB/hour. Given we sometimes had 30GB of archive data per night to import, you can see it was easier to get it all into Exchange, and then let KVS sort it out. In this way, users the following morning had access to all of their data. Obviously if we had less than say, 12GB of archive data, we could just set it importing into KVS.
One caution though - we found KVS was much fussier on PSTs than Exmerge was.
I think with a good (Gbit) connection to your Exchange server, you should see a good throughput of data if you use Exmerge.
HTH,
Greg
Podie said:Thanks... I'm well rusty on GW but applying the KISS principle can't you just e-mail the users and ask them to move the stuff they want to keep back into their mailbox by a given date and use it as an opportunity to remove the dross?
Think Bliarout is your man on this one...
Good job you're thinking ahead though as once the GW system has gone there is no way that I'm aware of to recover from the archive.
What version of GW is it?
I've been looking into the same as (sadly) the decision's been made to spend huge amounts on an Exchange migration rather than the already-paid-for path to GW7.
Our current plan is to just get people to move anything they need back into their live mailboxes. We'll add some more disk space and expand quotas for people who need it, but generally encourage people to clear out anything they no longer need.
At 100 users, the Quest tools may be affordable though. I think they quoted us £4500 for our 700 mailboxes, so it should be comfortably under a grand - depends how much the archives (or the time to move them back) are worth to you or your users. The software does do some other stuff to ease the migration beyond archive conversion.
On the subject - how did/would you handle personal address books? The free NAB to CSV converter seems to have gone, others I've tried mess up contacts that just have a company, not a name. Does anyone have a macro or similar that can format NABs in a way that Outlook will import cleanly?
>> Edited by sjg on Monday 29th May 17:36
Our current plan is to just get people to move anything they need back into their live mailboxes. We'll add some more disk space and expand quotas for people who need it, but generally encourage people to clear out anything they no longer need.
At 100 users, the Quest tools may be affordable though. I think they quoted us £4500 for our 700 mailboxes, so it should be comfortably under a grand - depends how much the archives (or the time to move them back) are worth to you or your users. The software does do some other stuff to ease the migration beyond archive conversion.
On the subject - how did/would you handle personal address books? The free NAB to CSV converter seems to have gone, others I've tried mess up contacts that just have a company, not a name. Does anyone have a macro or similar that can format NABs in a way that Outlook will import cleanly?
>> Edited by sjg on Monday 29th May 17:36
Blairout we are using GW 6.5
Sjg - the problem with putting everything back on to the live area from archive is that there is not enough storage space to go around..
my section still only has 30 gig of storage space on the network to cover all projects etc. needless to say that one project i am working on uses 80 gig is storage space for detailed mapping..
So i am looking for a locally installed utility that i can use to convert archive emails to outlook messages..
Thanks
Steve
Sjg - the problem with putting everything back on to the live area from archive is that there is not enough storage space to go around..
my section still only has 30 gig of storage space on the network to cover all projects etc. needless to say that one project i am working on uses 80 gig is storage space for detailed mapping..
So i am looking for a locally installed utility that i can use to convert archive emails to outlook messages..
Thanks
Steve
6.5 is newer than I'm used to but I do have a thought.... Can you run the Outlook client against your groupwise system using the Groupwise transport provider?
The archive alone is useless once it's orphaned from Groupwise unlike a .PST file but you could use the Groupwise transport provider as a half way house. De-archive files, access the Groupwise store through Outlook and then pull files out into a local .PST file. Far from elegant or efficient but in theory it should work.
Later versions of Outlook are a bit fussy but I have run Outlook 2K against Groupwise with reasonable success.
The archive alone is useless once it's orphaned from Groupwise unlike a .PST file but you could use the Groupwise transport provider as a half way house. De-archive files, access the Groupwise store through Outlook and then pull files out into a local .PST file. Far from elegant or efficient but in theory it should work.
Later versions of Outlook are a bit fussy but I have run Outlook 2K against Groupwise with reasonable success.
BliarOut said:Rob, great idea and I like your thinking.
6.5 is newer than I'm used to but I do have a thought.... Can you run the Outlook client against your groupwise system using the Groupwise transport provider?
The archive alone is useless once it's orphaned from Groupwise unlike a .PST file but you could use the Groupwise transport provider as a half way house. De-archive files, access the Groupwise store through Outlook and then pull files out into a local .PST file. Far from elegant or efficient but in theory it should work.
Later versions of Outlook are a bit fussy but I have run Outlook 2K against Groupwise with reasonable success.
BUT....what happens when it hits 2GB?
The Quest tool automatically spans them, so you get user1.pst, user1-1.pst, user1-2.pst etc etc.
Not sure how you could access the archive via an Outlook client too, I'm not 100% sure theres any provision for it.
Greg
GregE240 said:What happens when it hits 2GB? The wheels fall off
6.5 is newer than I'm used to but I do have a thought.... Can you run the Outlook client against your groupwise system using the Groupwise transport provider?
The archive alone is useless once it's orphaned from Groupwise unlike a .PST file but you could use the Groupwise transport provider as a half way house. De-archive files, access the Groupwise store through Outlook and then pull files out into a local .PST file. Far from elegant or efficient but in theory it should work.
Later versions of Outlook are a bit fussy but I have run Outlook 2K against Groupwise with reasonable success.
BUT....what happens when it hits 2GB?
The Quest tool automatically spans them, so you get user1.pst, user1-1.pst, user1-2.pst etc etc.
Not sure how you could access the archive via an Outlook client too, I'm not 100% sure theres any provision for it.
Greg
And I've never tried accessing an archive via Outlook... There would only be one way to know for sure, try it and see. My customers don't like spending money on a one off tool for some reason but don't mind paying for my time hence my propensity for good rough and ready solutions. I'm sure Quest is a better way if you've got a budget for it.
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