Migrating from Oracle Calendar Server to Microsoft Exchange while retaining recurrence patterns.

Oracle Calendar to Exchange -- Recurrence Pattern Recreation

When Sumatra reads Oracle Calendar Server data, it readily finds all of the instances of recurring meetings and activities – but the pattern created in OCS / CorporateTime is lost.

To make transition more seamless for the user community when moving to Exchange, Sumatra has developed methods of re-creating equivalent recurrence patterns and implementing these in Exchange.

While most recurrence patterns are simple and map readily, some of the patterns Oracle can create cannot be mapped into Exchange in any simple way – in these instances we insert the appointments or meetings as multiple instances with no recurrence pattern.

The following explains this in more detail.

Daily patterns in Oracle Calendar Server map easily into Outlook recurrence patterns.

Weekly Oracle Calendar Server patterns also map easily. For consistency, some “daily” patterns in OCS are translated into the equivalent “weekly.” That is – a “daily” OCS meeting that happens every 7 days is the same as a “weekly” meeting happening every “Tuesday.”

Monthly on Dates Oracle Calendar Server and Monthly on Dates in Microsoft Outlook are more problematical.

As you can see in the screen shots, OCS allows multiple collections od "by dates" or "by specific weeks."

We map these OCS occurrences if there is ONE of them per month. If there are two with the same title, we cannot translate them into an Outlook / Exchange recurrence pattern because Outlook allows only ONE such instance per month for a recurring meeting.

In cases where OCS has multiples (and our statistics show this is a rarely used condition relative to other recurrence patterns) we leave them as single instances.

Yearly recurrences map from OCS into Outlook / Exchange with no problems.

As always in migrations, there is usually ample time to work out special cases for client requirements.