Migrating from Oracle Calendar or Meeting Maker? Upgrade to Zimbra 4.5.10

Gentle readers,

Ms. Migrations recommends upgrading to Zimbra 4.5.10 if you are migrating from either of the legacy systems Oracle Calendar Server or Meeting Maker.

Version 4.5.10 fixes this problem:
http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/long_list.cgi?buglist=20684 which you are likely to encounter in a migration.

Exchange 2007 Permissions

In Exchange 2003 permissions were by far the biggest headache for folks wanting to migrate.

Exchange 2007 is shaping up to be a bigger headache. Think migraine. Think migraine with sinusitis. Then double it. You know what I mean. We have had to create an entire Label for permissions.

However, we would really like to thank Rohit from Extreme Networks for coming up with the following variation on setting permissions.

He was looking to migrate Resource Scheduler, but it's just as viable for general calendar migrations.

If you're using Ex2007 as the service account to run our code, execute this command:

Get-OrganizationConfig Add-AdPermission -user ex2007 -accessRights GenericAll -extendedrights "Receive as","Send as", "ms-Exch-EPI-May-Impersonate", "ms-Exch-EPI-Impersonation" -InheritanceType All

Takes care of all necessary permissions with one swoop.

(Note: Revised 2/15/2008 -- a pipe ("") should be place between get-organizationconfig and add-adpermission. It was stripped when pasting the command line in this blog)

Update 11/11/2010:

1) Added '-InheritanceType All' to the commandlet. Sometimes permission inheritance issues prevent access to calendars.

2) Remember that RESOURCE accounts must be ENABLED (via ADU&C)

3) If you want to look at calendars via OWA, you need fullaccess. This commandlet grants 'exsu' full access to all accounts in the domain:

Get-Mailbox -resultsize unlimited add-mailboxpermission -user exsu -accessrights: fullaccess -InheritanceType: All
--Russ

Migrating RSOE (Resource Scheduler for Exchange) data into Exchange 2007

A few months ago we got asked if we could extract data out of Resource Scheduler for Exchange (RSOE) from PeopleCube and insert it into Exchange 2007.


Well, because of a request from the West Coast we went ahead and did it. They mainly use RSOE for straight-forward room reservations and are looking to simply transition to the resource reservation features in Exchange 2007. So all we're interested in is moving the reservations in as few steps as possible into Exchange. We make no effort to recreate most of the other features of RSOE (prep time, cleanup times, etc.), all we're doing is transitioning the resource management over.

Here's how it works.

There are two ways to reserve a resource in RSOE:

• Via a from in Outlook
• Directly from a web browser

So we deal with each of these cases differently.

From Outlook

This is the easy case. Resource Scheduler puts a MAPI flag and an RSOE identification number in the meeting.

Technical background: Those of you who know how to use OutlookSpy (an invaluable tool for the Exchange developer) can look for RSOCEntryID.

We read this from the RSOE SQL database into an Access database and (since we know the meeting organizer and can uniquely identify the meeting via the MAPI tag), we add the E2K7 resource to the meeting and update it.

The code relies on Outlook 2007/Exchange 2007 to automatically apply meeting updates if an end user has already accepted that meeting. e.g. a time or location change to the meeting is received, the meeting will be automatically updated and the old invitation marked out of date so users will not accidentally accept it. See the TechNet article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/12/outlook/default.aspx

DONE.

From the Web

This is a more interesting case and we took the most general way of solving it.

Since there is no unambiguous link between the meeting reservation in RSOE and any existing data in Outlook (and a quick look at real world data will convince you that just being at the same time and date is not enough), we just create one meeting owned by the resource owner, with the resource in E2K7.

E2K7 books it and then the meeting organizer can add users or modify as they see fit.

PROCESS ASSUMPTIONS

1. Resource accounts MUST:
   a) exist and be mail-enabled in Exchange 2007, Active Directory
   b) be configured to process meeting requests
   c) Client must provide a map between RSOE resource name and Exchange Resource alias/email address


2. Testing and Use:
   a) Service Account defined with Impersonate and Send-As permissions
   b) Test in a lab prior to running in production!!
   c) Sumatra code runs on a 32-bit machine (NOT on a 64-bit Exchange server)
   d) Code uses Exchange Web Services through an Exchange 2007 CAS


3. End Users use Outlook 2007


4. Meeting updates:
   a) accepted as part of Exchange 2007 features,
   b) might remain in all end user’ inbox post-update and will not be removed by our code (up to the end user).


5. The Sumatra process:
   a) does not check for resource double-booking or conflicts
   b) works on CURRENT meetings only – it will skip expired/completed meetings as determined by RSOE’s meeting end date

Oracle Calendar Command Line Conversion

As usual the best ideas come from our clients, and in this case kudos go to Steve in Georgia.

For an Oracle Calendar to Zimbra migration he suggested "Why not make the OCS conversion command-line driven? Then we can script the entire process end to end."

Not a bad idea -- so we went ahead and did it.

OraCalReader.exe is our tool that takes OCS Export files from UNICPOUTU and turns them into our intermediate format (from here they can go into Exchange or Zimbra).

So now to run this on the DOS command line:

OraCalReader /ALL /TZ:tzValue /TH:xx /DROPDT:"dt" /EXPDIR:pp /OUTDB:ppdb

Notes:

• If you run /ALL without any other command line parameters, the code takes the DEFAULT settings saved in the UI preferences. UI preferences are visible by running the application without any switches on the command line
• The code will read the export files and insert them into the database.
• The code's default behavior is to delete ALL existing data in the database prior to insertion.
• Two Logfiles are generated: _OraCalReader_log.log, and _OraCalReader_Error.log

/ALL Required and has no command options

/TZ:tz Timezone.
Acceptable values are: EST5EDT CST6CDT MST-3MDT PST8PDT
NAST9NADT MST7MDT GMT0BST MET-1METDST MEZ-1MESZ
CIST-12:45CIDT IST-2IDT MST-3MDT UCT-5:30 UCT-7 CST-8 UCT-8
JST EST-10EDT UCT6 UCT4 UCT EST5EDT

/Th:xx Threshold xx is a percent, ranging from 1 to 100, Default is 80
This is a number, not a decimal. Exclude the percent sign

/DROPDT:dt DROP/Cutoff Date Where dt is any valid date format in US format time, e.g., mm/dd/yyyy, mm-dd-yyyy
One year from today

/EXPDIR:pa OCS export file directory (path) Where: Pa is any path, e.g.:“f:\data\ocsout”
Defaults to the current path. The path should be enclosed in quotes. Do not include a trailing "\"

/OUTDB:db MS Access Output database Where db is the name of the database, including the path NO DEFAULT You must specify this parameter!

So the following would be a real world example:

oracalreader /all /TH:80 /TZ:"EST5EDT" /EXPDIR:"C:\Documents and Settings\Zyg\Desktop\Tech Data" /OUTDB:"C:\Documents and Settings\Zyg\Desktop\Tech Data\gt3-prime.mdb" /DROPDT:"11/1/2006"

The above command specifies an 80% recurrence threshold, Oracle's Eastern Standard Time, directories and database as shown, and to only take calendar data AFTER November 1, 2006.