Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Migrating Oracle Calendar Server into the Microsoft Exchange Cloud

The calendar gnomes have been busy.

We have gotten some requests to take Oracle Calendar Server into this Microsoft "cloud" thing (which last time I looked had a couple of different names).  Of course we started with Live @ Edu because that's where the first money is.

So if we look at Jimi's calendar in Oracle Calendar we see:


and if we look at his calendar in Sumatra's LIVE@ edu test system we see the exact same thing (minus the color which you cannot port anyway).



Some of you will notice the one appointment that's not there, which led us into looking at timing issues in Live @ Edu.  We found that changing our CAS and EWS URLs for the insertion to remove the "PSH" part removed the issue.

If your Outlook.com server is something like
PODnnnnnnPSH.outlook.com

use:
PODnnnnnn.outlook.com

instead on insertion.

... and Jimi's calendar comes out fine everywhere.  So in case you find yourself missing some data, check the URL you're pointing to.  We obviously don't have as much control over timing and performance in this scenario as we do in a native Exchange environment.  So the first few who go live with our tech are going to be taking the earliest risks for timing and the eternal X-Factor.



Oh yeah, this would work for Meeting Maker, Zimbra, Sun Java Calendar, anything else we can migrate.  But let's face it, Oracle Calendar Server is the one everyone is currently looking to drop ASAP.

This all involved minor changes to the SuExchange interface, mainly to specify Credentials to your CAS server.  Your Live admin account is the one to use:

This also means there's no need to "Run as..." with the Service Account.  Your  CAS credentials effectively ARE the Service Account.

There's also good news on conference rooms, which are looking like we can Accept and Decline them under our control but as always we want more field tests to make sure we're not drinking our own Kool-Aid: 


Keep in mind: our distinction is that we re-create meetings with guest lists and responses and re-create recurrence patterns in moving from OCS to Exchange, and that is the same whether going to the cloud or a native Exchange server.

So from the perspective of your end users it's a migration with results that make it act as though you've been using Exchange all along.

4 comments:

Jonny Chambers said...

Can you let us know where our customers can get hold of this tool? I assume you are using web services to do this?

zyg said...

Well we're not giving this away for free. They can contact us via our web site: http://www.sumatra.com/please_contact_me.htm

We're happy to do free trials for qualified sites.

We've been using EWS to insert into Exchange 2007/2010 for three years now. I do not even bother counting how many sites we've done since then. The technology is pretty robust.

Jonny Chambers said...

Not suggesting that you gove anything away for free... :)

Do you happen to have a video recording of this in action? If so, I would love to repost/link this on my blog.

zyg said...

OK -- just making sure. We do not have a video but it would not be too hard to make. We do this stuff all day. Give us a few days.