Our Office 365 Experience Thus Far...

So we've been pretty good letting our readers know that migration performance into both Live @ Edu and Office 365 is about 14% the performance of on-premises Exchange.  And then there's the problems with quotas.

That none of this has changed or been addressed through the beta period of O365 should not be surprising to anybody not under the influence of Prozac or electroshock. 

In fact, despite bringing this to Redmond's attention, we've gotten zero feedback, seen zero progress, and expect zero results.

Now that Office 365 is out of beta and in the production, plan on all these nagging "problems" getting re-classified as "features."

Oracle Beehive to Exchange Migration

Zyg was just back from Charlotte, NC and Russ was soon to head out for a while, when we got an inquiry from one of the few third parties we trust to independently run a migration (Kuttig in Germany -- these guys are sharp and efficient, a pleasure to work with).

Turns out that at least one Oracle Beehive site (see: Is Oracle Beehive DBA  (Dead Before Arrival)?)  wants to migrate to Exchange. 

A quick look at the Oracle Beehive Administrator's Reference Guide and our technology convinces me it should be not too difficult to do at the level we do it at: full-state, server-side to server-side.

Summary changes in our usual process:

Use xCalReader's ICS option.

You'll need a USERS.TXT and RESOURCES.TXT, which should come out of the Beehive utilities list_users and list_resources (be careful of format).

And you will need to export the calendars using the export_icalendar function.

When a user has 15,000+ unread items in the inbox....

We *thought* huge mailboxes (as measured by disk space) could wreak havoc during a migration. Perhaps we are wrong. This is a story about huge inboxes and unread email (the harbinger of problems that plague email systems.)

Last week we moved a client into Exchange 2010 (on-premesis). BUT the Sumatra Exchange insertion tool hung while inserting one user. For hours. Restarting the tool and rebooting boxes didn't help. After much digging we found the problem: that end user had 15,000+ unread emails in her inbox. What was the issue? (no, not why would we migrate a user with 15,000 unread emails in their inbox who probably left the company three years ago....)

The client hit an Exchange threshold. The issue is described in a Microsoft Technet article: Understanding the Performance Impact of High Item Counts and Restricted Views.

The article says: ...In Exchange 2007 ... an acceptable user experience can still be maintained with item counts as high as 20,000 items. We're still researching if that limit changed for Exchange 2010. Our client hit that wall in Exchange 2010.

So who are these big-bad-inbox-boys and girls? Here's a powershell command: (note, I've set a conservative threshold of 10,000 items for just user mailboxes.)

Get-Mailbox -filter {RecipientType -eq "UserMailbox"} -ResultSize unlimited Get-MailboxFolderStatistics where {($_.name -eq "Inbox" -or $_.Name -eq "Calendar") -AND $_.itemsinfolder -ge 10000} sort-object ItemsinFolder -Descending ft Identity,ItemsinFolder,FolderSize

-Russ

Follow-on to the Headaches of Cloud Migration

As a follow-on to our earlier postings, you might want to check out

http://ferris.com/2011/06/03/moving-to-hosted-exchange-plan-for-hiccups/

There is never a free ride when you move an entire server.

International Characters and an OCS to Google Calendar Migration

Short story on International characters migrating into Google Calendar from Oracle Calendar: it works.

Oracle Calendar to Google Calendar - Server-Side Full-State Migration

Let's say you're using Oracle Calendar and, not happy with your current mega-corp, you opt for another one that is at least producing better graphics and walks the walk about this cloud thing.

Our old friend Jimi Hendrix's calendar in OCS

can now be migrated with full state information into this in Google Calendar:

Yep.  You read me right:  Full state.
Meetings are meetings with guest lists and status.
This will also work for Zimbra calendaring to Google and Meeting Maker to Google.
We are still working on a few parts of this, but it is now basically completely functional and in two test sites.
One other thing.  If you wanted to take all your calendar data from something called Microsoft Exchange and migrate it full-state into Google Calendar, that can be arranged.

June 12: In response to queries.  This is all SERVER-SIDE to server-side with no end-user / client-side intervention.