When your ICS export has TWO SMTP addresses for the same user

So from the annals of "what we see in the real world is always more interesting than what we make up ourselves...."


We migrated a client from Zimbra to Exchange and found a user with TWO separate SMTP email addresses.  Call them Krueger@company.com and Freddy.Krueger@company.com.  How did this happen?  The company changed their email address policy six months ago; the new policy makes all primary SMTP addresses to be first.last.

The Sumatra tool uses ICS export file name to identify the user who owns this calendar information.  Thus, the user Kruger (KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS) would miss all meetings or appointments he owns under FREDDY.KRUEGER@company.com."

You with me so far?

The solution IS fairly simple; Customers in field report it works beautifully.

1. Insert KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS 
2. Rename the primary SMTP on Exchange to FREDDY.KRUEGER@company.com
3. Copy KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS to FREDDY.KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS
4. Insert FREDDY.KRUEGER.CALENDAR.ICS
5. Rename his primary SMTP if you wish.

The other approach, for the brave, is to replace all of the mailto:krueger@company.com with  mailto:freddy.krueger@company.com.  Be mindful you don't find and replace the wrong SMTP address.

Is there still enough GroupWise out there to make a calendar migration tool worthwhile?

We've been having such success with how easily the "faster, simpler" method works with Zimbra and Oracle that we're wondering if there's any demand for any other calendar migrations that have been under-served.  The one that comes to our minds is GroupWise.

Anybody want an easy way to migrate their GroupWise calendars to Exchange server-side?

Let us know.

Zimbra to Exchange New Functionality

Pretty soon we're going to have migrated more people from Exchange to Zimbra (in a few months) than we migrated from Meeting Maker to Zimbra (in a few years).  Cool!!!!


We just added some functionality at the request of a site.


The subject is reading the contacts in the "Suggested Contacts" folder in Zimbra and migrating those to Exchange.


Now it's possible.


The newest zCalReader looks for files named:

USER.contacts.vcf 

and 
USER.econtacts.vcf 


and loads them both into “Contacts” in Exchange.

Why cannot we load econtacts.vcf into the Outlook/Exchange "Suggested Contacts" folder? Because Exchange Web Services does not currently give us access to that folder. 


We actually found in a migration this weekend a 24 Mb exported Suggested Contacts list containing over three hundred thousand contacts.  That caused zCalReader to bomb (we just weren't scoped for that many contacts).

Symantec Endpoint Protection running on Exchange Servers: Fool me twice....shame on me

Note to self:  Disable all instances of Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) on ALL Exchange servers before and during a calendar migration.

Why?

* Insertion throughput dropped 99%: from 750 transactions/minute to four (4) transactions/minute.
* SEP stripped all of the Sumatra strings we associate with calendar items to process messages.

This product bit us two years ago.  It just bit us again.

It's your choice to deploy SEP in your Exchange environment (or not.)   But do not deploy SEP during a Sumatra calendar migration.