Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Preview: Oracle Beehive to Exchange 2010 Calendar Migration

We have Oracle Beehive to Exchange 2010 migration working pretty well in our lab and are about to release it to one of the few test sites we trust with these things.

We chose a different path on this new code.  Instead of going through an intermediary "extraction" step  we read directly from the Beehive Database and insert from there into Exchange 2010.

We still allow for individual mappings (so if Hillary Rodham in Beehive needs to become Hillary Clinton in Exchange we can handle that, or if you want to take this opportunity to recast your Conference Room nomenclature that is completely possible).

Of course, this is a FULL STATE migration so we preserve all of the recurrence patterns (and in this case we can preserve ALL of them), the Guest Lists, and the guest responses.  In short: meetings are completely "live" after migrating with this code.  It is like your users were on Exchange all along.

Just so you folks can get a glimpse of it:

And since one of Zyg's personal hot buttons is making sure international characters come out correctly, this hybrid German-Spanish text in Outlook on Beehive:
Migrates perfectly correctly to Office 365:

We're still working on some performance tuning -- but you can get a good idea of where this is all heading.

We're also considering migrating all the user preferences and email if we get strong enough demand.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Calendaring Incident in Office365 March 15

Sometimes clients wonder about our paranoia religion of checking and re-checking everything in migrations.

This is the latest battle story of WHY.

Last night as we were running a migration we started noticing that invitations were not being sent for migrated meetings.  Appointments and regular email seemed to be going in fine.

This in our world is a first-rate fuster-cluck disaster.

First we naturally suspected a bug in our own code or throttling changes.  This led us to a code review, soul-searching, and much sweat-producing anxiety.  We did solve this, and it was enlightening.

Wait for it.

Office 365 ITSELF was DOWN for all practical calendar migration purposes.

We never START with blaming Microsoft. It is with great regularity their fault, but it's better practice to look at ourselves first.


So adieu this weekend's migration into Office 365, we'll have to reschedule since as of this morning this is what the situation looks like in Service Health.



Was there any kind of alert to either THEIR administrator or say OUR Office 365 administrator that this was going down?  No.  I suspect there is some way to configure these, but am perfectly willing to give someone else credit for showing me how.  Right now with the tension buzz just coming down I feel more in need of documenting the situation.

To the credit of the Office 365 team they did acknowledge that the system was throwing defecation at the ventilator.

The way this presents itself in a migration is that invitations will seemingly disappear. (Amended from earlier posting where I showed a DIFFERENT issue.)