Multiple Insertion Instances in Oracle Beehive Calendar to Exchange Migration

Now that we have Beehive to Exchange migration running reliably and in test in both the USA and Europe, we're working on improving the throughput with our old friend: Multiple Instances aka Segmentation.

Since re-creating calendar state in Exchange requires sending, responding, and creating exceptions for meeting invitations, this technique does require some special handling, which we're detailing here.

First, the screen morphs a little:

As we've done in the past, this is an alphabetic list, so 

1. Make sure when you do this you cover the entire alphabet.  Once a site left out the letter "k" -- yet another great example of why we built "UNDO" capability into the process.

2. Sometimes resources or rooms start with numbers, so make your first installation "SPACE" instead of "A".  If you try to use A this comes up: 

3. Remember what we said earlier about sending invitations and responding to them?  Suppose that Adam Ant invited Lex Luthor to a meeting, but Luthor is in a different segmentation.  It's possible one instance could be trying to respond for Luthor before he gets the invitation and suddenly everybody gets confused.  No worries.  After the invitations have been sent for each instance the code pauses and tells you to wait for all the other instances to catch up.

How to use this:

• Go to each computer you want to use 
• Install bCalReader and its associated .DLLs
• Validate and map all your users on one machine and then COPY the account_validation.txt and alt_account_maps.txt to the other instances.
• Proceed.

As always, TEST TEST TEST before you go live.