Thursday, February 13, 2014

#MDaemon Calendar Migration to #MSExchange / #Office365: Video and Documentation

We have calendar migration from MDaemon into Exchange working.

Here's the video.



The migration features are pretty much all dealt with in the video.

The main screen of the application gives you our usual set of options:

And the configuration holds no surprises.



The site we're doing this for has decided it's more important to migrate in a phased sequence of groups of users, so we're taking the calendars over as "flat" but with information on attendees and status in the Agenda/Notes body.  If there's demand for a full-state method we can do it.  But this keeps costs down.

Mapping Users
If you have a user in your legacy domain named "zyg" and in Exchange the ID is "zyg-furmaniuk", you enter the following line in the exceptions.txt folder:
When you validate, you will find the mapped (i.e., correct for the target) address.
Note that in the above example Room.222 did not validate, so either our mapping is wrong, or the account on Office 365 is not set up properly.  

Permissions
You will need a service account on the Exchange side.  This account needs permission to write to all accounts you're mapping into.  We've already blogged on permissions a lot. 

Firewall Requirements 
  1. Your fire wall must be configured to allow Time Sync (we need Port 13 and we cycle among time servers, the top two being 64.90.182.55 and 206.246.118.250).
  2. Your computer time should not differ from the US Navy Atomic Clock time by more than 1 hour or mCalReader will inform you.
Why do we require this?  Short answer: Digital Rights Management and version control.

Determining your EWS URL
For on-premises Exchange, the EWS URL formula is HTTPS://CAS_server/EWS/Exchange.asmx
In ON-PREMISES you will usually have your IIS set for Windows Authentication (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg247612.aspx for more details). This is also the default in hosted Exchange. Should you need to change this you may do so in the _Config_XML file by changing the HTTPAuthType parameter (options are Basic, Negotiate, ntlm, and Kerberos)
NB: You hear us talking about Exchange being a moving target in a migration. That’s true here. The default is Negotiate in Exchange 2013, and Basic in Exchange 2007 and 2010.

For Office 365 it is: 
https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

2 comments:

zyg said...

FYI - we'll update this post as necessary to amend the documentation or functionality. Since this isn't anything like journalism we'll not keep a running log.

zyg said...

Also, keep in mind this is part of a comprehensive protocol for migrating from MDaemon into Exchange. See http://calendarservermigration.blogspot.com/2014/03/fully-automating-mdaemon-to-microsoft.html