Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Distribution Lists Now Working in MDaemon Calendar Migration

We've been on a mission to completely automate an MDaemon to Exchange migration.  Email, contacts, calendars, the works.  We'll tell you more about that later after it's fully field-proven.

In this case "the works" also means MDaemon private distribution lists (which in the language of Exchange/Outlook are called "groups") which we have added to our calendar migration application since (as glorified contacts) that is where they belong.

Post-migration in Office 365, it'll look like this:


We do the smart thing in this case:  if a contact on the list is on the legacy domain and needs to be mapped to a new domain or a different email, we automatically do that.  Users outside the legacy domain we leave alone.

Please note: In Exchange, users create distribution groups by linking to existing contacts (or contacts from Active Directory). This way, when a contact name/email address changes, the distribution group gets updated.  However, in the case of this migration, MDaemon does not provide any  indicator if the entry is an existing contact.  We don’t want to automatically create contacts because if they do exist, the user will see double contacts – something that will confuse them.  So communicate to your users that if an email address changes in the private group mailing lists, they will have to either manually edit and fix the name, or delete the name and link it to a previously created contact.

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