Microsoft Exchange to Office 365 Calendar Migration Preserving Meetings as Meetings

Microsoft does not offer full-state calendar migrations from Exchange to Office 365.

Your meetings will all become appointments.  It's like printing your calendars from one Exchange system into office 365.

If you're a small site this is no big deal and easily managed.

If you're an enterprise where people live in meetings and conference room and resource allocation is crucial this can be a huge hassle which can delay your migration to the cloud.

If you use our technology your meetings will stay meetings. Problem solved.

And this shows synchronization working, again with full-state meeting migration, from one Exchange environment to another:

Since we added sync for meetings we also did it for tasks and contacts. 

And of course this is fully-mappable and includes our UNDO capability for easy testing and disaster recovery.

Why don't we do email as well?  Because imapsync does a superlative job for 100 Euros for any number of seats!  We cannot beat that.  Actually I do not think anyone can beat that.

Given the popularity of our MDaemon to Exchange and Zimbra to Office 365 email migration guides we're seriously considering an Exchange to Exchange email migration guide for imapsync.  Stay tuned.

If you do not need or want all that utility we have an option that runs faster but still tells you who is supposed to be in your meetings.  This is the information no one else provides you.

If you need Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft Office 365 calendar migration, feel free to contact us.

Saving the configuration of an #MSFTExchange mailbox or meeting room as a CSV or TXT

We are no strangers to Exchange resources.

For those of you looking to save off the state of a conference room or resource in Exchange to a CSV please see Showing the Calendar Configuration of a Mailbox or Meeting Room using EWS by the incomparable Glen Scales for an excellent script.

You can also in an alternate simple method get the info in PowerShell and pipe it to save as a TXT file.

Get-CalendarProcessing  -Identity   Room_222@yourcompany.com  | fl > Room_222.txt

Your call what you need.

Printing a Paper Backup of Your iCloud Contacts

From today's New York Times:  Printing a Paper Backup of Your iCloud Contacts.

Folks are sometimes amazed when I pull out my long-treasured filofax.

Why does someone who worked on the first Personal Information Manager and the first group scheduler still use PAPER?

Simple.  Every calendar server and calendar client at Sumatra can become test data with no notice at all.  It's a principle as ingrained as our minimum two brain rule.

Paper doesn't suddenly disappear in a software meltdown.

We still haven;t added contacts to our Apple iCalendar to Exchange migration, but it also does not seem to be a big issue to anyone in a migration phase right now.

Sharing calendar and contacts in Office 365 - Microsoft's Guided Walkthrough

Because once you're done migrating into Exchange from a legacy system you want to USE the calendars and contacts you've brought in, you may wish to check out 

Sharing calendar and contacts in Office 365 Guided Walkthrough

Looking at the URL it's in the /common/survey directory so it's at least doing thinly-veiled double-duty as market research, but it has some good information.

You may also wish to refer to some of our earlier posts:

Shared Calendars in Exchange 2007 sp1  (still one of our most popular posts ever!)

and

Create a Company Shared Contacts Folder in Office 365

UNDO options in an #Oracle Calendar Server to #MSFTExchange migration

We were dealing with a client who needed to do an UNDO of a previous test migration and this meant we gave the site a concise summary of their options.

Of which there are three.

The fastest: dismount the stores, delete the database file(s) and logs, and then remount the stores.  This clears everything from all provisioned accounts!   This is the nuclear option on the data. It’s OK to do IN A TEST ENVIRONMENT.  It will cause a “resume-generating” action if done in production.  Remove the guest response database and start a new insertion.  Note that you will not need to re-provision the mailboxes. That’s what’s so good about this option:  Exchange remembers that accounts/users are already provisioned in Active Directory and Exchange recreates mailboxes once meeting invitations start flowing in.

Remember, if anyone else is working on the server, the nuclear options wipes their data.

Here's an example of how to script the removal of two databases "mbx01" and "mbx02"

d:
cd "D:\Ex13DB\"
Dismount-Database "mbx01" -confirm:$false
Dismount-Database "mbx02" -confirm:$false
remove-item -Path mbx01 -recurse -force
remove-item -Path mbx02 -recurse -force
Mount-Database "mbx01" -force
Mount-Database "mbx02" -force

Next fastest: Keep the guest response DB and do an UNDOALL.   This clears everything and the guest response table. Then delete the guest response DB and start a new insertion.

The slowest but safest: keep the guest response DB do a regular UNDO.  Then remove the guest response DB and start a new insertion.