Oracle Beehive to Exchange Migration

Zyg was just back from Charlotte, NC and Russ was soon to head out for a while, when we got an inquiry from one of the few third parties we trust to independently run a migration (Kuttig in Germany -- these guys are sharp and efficient, a pleasure to work with).

Turns out that at least one Oracle Beehive site (see: Is Oracle Beehive DBA  (Dead Before Arrival)?)  wants to migrate to Exchange. 

A quick look at the Oracle Beehive Administrator's Reference Guide and our technology convinces me it should be not too difficult to do at the level we do it at: full-state, server-side to server-side.

Summary changes in our usual process:

Use xCalReader's ICS option.

You'll need a USERS.TXT and RESOURCES.TXT, which should come out of the Beehive utilities list_users and list_resources (be careful of format).

And you will need to export the calendars using the export_icalendar function.

When a user has 15,000+ unread items in the inbox....

We *thought* huge mailboxes (as measured by disk space) could wreak havoc during a migration. Perhaps we are wrong. This is a story about huge inboxes and unread email (the harbinger of problems that plague email systems.)

Last week we moved a client into Exchange 2010 (on-premesis). BUT the Sumatra Exchange insertion tool hung while inserting one user. For hours. Restarting the tool and rebooting boxes didn't help. After much digging we found the problem: that end user had 15,000+ unread emails in her inbox. What was the issue? (no, not why would we migrate a user with 15,000 unread emails in their inbox who probably left the company three years ago....)

The client hit an Exchange threshold. The issue is described in a Microsoft Technet article: Understanding the Performance Impact of High Item Counts and Restricted Views.

The article says: ...In Exchange 2007 ... an acceptable user experience can still be maintained with item counts as high as 20,000 items. We're still researching if that limit changed for Exchange 2010. Our client hit that wall in Exchange 2010.

So who are these big-bad-inbox-boys and girls? Here's a powershell command: (note, I've set a conservative threshold of 10,000 items for just user mailboxes.)

Get-Mailbox -filter {RecipientType -eq "UserMailbox"} -ResultSize unlimited Get-MailboxFolderStatistics where {($_.name -eq "Inbox" -or $_.Name -eq "Calendar") -AND $_.itemsinfolder -ge 10000} sort-object ItemsinFolder -Descending ft Identity,ItemsinFolder,FolderSize

-Russ

Follow-on to the Headaches of Cloud Migration

As a follow-on to our earlier postings, you might want to check out

http://ferris.com/2011/06/03/moving-to-hosted-exchange-plan-for-hiccups/

There is never a free ride when you move an entire server.

International Characters and an OCS to Google Calendar Migration

Short story on International characters migrating into Google Calendar from Oracle Calendar: it works.

Oracle Calendar to Google Calendar - Server-Side Full-State Migration

Let's say you're using Oracle Calendar and, not happy with your current mega-corp, you opt for another one that is at least producing better graphics and walks the walk about this cloud thing.

Our old friend Jimi Hendrix's calendar in OCS

can now be migrated with full state information into this in Google Calendar:

Yep.  You read me right:  Full state.
Meetings are meetings with guest lists and status.
This will also work for Zimbra calendaring to Google and Meeting Maker to Google.
We are still working on a few parts of this, but it is now basically completely functional and in two test sites.
One other thing.  If you wanted to take all your calendar data from something called Microsoft Exchange and migrate it full-state into Google Calendar, that can be arranged.

June 12: In response to queries.  This is all SERVER-SIDE to server-side with no end-user / client-side intervention.

Inserting holidays into hosted Exchange without an Outlook client

Holidays.We've been doing them server-side for years now.
So extending Decaf to insert holiday files was not too much of a stretch.
Since we focus on migrating OCS to Exchange, we used the relevant parts of their ICS format for our template.
Create a text file using this template to insert holidays:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VEVENT TRANSP:TRANSPARENT SUMMARY:New Year’s Day STATUS:CONFIRMED LOCATION: Any time zone in your system DESCRIPTION: No work day DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120101 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120101 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VEVENT TRANSP:TRANSPARENT SUMMARY:Holiday on the 14th STATUS:CONFIRMED LOCATION: Company-Wide DESCRIPTION: Suppose Jan 14 was a holiday in your company DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20120114 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20120114 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR

This will insert server-side and happen on the given dates, regardless of time zone (!) So a user in the USA or Canada need only put one holiday file together and can use it for all users.

And you go here to insert it.  Our usual restrictions apply.  Of course UNDO works for this.

As always, any feedback is welcome.

We're debating whether to include an option to insert for all users on a domain -- which is certainly possible but we're a little leery if it's in demand.

Sumatra Decaf: Insert Oracle Calendar ICS into Hosted Exchange

We made our street cred on full-state migrations server-side to server-side.

But there have been folks who either want to try out just ONE user or go for a simpler migration that trades off full-state migration for something faster and simpler.

This is the reason we've done Sumatra Decaf which we're now happy to open for general inspection at http://www.sumatraresourcewatch.com/decaf

A few things to note:

• This works only for hosted Exchange (e.g., Live at Edu, Office365, BPOS)
• We keep track of the domains that insert and limit it to 5 accounts on that domain by default
• We've geared this to the ICS exports from Oracle Calendar System. Others MIGHT work, but they are a lower priority to us. Each ICS upload is limited to 1 Mb and it inserts only from Today (i.e., the date you are inserting) forward.
• In a few days we'll show you how to use this to insert holidays server-side.
• Read the Help PDF at the site for more information.

Silverlight web service times out after 60 seconds

For Silverlight apps with web services calls that time out after 60 seconds:

You've set httpRuntime executionTimeout and binding SendTimeout, but your app still times out after 60 seconds. The problem is the CLIENT, not the server, is timing out.

In your Silverlight app, set a timeout after you instantiate your service client. For example, set a 30 min timeout on your service called "mySvc:"

mySvc.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Binding.SendTimeout = New TimeSpan(0, 30, 0)

Creating All Day Events with EWS in Office365

You might remember our recent post:

http://calendarservermigration.blogspot.com/2010/12/ews-outlook-live-exchange-release.html

about the head trip that we went through with migrating all day events into Exchange using EWS and how weirdly the display was different between versions of Outlook and OWA.

Well we're adding this to tell you it's the same head trip in Office365 (no real surprise there but we just feel the need to document it).

Web-Based, one-step Oracle Calendar to Hosted Exchange migration

This is an early look at something we call Sumatra Decaf and a call for informed consent volunteers.

We've built a really good business out of migrating calendars full-state into Exchange.

But some folks do not need the whole magilla and are just looking for the simplest way of getting data from your legacy system into Exchange in a "good enough" fashion. So we've done that as well.

So yea, we have server-side ICS insertions to Hosted Exchange.

Let's take a look at Puffy Amiumi's calendar in OCS (also in Japanese Standard Time)

Use UNIICAL to export it and then read it into our web-based application (shown here in Alpha):

and in Outlook Web Access on Live at Edu, the results look like this:

Notice we're prefacing them with _TEST_ for the moment to make sure it does not get into the wild before we're ready.

The 5:00 PM Meeting at which Puffy is a guest looks like this in the agenda so that you know who's organized it and who else is supposed to be there.

Quick, simple, and executable without a lot of prep time.

Now our other option for a migration remains: longer, planned, and full-featured.
We're looking at how we want it to evolve and would welcome some input from you folks.

Progress on migrations to Google Calendar

We're kind of psyched because we've made the first real progress on Oracle Calendar / Meeting Maker / Zimbra full-state migration to (*shudder*) Google Calendar.
Check out this screenshot from our latest tech:


The important thing is the yellow highlighting. Yep -- we got attendees in with their responses.
Now we're working on the mappings and recurrences. So those of you out there stay tuned -- there is light at the end of the tunnel

Creating a Room in Office 365 Beta

Working in Office 365 Beta we found it very simple to set up users but a little confusing to set up a Conference Room. So we're documenting the process here. First create the room as though it were a regular old user, like so (you could do all this through PowerShell but I like the simplicity of the Office 365 Admin interface): Now use PowerShell to set up your session: $LiveCred = Get-Credential This will prompt you for your admin credentials on Office 365. Follow this with the next two commands: $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection and Import-PSSession $Session You are now ready to rock and roll by changing your “room” into a ROOM. This PowerShell command will now transform the ID into a Room. Set-Mailbox room222 –Type Room Check this by trying to add it in Outlook: And we’re certain that it is now behaving like a room! Since you’re here you might as well also configure the room as you wish. My preference for daily use (though for a calendar migration you’d want to turn OFF AutoAccept): Set-CalendarProcessing -AutomateProcessing:AutoAccept -DeleteSubject:$FALSE -AddOrganizerToSubject:$TRUE -AllowConflicts:$TRUE -EnforceSchedulingHorizon:$FALSE Wash, rinse, and repeat for any other resources you need. When done, be a good doobie and disconnect PowerShell from Office365: Remove-PSSession $Session

Oracle Calendar Migrations and Long Resource Names

Kudos to the team at North Dakota State University for finding a bug!

If your Oracle Calendar resource name is longer than 32 characters (and those 32 characters were the same as some OTHER resource's) we weren't handling the error condition gracefully.

That is fixed in version 5.1.01 of xCalReader.

This is probably not an issue for most teams in migration but if you do not have the latest version and want it just contact us.

Outlook Live URL changes

Quoting from an email Microsoft sent, we want to remind you about upcoming URL requirements for accessing Outlook Live. Due date: June 30, 2011. It's already been extended so now is a good time to get it all done.

URL Changes

URLs that go directly to Outlook Web App, such as http://outlook.com or http://outlook.com/owa should be changed to go to http://outlook.com/ - for example, http://outlook.com/contoso.edu. To prepare for URL changes:

Inform your users of the change so that they can update any bookmarks they may have Inform your support desk of the upcoming changes and how to help users use the new URL Update any related links on Web pages and in documentation

If you are using the URL http://outlook.com/ecp to access the Exchange control panel management interface, you will also want to modify that URL to look like this: http://outlook.com/ecp/?realm=contoso.edu.

Single Sign-On Changes

Single sign-on solutions using the Live@edu SSO toolkit must make the following changes:

Update the Outlook URL in the web.config file as follows: Change: https://outlook.com/owa”> To: https://outlook.com/edu”> Custom solutions have to make this change also, though the location will vary. In addition, we have seen some cases where Live ID removes URL parameters, resulting in undesired behavior. To mitigate this issue, we advise that all single-sign-on solutions add the parameter exsvurl=1 as a setting in the URL. This setting will force the URL parameters to be preserved. Typically, the setting is appended to the end of the redirection URL and preceded with an ampersand, like this: https://outlook.com/edu&exsvurl=1.

Oracle Calendar / Outlook Free Busy Interchange

Free/Busy Lookups from MS Outlook into Oracle Calendar Server

Congratulations – you are dropping Oracle Calendar for Exchange. One problem: you need to stage it and you need some kind of connectivity between the two systems. This outlines how you can get Free/Busy lookups in Outlook / Exchange from OCS.

Outlook lets you have Internet Free Busy for Contacts:

SO: If we can produce IFBs for your OCS users (sorry about all the TLAs here), you can get Free-Busy lookups automatically working for your Outlook users into OCS.

One problem: The Oracle Calendar interface specifically does not create the IFB format known as VFREEBUSY:

Probably Oracle wanted to avoid exactly what we want in this case.

Not a problem. We can create VFREEBUSY from off the shelf tools in the OCS environment. In particular we will use the utility UNIICAL.

The solution works as follows:

· Select the OCS users you want to have Free-Busy available for in Outlook.

· Set up an internal share that is available to your OCS environment (you will be publishing to it) and your Exchange environment (you will be reading from it)

· One directory call “/…/EXPORT”

· Another directory call “/…/CURRENT”

· A third directory call “/…/IFB”

We’re going to take you through the process for one specific user, who we call Jimi.Hendrix

Create a batch file something like the following:

Uniical –export –u “S=Hendrix/G=Jimi” –f /…/EXPORT/jimi.hendrix.ics -n 1 –end 12/31/2011 –start 10/31/2011 –p PASSWORD

So we’re going to publish an ICS file into the /EXPORT directory.

Notes to this point: The above batch file hardcodes two dates. Obviously we want to make it general to start from TODAY and end at (TODAY + Default F/B Horizon). But let’s start with small ambitions and grow from there.

On a separate computer, we set up a process which interrogates the EXPORT ICS, compares it to the CURRENT ICS (say by comparing the MAX (CREATED) to see if it needs to parse or not), and if so moves it into the CURRENT and parses into an IFB. Practically any scripting language of your choice will work.
So what does ICS look like and what schematic takes it into IFB?

OCS ICS example

An OCS ICS file has a simple structure with a three-line preface before VEVENTS begin.

<><>

<><>For a one-time appointments we need only look at the DTSTART and the DTEND (they are in Zulu time, which is a godsend for IFB). These need to get converted into VFREEBUSY format:

FREEBUSY:DTSTART/DTEND map to:

FREEBUSY: 20110210T140000Z/20110210T150000Z

For recurring, we need to worry about RDATE and RRULE. First RDATE (because from OCS I have not yet found an RRULE in version 9.0.4, but they DO exist in version 10.x)

In this case this maps to:

FREEBUSY:DTSTART/DTEND

FREEBUSY:RDATE(1)/RDATE(1)+(DTEND-DTSTART)

FREEBUSY:RDATE(2)/RDATE(2)+(DTEND-DTSTART)

FREEBUSY:RDATE(3)/RDATE(3)+(DTEND-DTSTART)

Etc.

NOTES TO THIS POINT: IFB so far does not appear to need to be in chrono order to function properly. Of course a maintenance release could change that in a moment.

Optimization issue: IF MAX(CREATED ) in an ICS < export =""> is there no need to parse?

OUR END POINT NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE THIS:

Microsoft Free/Busy .vfb Format – External file

-----------------------------------------------------------------

BEGIN:VCALENDAR

PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN

VERSION:2.0

METHOD:PUBLISH

BEGIN:VFREEBUSY

ORGANIZER:/o=First Organization/ou=First Administrative

Group/cn=Recipients/cn=jimi.hendrix

DTSTAMP:20070223T145148Z ; Time of FB File gene

DTSTART:20070201T050000Z ; Start of period NB:

DTEND:20070401T040000Z ; End of period

FREEBUSY:20070205T140000Z/20070205T143000Z ; Begin events

FREEBUSY:20070222T140000Z/20070222T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070222T160000Z/20070222T163000Z

FREEBUSY:20070223T130000Z/20070223T133000Z ; Busy -- 1/2 hr mtg starting at 8AM

FREEBUSY:20070223T150000Z/20070223T153000Z ; EST = 1PM Zulu

FREEBUSY:20070224T130000Z/20070224T133000Z

FREEBUSY:20070226T140000Z/20070226T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070228T150000Z/20070228T153000Z

FREEBUSY:20070319T140000Z/20070319T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070319T180000Z/20070319T183000Z

FREEBUSY:20070320T160000Z/20070320T163000Z

FREEBUSY:20070321T140000Z/20070321T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070323T140000Z/20070323T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070326T140000Z/20070326T143000Z

FREEBUSY:20070328T140000Z/20070328T143000Z

END:VFREEBUSY

END:VCALENDAR

NOTES:

· When Outlook says “Publish 2 months” it means from the START of the current month to the end of the next month. It doesn’t roll with the day of the month.

· TIME SEQUENCE does not appear to be significant. I can move the VFREEBUSY entries around and they are still interpreted correctly for a reasonable (2 month-3 month) FB window.

What is the User Experience?

A user needs to create a Contact in Outlook

REQUIREMENTS: The contact must be in the CONTACTS folder. NOT a sub-folder, or any other folder.

Note that the email address does not need to match the IFB name.

They can then add that contact to their meeting list and see their Free/Busy just as if they were native on the Exchange server. (caveat: the timeliness of the information depends on how often you set your processes to export ICS files on the OCS side and how often you interrogate for parsing)

Do we recommend this long-term?

Heck no. But as a short-term-help-you-over-the-hump to get OUT of OCS it’s more useful in integrating the remaining OCS users into your growing Exchange environment than anything else, and it is workable with minimal effort (and real-time OCS-Exchange calendar sync is just one of those things you should cringe at).

References:

How to use the Internet Free/Busy Feature in Outlook

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291621

Using Free/Busy without Exchange Server (can be very helpful)

http://www.outlook-tips.net/howto/freebusy.htm

WARNING: Experimental evidence has shown that for this to work a contact with Internet Free Busy MUST be in your Contacts folder, not a subfolder, or a folder with any other name.

New xCalReader for using ICS format to migrate Oracle Calendar

Our latest xCalReader now reads .ics files from Oracle Calendar Server for an Exchange migration:

NB: This is because we've been picking up increasing reports of weirdness with the UNICPOUTU format. We've applied all our usual expertise to the iCal exports: including converting RDATE arrays to real recurrence patterns using RTYPE in Outlook / Exchange.
Also this includes support for Zimbra 6 migration.

New Mantra

Kudos to Russ for our newest mantra:

Hear it once, it's a trick.
Twice it's a special project.
Three times it's a new Sumatra product.

So the topic on the table here is Meeting Maker to Google Calendar migration (with link preservation).
We've had two requests in the last week. Is there anyone else out there?

More Zimbra 6 to Exchange 2010 / Cloud

So I promised you could see the before and after of contacts and tasks. Here they are.

Migrates to Exchange like this:
Tasks come over with very few problems. What in Zimbra looks like this

Becomes this in Live @ Edu. It could just as easily be in Outlook -- but we're grooving on someone else keeping an Exchange server running for a change.

One thing to keep in mind: Migrating to Live @ Edu is slower than migrating into on-premises Exchange (by a factor of about 7). We're pretty sure it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future.

Zimbra 6 to Exchange 2010 calendar migration

It's been a year since Yahoo sold Zimbra to VMware (which reminded me of some of the scenes from prison movies involving cigarettes).

And now is when people are starting to contact us en masse asking if we can move their calendars from Zimbra 6 to Exchange 2010.

Yes, we can.

The way we do it is really convenient. We open the mySQL database and read all the calendar, contact, and task data directly and insert it into Exchange using our usual, field-proven process.
You heard that right: NO user intervention, one spot for an Admin to pull the data and insert the data.

So let's take a look at the BEFORE and AFTER.

Jimi Hendrix's calendar on Zimbra 6.0.7 looks like this:

After extraction and insertion into Live @ Edu it looks as we would expect:

Note, the tentative meeting is tentative, the accepted is accepted, and the declined doesn't appear because that's the way Exchange works. We keep all recurrences and the meetings are completely LIVE on live @ Edu.

But wait -- there's more.
Contacts and Tasks come along for the ride too.

But we'll show you those in a separate posting.

Color-coding your inserted calendar data

Something our QA department has been doing for almost a year now has suddenly struck me as a really really good idea suitable for blogging.
Did you know it's possible to color-code your inserted calendar data?
What amazes me is how simple it is.
In the following example we've inserted several times (with a minimal data set) adding additional digits to our usual Category string:

All you need do on an individual basis is Manage the categories (seen here in OWA our client of choice on the Cloud).

You can also use Group Policy to propagate this for everyone if that helps you out. See Configure Categories in Outlook 2007.

More on Live @ Edu vs. On-Premises Exchange Speed Differential

		Live@EDU		On-Premises
Object Count		7675		7585
Total Time (seconds)		4193.25		597.01
Total Time (minutes)		69.89		9.95
Average Insertion time		0.55		0.08
Mode		0.41		0.05
Median		0.44		0.05
Max		9.29		3.5
Min		0.10		0.03

So our latest tests on inserting calendar items into Live@Edu vs. inserting into on-premises Exchange gives us a 7:1 time ratio.
That is: it is currently about seven times faster to migrate calendar data into your own Exchange server than it is to migrate it to Live@Edu. We've seen the same data set go far longer, but this is a good estimate to use in your planning purposes. Also yesterday another real-world site reported a figure similar to the one we found.
Just so you know.

Oracle Calendar to Exchange using UNIICAL / ICS formats

Yep. We have a version in-house we're using now -- so if any of you out there want to use ICS files to migrate to Exchange and are willing to be informed consent test sites drop us a line.
Oh yeah, same deal: we re-create meetings with responses and have put in tech to turn RDATE strings into real recurrence patterns (your Outlook client will thank you for that).

iPhone Alarm Glitch Greets New Year

The title says it all, though the New York Times has some more information.
Apple of course offers no explanation because as all Apple employees know, Apple can do no possible wrong.

Oracle Calendar / Exchange Free/Busy

An odd combination today here in the Boston-Cambridge area. A request last week for Free/Busy interchange between OCS and Exchange, and a blizzard put one of us into the Zen-like frame of mind to come up with solutions that do not involve lots of custom programming.

If any sites currently in an OCS to Exchange migration with us want to try out Outlook based Free/Busy queries into Oracle Calendar, please drop your Sumatra contact a line.

We are looking for "informed consent experimental subjects."

Quotas and Live @ Edu Migrations

The calendar elves were busy this weekend migrating TWO former Oracle Calendar Server sites into Exchange in this Cloud thing.


One went into BPOS (one of the dumbest acronyms EVER!) which is in reality Exchange 2007, which does NOT have submission quotas. (So now you know where this is heading)


The other site went into Live @ Edu which, despite their having had their submission quotas removed for purposes of migration, found the quotas very much in place.


So this is about what you'll see if one of your users hits submission quota in a migration.

In this example we kept inserting meetings until we hit quota. So one went in fine (you see the guest list and responses) and one did NOT (it says "Invitations haven't been sent for this meeting").

Once your submission quota rolls over (and when is that exactly?) you can send this and it'll go out like a regular meeting invitation. Not fatal in a migration, but we agree, it is darned annoying.

EWS, Outlook Live, Exchange Release Levels, OWA, and WTF?

Come with us on a journey to mystery.

The subject started out as Holidays but morphed into the more general one of All Day Events (ADEs).

Using EWS, it is possible to insert ADEs and we do LOTS of them in the course of a migration.
BUT, some combination of EWS, Exchange release levels, and OWA are currently giving our usually stable process conniption fits.

Start off with inserting an ADE under either Exchange 2007 rules (with deprecated Time Zone, rules, but bear with us for a moment here) into Live@Edu (not that we have a client trying to do this exactly now or anything like that).

In Outlook attached to Live @ Edu they will appear correctly (as below) if you specify Exchange 2007 SP1. But it will appear as a two day banner if you specify Exchange 2010.

JUST to keep thing really really interesting, viewing the EXACT SAME ADEs in OWA shows the 2007 SP1-defined ADE showing up correctly, and the 2010-defined ADE spanning THREE days:

If your head does not hurt you have not been paying attention.
SO, for the time being while running a holiday insertion with our tools, specify Exchange 2007 SP1. Everything will be hunky-dory.

Don't believe us? Here's the VB .net code (we use Exchange Web Services Managed API v1.1. )

Public Function ewsBuildAllDayEvent() As String

Try

Dim myUserEmail As String = "user10@test.com"
Dim myEWSURL As String = "https://sn1prd0202.outlook.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx"
Dim myExchangeVersion As ExchangeVersion = ExchangeVersion.Exchange2007_SP1
Dim myLogon As String = "admin@test.com"
Dim myPassword As String = "Gu3ssWh0"
'create Service
service = New ExchangeService(myExchangeVersion)
service.Url() = New Uri(myEWSURL)
service.Credentials = New WebCredentials(myLogon, myPassword)
service.ImpersonatedUserId = New ImpersonatedUserId(ConnectingIdType.SmtpAddress, myUserEmail)
'build appointment
Dim appointment = New Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.Appointment(service)
appointment.subject = "MyTestADE"
appointment.Start = CDate(Now.ToShortDateString)
appointment.End = CDate(DateAdd(DateInterval.Day, 1, Now))
If myExchangeVersion = ExchangeVersion.Exchange2007_SP1 Then
appointment.StartTimeZone = System.TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time")
Else
appointment.StartTimeZone = System.TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time")
appointment.EndTimeZone = System.TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time")
End If
appointment.LegacyFreeBusyStatus = LegacyFreeBusyStatus.Busy
appointment.isalldayevent = True
appointment.Save(SendInvitationsMode.SendToNone)
Return "OK"

Catch ex As Exception
Return ("ERROR: " & ex.Message)
End Try

End Function

Migrating Email? Check out this blog

Frequently we get asked about email.
We do not touch email since we're calendaring guys and enough other people handle email.
But when we see a site that specializes in it and conceptualizes migrations in ways that we ourselves espouse, we just need to let you know.
Such a site is MigrationWiz.
I hate the name (any male who has been a teenager in the USA smirks when the word "wiz" shows up anywhere), but their analyses of email migration are right on.

Asynchronous Programming

Earlier this week I went to a Microsoft Firestarter Event on Windows Azure. The event was run by a Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jim O'Neil. Jim's talks always inspire me to tweak Sumatra's code bases, ensuring we take advantage of as much of the emerging Microsoft technology as practical. One segment of the day talked about patterns and practices, specifically, the use of asynchronous communication when interacting with cloud (and the web).

They told us about a new Asynchronous Programming module (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx.) I'm very interested in this because many customers in Sumatra's Education market segment are migrating to Exchange in the Cloud -- Microsoft's
Live@EDU. When inserting lots of data, the variability of "network speed" makes insertion times difficult to predict. We explored changing the Sumatra code to run on multiple threads, but concluded it added more complexity to the code and didn't address the underlying bottleneck: network latency.

What I find interesting about this CTP is that the new async calls have the potential to work around latency issues without increasing code complexity. We'll be testing this in our labs in the next few weeks!

Exchange 2010 SP1 Managed API 1.1 released

For the last two weeks I've been puzzled why the installation of the EWS Managed API SDK v1.1 does not install the API library. Turns out it was released today (two weeks after the SDK was released.) Click here for the link to the release blog posting or to the download page.

Exchange 2010 Mapping Users - A Brief Guide

Compared to taking data from a legacy system and putting it into Exchange, you'd think user mapping between the two systems would be pretty easy. Usually it is straight-forward, just incredibly tedious and time-consuming (the occasional input error does not help much).

This is a brief guide to user mapping.

Let's say we have three users with the following addresses on Oracle Calendar Server and Exchange:

We design the process so that by the time you've created your intermediate database you should already have the email addresses for these users in the Users table.

So the brief rules are:

• Do NOTHING for OCS email addresses that are the same as in Exchange
• Add entries to the User_Adjusted_Maps table to map OCS accounts that have different Exhcange addresses
• Run the following queries Q_Build_CustIDs_From_MMUserids, Q_Build_CustIDs_AdjustMMUsersids, Q_1_Make_User_Map, FInd duplicates for MM_Exchange_User_Map
• Look at the results in MM_Exchange_User_Map
• Repeat until all of your accounts are done.

The mapping table will look like this when you're done.

A few other things to keep in mind.
If Oracle Calendar Server IDs are THE SAME as Exchange:

• Make sure the Primary SMTP or UPN is defined as login@mydomain.com

If Oracle Calendar Server IDs are DIFFERENT from Exchange:

• MAP the differences (Tables)
• Build the mapping table
• Overlay the changes

Once you've got all your users mapped you can just edit the mapping table. But please exercise proper handling and care with it. You do not want to be wondering which version to use when starting yoru migration at midnight on a Friday.

UNICPOUTU unreliable in some Oracle Calendar Environments

Let us let you in on one of the open secrets of calendar migration: It's not a wise investment to put a lot of code into pulling data OUT of a legacy system. Better to use one of the utilities the legacy system uses for purposes of upgrading servers or moving users between servers. Less prone to error, it uses the legacy's capability against itself, and it allows a migrator to put their effort into getting the data INTO the target system.

Sometimes though this gets more difficult when there's bugs in the legacy system.
One of our clients (shout out to Matt in North Carolina!), discovered some data missing from the UNICPOUTU export in their Solaris environment.

Quel horreur!

It's been mentioned a little on the OCS boards, but nobody is making a big deal about it and it is unlikely Oracle is going to fix it to make breaking your OCS habit any easier.

Thus far we've seen this ONLY with OCS 10.x on Solaris (all the 9.0.4 migration systems look absolutely peachy and we've been doing 10.x for years with no issues). We suspect it's with the very latest and is more prone to happen when the export is constrained by date (so export everything and let us segment it in our tools).

So as always, keep an eye out.

Putting Holidays into Live @ Edu Server-Side

We tested our holiday insertion code on Live @ Edu and a list of holidays like this:






Note that this is an All Day Event (and you can specify if the time is to be shown BUSY or FREE):

While this is an appointment we've put into every calendar without any muss or fuss. You could use the same technology to do that for anything else you want (Shareholder's Meetings, Fire Drills, as your business and imagination dictate).

Any of you who have been through a migration with us know why we keep the "(Migrated)" tags, but you can decide to not use them.
This is scriptable so you can create holidays as you provision users if you have an automated system for so doing.


A few other things to keep in mind:

• This runs as an EWS application from a 32-bit workstation. So all your credentials are completely under your control. If there's demand to run this as an online service we'll listen.


• We take the default time zone of your server for all insertions. If you have users in multiple time zones and want to do this contact us -- that would be a different version.


• You can specify a single user, a list of users, or an LDAP query to handle your insertion.

Handling Conference Rooms in a migration into Exchange

Resources are kind of a pain in the neck in a migration. You want them to take care of themselves when you're done migrating. But to get your data from your old system into your new system with the same state, you're going to need to treat them with kid gloves and lots of TLC.

So we have the following guidelines:

Put all resources in one or more OUs for ease of administration.
PRIOR to migration:

• ENABLE all of the resource accounts via Active Directory Users and Computers
• HIDE the accounts from the GAL
• Configure resources NOT to AutoAccept meetings

AFTER the migration

• Disable the accounts and add them to the GAL
• Configure the resource for AutoAccept (if you desire first-come-first-served functionality) or
• Use group-policy settings for managed rooms and resources

Exchange 2010 Permissions for Migration

Impersonation has nothing to do with Frank Gorshin or Rich Little.
It's the permission you need to give your service account to execute a full-state calendar migration.

Create a managementRoleAssignment:

new-ManagementRoleAssignment

-Name:_suImp8

-Role:ApplicationImpersonation

-User:'mysvcaccount@mydomain.com'

If you have to ask where you're doing this, please go to your Exchange Administrator.

Exchange 2010 - Throttling During a Migration

We're all for progress as much as the next techno uber-geeks, even though sometimes it bites/kicks/stabs us in the neck/butt/back. Such is the case with throttling in Exchange 2010.

So -- when doing a migration of about any non-trivial size into 2010 you're going to have to set a new throttling policy here called "SuPolicy":

New-ThrottlingPolicy SuPolicy

Set-ThrottlingPolicy SuPolicy -RCAMaxConcurrency $null

-RCAPercentTimeInAD $null

-RCAPercentTimeInCAS $null

-RCAPercentTimeInMailboxRPC $null

-EWSMaxConcurrency $null

-EWSPercentTimeInAD $null

-EWSPercentTimeInCAS $null

-EWSPercentTimeInMailboxRPC $null

-EWSMaxSubscriptions $null

-EWSFastSearchTimeoutInSeconds $null

-EWSFindCountLimit $null

Set-Mailbox myserviceaccount@mydomain.com -ThrottlingPolicy SuPolicy

ResourceWatch Online Capability Beta

Anybody who has done a migration with us has gotten one of our "Shock and Awe" reports showing what your calendar use looks like.
No surprise we've been developing this capability.
If you go to our on-line beta, you'll be able to generate a really cool report on your conference room or resource use.
We've used it on ICS format files from Exchange 'natch, but Oracle Calendar seems to work just as well. We're using Microsoft SilverLight, so working with anything other than Internet Explorer we do not guarantee, but if it works for you just let us know.

Microsoft Expands Effort to Protect Nonprofit Groups

There are very few occasions when we would say this -- but this is one of them.

Microsoft Expands Effort to Protect Nonprofit Groups - NYTimes.com

GO MICROSOFT!

BlackBerry Enterprise Server - Stay on Top of It!

If you are planning on migrating and use the BES server. Please stay up to date with your BES versions.
How to Enable BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 Sp1 and SP2 to use Microsoft Exchange Web Services is required reading.
Here's the issue: BES still relies on CDO 1.2.1, which is a little like a 2011 model year hybrid still needing a Model T crank. BES requires pretty much the same kinds of permissions we do in order to act on calendar objects in Exchange, so after migrating if you flip on BES and notice issues with setting up or responding to meeting invitations as a Delegate -- the first place to look is your BES configuration.

Shared calendar items are shown incorrectly in Exchange 2007 (Fixed in SP3 RU1)

Sumatra enterprise clients use shared calendars to allow Managers to look at employee calendars, employees to access common calendars (e.g., the 'vacation' calendar, or to look at conference rooms (when free/busy doesn't contain enough information.)

Unfortunately, the calendar events are often shown at the wrong time.

Microsoft KB 976100 offered a hotfix for this issue. It was also included in the Exchange 2007 SP3 Rollup 1 (KB 2279665)

For clients who share calendars -- apply this rollup.

Exchange 2010 Calendar Permissions Using PowerShell

One of the Microsoft blogs did a great article on setting calendar permissions using PowerShell in Exchange 2010.
Their earlier article on setting Outlook Delegate permissions with RBACs is also worth reading for sites migrating into 2010.
Many thanks!

Dilbert on the importance of Conference Rooms

Dilbert from Sunday September 12, 2010 had an excellent strip on the importance of conference room scheduling.

We normally see this as the attempted "great conference room land rush" during migrations, which you can avoid by hiding your resources in the GAL for the migration period.

Circumvent Outlook Rules in Exchange 2010

We just completed an Exchange 2007 migration this past weekend. After each migration we review what worked and what didn't. One of the problems we faced - clients setup delegate forwarding rules, so the "bosses" and their delegates had copies of the meeting invites in their inboxes. The client used Redemption to write a MAPI script to disable those rules, but it didn't work as planned. The good news-- the Sumatra process correctly built the bosses calendars! The bad news - delegate had a bunch of meeting requests in their inbox that they had to delete (Not a show stopper -- just tedious!)

Had they migrated to Exchange 2010, this would not have been necessary because Exchange 2010 allows you to manage rules using these six commandlets: Get-InboxRule, Set-InboxRule, Remove-InboxRule, Disable-InboxRule, Enable-InboxRule and New-InboxRule.

One approach is to use "Get-InboxRule" to find all enabled, server-side rules. Disable those rules (remember which rules you disabled so you can re-enable them after the migration.)

We came up with another approach: Add a new rule that has the "highest" priority, have that rule do nothing, then say "stop processing rules." After the migration, remove that rule.

Here's how we approached it for one user, say, Zyg:

• New-inboxrule -mailbox:zyg@mailbox.sumatra.com -name:"_sumatraHiPriorityRule" -Priority "0" -StopprocessingRules:$true -Confirm:$false

and then to remove:
• Remove-inboxrule -mailbox zyg@cod.sumatra.local -Identity:"_sumatraHiPriorityRule" -Confirm:$False

Caveats:

• Note the priority zero (0) makes this rule the highest-priority rule. All others drop down one.
• We are ignoring the power-rule-user scenario: the user exceeds Exchange's inbox rule memory size buffer limit (it's 32KB) (or about 40-50 rules.) Obviously when you're at the limit you can't add any more rules. We don't have a suggestion except to say "look" for disabled rules and ask the end user if a few could be removed.
• The "-force" parameter - removes disabled rules AND all Outlook client-side rules.
• new-InboxRules doesn't accept pipelined userlist from "get-mailbox -filter {isResource -eq $false}". What happens if you have 5,000 accounts? Stay tuned ---

Sumatra Utilities - Holidays for the remainder of 2010

Since the year is drawing to a close, we're going to put up the Sumatra Utilities for 2010 for no charge for the rest of 2010.

So Exchange Admins in the USA can server-side insert Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, and Canadian users can do Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day, and UK users can do bank holidays from now until the end of the year and... OK OK you get the idea.

This version will only insert data up to January 2011. This version works with both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, and will not work for hosted Exchange (i.e., Live @ Edu). Hosted sites working with us on migrations already have versions that will insert holidays.

To download the ZIP file just click here. If you want to read through the documentation first, please do.

Look for an update from us in October about what we'll do with server-side Exchange holidays in 2011.

If you are looking to private label or distribute and support the Utilities holiday insertion tool we'd be happy to discuss that.

Exchange 2010 SP1 - ErrorRecord: Database is mandatory on UserMailbox error

We planned to upgrade our Exchange 2010 servers to SP1 this labor day weekend to take advantage of these calendar-related improvements:

• Outlook Web App Improvements
• Calendar Repair Assistant supports more scenarios than were available in Exchange 2010 RTM.
• Mailbox Assistants are now all throttle-based (changed from time-based in Exchange 2010 RTM).
• Internet calendar publishing allows users in your Exchange organization to share their Outlook calendars with a broad Internet audience.
• Importing and exporting .pst files now uses the Mailbox Replication service and doesn't require Outlook.

(fyi be prepared to install hotfixes before installing SP1!)

But what happens when it fails on the mailbox role with these two errors?

1. ErrorRecord: Database is mandatory on UserMailbox. Property Name: Database



2. Microsoft.Exchange.Data.DataValidationException: Database is mandatory on UserMailbox. Property Name: Database

It seems we had to upgrade active directory (i.e, run setup.com /ps, then /p, and then /pad)

But that threw an error "Setup previously failed while performing the action "BuildToBuildUpgrade"

There are two fixes to this problem. The FIRST Fix - edit the registry (seems like that's always part of a fix), and SECOND remove a few system mailboxes:

Edit the registry. Under the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\MailboxRole you will find two keys - Watermark and Action. Export the mailbox role settings, then delete the two keys. Now re-run setup.com /ps, then /p, and then /pad. )I tried running the setup GUI, but it didn't completely upgrade AD.)

The SECOND fix: Now we're back to the initial "Database is mandatory on UserMailbox" problem. Launch AD Users & Computers, and delete the discovery mailbox, system mailbox(es)

Finally, if you are deploying Exchange 2010 for the first time, Exchange 2010 SP1 is a full install package. Pat Richard's Exchange2010Prereqs.ps1 script simplifies installation.

>>Update After I brought the servers back online and started writing this post, I found Brian Day's post in Technet (...wish I had found it earlier!)

--Russ