Two ways to grant access to a Resource in #MSFTExchange

A client asked us to explain the difference in the two ways for an end user to have "delegate" rights to a conference room.  It is confusing -- Microsoft calls them both "delegation"  and tried to explain them in a recent Exchange Team Blog post, Booking Delegation Vs. Classic Delegation.

Here is the summary:
1. Grant delegate permission using Outlook or OWA (aka "Classic Delegation")
2. Grant delegate permission using Exchange Control Panel (aka "Booking Delegation")

There are three problems with the "Classic Delegation" for conference rooms:

• First, since rooms are "disabled accounts", it's hard to log into them.  
• Second, Classic Delegation creates two rules -- one visible (IPM Subtree folders), and one invisible (think NON-IPM Subtree folders.)  When you change/remove a classic delegate, the hidden rule does not always get deleted and thus still remains in force. (Why? Outlook tries to be helpful, and when it sees there is a hidden rule, it uses the hidden rule.) 
• Third, the classic delegation rules run at a higher priority than  booking delegation rules.  More ways to confuse administrators.

Moral of this story: don't use Classic to delegate access to rooms. Sumatra urges all our migration customers NOT to migrate delegates -- once set they are difficult to remove (see our post from '08).


Sumatra recommends you assign room delegates using the "Booking Delegation" approach.  You can either use Exchange control panel to assign booking delegates, or PowerShell.  We prefer PowerShell.

There are several things you must do, depending upon how you want to handle room reservation requests

For auto-booking:
Ensure automated processing of meeting requests is set.
Example: Set automated processing for conference room 101B
Set-MailboxCalendarSettings cr_101b -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept

For a managed room:
1. Ensure automated processing of meeting requests is disabled.

Example: Disable automated processing for conference room 101B
Set-MailboxCalendarSettings cr_101b -AutomateProcessing None

2. Decide on your room administrators,  grant them permission, and allow the room to receive requests but NOT allow direct booking.  (You and also play with Book-in and Request-In policies starting with this old but good Technet Article....this is beyond the scope of our post, though.)

Example: Allow Russ Iuliano to manage Auditorium meeting requests. 

Set-CalendarProcessing Auditorium -AllBookInPolicy $false -AllRequestInPolicy $true -ResourceDelegates "Russ Iuliano"

3. Grant administrators permission to send on behalf of the room.

From time to time, you may not
Example, Grant delegate "riuliano" send as permissions on behalf of Room CR 101B
Add-ADPermission cr_101b -Trustee riuliano@sumatra.com -AccessRights "Send As"

Finally, You can read more about creating and managing room booking on Microsoft Technet.

Which version of Exchange should you be on for a calendar migration?

For a Sumatra calendar migration you should be on the latest update to Exchange (currently Cumulative Update 9).

At the very least, CU6, owing to that fixing problems with Contact Notes.

We spent an hour last week diagnosing problems with Exchange 2013 CU 4 -- once the Exchange environment was updated the issues went away.

Manifesto for Calendar Server Migration

What are the current gaps in calendaring migration?

Calendaring is fundamentally different from email even though it usually uses it as a transport protocol.

Historically all migration solutions have focused on email.  Not surprising since email is a mission-critical concern.

But where email is static once you have sent or received it, calendars have a crucial difference:  they contain evolving meetings that are linked to the calendars of other individuals in the enterprise.  In Exchange changing a meeting updates the calendars of attending resources and individuals.

And in a real migration you need to take these links and the data associated with them along or you’re only doing part of the job.

Nobody except Sumatra Development does this for calendaring.

Solutions other than Sumatra's treat calendars exactly like email:  they create the events but do NOT recreate live meetings because they ignore the guest lists, responses, recurrence patterns and resource  bookings.

Think if it like this: they take a print-out of a calendar and migrate that. We call this a “flat” migration. Most do not even take recurrence patterns. 

Sumatra re-creates the state, creating live meetings with guest lists (which you might have to map to new domains or addresses), responses, recurrence patterns, exceptions, and resource bookings.

We call this “full-state.”

Even in the on-premises Exchange to Office 365 world, Microsoft focuses on email and does not even offer a calendar migration path.  So we went out and blazed our own full-state migration method.

For small sites this is a tractable (if unpleasant) problem. It's still a productivity loss, but we’re talking a couple of hundred users.

For sites of 500 or more users the productivity hit can be immense.

Put another way:  after a full-state Sumatra migration the user and resource calendar data experience a seamless transition:  as though the enterprise had been using their new calendaring system all along.  With other solutions users actually need to find and recreate their meetings to make them live and update-able.

Finally, other solutions willfully ignore the possibility of failure.

We have an UNDO strategy to gracefully remove only the data we put in in in the event of catastrophe.  (We have seen servers fail in the middle of migration).

This is of course an overview from jet plane altitude and by the time we get through the first test phase with a client we’ve brought them to tree-top level.

Our web site: http://www.sumatra.com

It shows how our migrations work, and it also highlights some of the things
we’ve done in calendaring.

In a nutshell: if it involved MS Exchange calendaring / scheduling we can do it.

On-premises @MSFTExchange Migration to #Office365

A PowerPoint Presentation about migrating from on-premises Exchange to Office 365.

The Migration section does not specifically call out calendar migration -- but that's what we specialize in.



Towards the end the notion of a back-out plan is one of the main things we constantly harp on.  Our calendar migration can take Exchange to Office 365 preserving guest lists, responses, and recurrence patterns, and do it in BOTH directions and it includes an UNDO to selectively remove only the data inserted.

Microsoft Exchange Virtual Machines and your Calendar Migration Test Environment

These days everybody's doing migration testing in their virtual environments.  That's cool with us.

You should start your project by reading Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing Exchange 2013.  It's a little dense and abstract.

But we also have a few Cliff's Notes (which is a trademark of somebody other than us which we use here metaphorically) to put in front of you for the calendar migration you are testing:

• Space consumption is a constant battle. To sway the odds in your favor we recommend:
• Circular logging  
• Remove log files (e.g., IIS, EWS) often,  
• Check event logs (or setup to overwrite)
• DNS vs Firewall. You want to get mail to flow locally, but not leave the testing sandbox.  This is always tricky and you should make sure you've got it right before you go to any appreciable scale with your testing.
• Keep your Active Directory on a separate Virtual Machine from your Exchange components.  Why?
• The Exchange VM already has enough to do – don’t add another function to its workload
• Next, a separate VM for AD should mimic your production architecture. It allows different administrators to manage discrete roles. You might as well start by following best practices.

Keep in mind, these are guidelines for your testing phase to make sure you do not run out of space in defined and constrained virtual environments.  You will want to adopt other behavior when you move to production.

Further good reading:

• Exchange 2013 diagnostic and performance log files

Move mailboxes between on-premises and Exchange Online organizations in 2013 hybrid deployments

Folks,

Do any of you have field experience with:

Move mailboxes between on-premises and Exchange Online organizations in 2013 hybrid deployments

?

We'd really be interested in the field stories of SPEED, RELIABILITY, and ISSUES.

You do not need to identify yourselves or even put it in the comments, we'd appreciate your confidential experiences via our contact page.

Closely related to this is Single sign-on with hybrid deployments.

Mapping Resource Names in Oracle Calendar Server to Microsoft Exchange Migration.

In Oracle Calendar Server, resources are database objects.

In Microsoft Exchange they are SMTP addresses with calendars.

So, while your export file names for Users should match the target SMTP address. the resource mapping file will actually map the ICS file name to the SMTP address.

For example, the export file:

             erp conference room 1 tiger.ics  

gets mapped to cr_colonial_222@YOURDOMAIN.COM

Here:

Side note: If you have parentheses in your Oracle Calendar Server resource name, for example:

                     ERP Conference Room 1 (Tiger)

Drop the parentheses or other nin-permitted characters and use the same mapping.

You will get results like this:

I.e., you will have the mapped resource as an Attendee, and the old resource name as the location (because in the source data it's just a text string we insert).

Follow-up to #CalDAV to #MSFTExchange calendar migration tool - round 2

If you have read #CalDAV to #MSFTExchange calendar migration tool - round 2 and said "all very well and good, but I want to LEAVE Microsoft Exchange for some other calendar server" -- WE CAN DO THAT.

We  can already read calendar data directly from the Exchange server and insert it full-state into another Exchange Server or Office 365, as you see here:

Taking all the data out of the source is (for us) simple, inserting it into another target is certainly within our expertise.

If you have at least 1000 users or a realistic budget we can discuss this.

#CalDAV to #MSFTExchange calendar migration tool - round 2

It's been almost exactly a year since we did a sanity check on this #CalDAV to #MSExchange calendar migration tool.

Since then we've field-proven full-state migration of Oracle Calendar Server to Exchange using ICS files -- which means we could insert ICS FULL-STATE for any of the other iCalendar standards based calendars.  You know -- Zimbra, Apple, Google being the only ones that matter these days.

Let us know if you have more than 500 users and want to give it a spin.

Speeding an Oracle Calendar to #MSFTExchange Migration by Parallel Insertions

If you have more than a few hundred users, you can run multiple instances of the Oracle Calendar Server to Microsoft Exchange migration code.

Let's say you have 1000 users and want to break it down by half.  Say from A to M and N through Z.  You can set up two separate instances as follows:

Who "Blank" to M?  Because numbers sort BEFORE "A" so things beginning with numbers are lost if you do not do "Blank" as your start.

Then "N" to "Z":

Just to be safe I'd run each of these on separate machines, but you use the SAME mapping tables for each.

Make sense?

Oh -- and if you want to insert just ONE calendar to test, this is the way to do it:

Put the same name in each endpoint box.

And this is an Oracle Calendar to Office 365 migration in action:

Oracle Calendar Designate to #MSFTExchange Delegate Rights Migration

We at Sumatra are no strangers to the issues of delegate/proxy/designate migration into Microsoft Exchange 2013 / Office 365.

We just refuse to do it ourselves anymore.

Why?  Because while we can give you the best possible technical solution, it is not always the best social or political solution for a given environment.  Someone's gonna grumble.  And we do not need that.

If YOU on the other hand can manage your organization sufficiently well for your purposes, we're fine with it.

Here's what you do.

Let's start at the back, where we insert calendar delegate rights into Exchange.

You need the command Add-MailboxFolderPermission in PowerShell.

This format which can be executed in PowerShell to set calendar permissions on Exchange. as we do here:  

Which means in Outlook looking at an Exchange server the user will see this in Calendar Properties:

So working backwards, you need to get Designate permissions on the Oracle Calendar Server side.

Say you need to get Designate rights for Russ Iuliano from OCS:

uniaccessrights -ls -grantor %1 -grantee "S=Iuliano/G=Russ" -n 1 -p PASSWORD >>russ_rights.txt

The output of UNIACCESSRIGHTS is relatively straight-forward to read:

"S=Iuliano/G=Russ" Grantee: S=Iuliano/G=Russ/UID=riuliano/ID=257/NODE-ID=1 Designate Right: CONFIDENTIALEVENT=VIEWTIME/CONFIDENTIALTASK=MODIFY/NORMALEVENT= MODIFY/NORMALTASK=MODIFY/PERSONALEVENT=REPLY/PERSONALTASK= MODIFY/PUBLICEVENT=NONE/PUBLICTASK=MODIFYEvent Viewing Right: CONFIDENTIAL=ALL/NORMAL=ALL/PERSONAL=ALL Grantee: S=Whiplash/G=Snidely/UID=swhiplash/ID=260/NODE-ID=1Event Viewing Right: CONFIDENTIAL=NONE/NORMAL=ALL/PERSONAL=TIME

Depending on how you implement your OCS Delegate to Microsoft Exchange Mapping you need to parse the UNIACCESSRIGHTS output into this format which can be read in PowerShell to set calendar permissions on Exchange.

You need to execute this from PowerShell.  Needless to say this command should be called something like russ_rights.ps to execute in PowerShell. 

To launch PowerShell: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Windows PowerShell > Windows PowerShell right-hand click and "Run-As administrator"

The parser we'll leave to you and write about in a future blog post.

Full-State @Oracle Calendar Server Migration into @MSFTExchange Database Configuration

For full-state Oracle Calendar Server migrations, the Sumatra code creates a small database to store Guest responses.  Don't fret -- in contrast to our first-generation methods this one does not require you to ever open or modify the database.

The database will require you download and install the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable.

(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255)

For x32, install the AccessDatabaseEngine.exe.

For x64, install the AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe

The Sumatra code sets the database provider in the configuration XML file based upon the operating environment. 

For x32, the provider is:  Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=

For x64, the provider is: PROVIDER=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=

Here are the lines in the XML as setup for an x64 system.  Note we include provider “sample” lines so you can copy the provider setting appropriate to your environment.

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=

PROVIDER=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=

If you fall asleep in meetings....

... make sure your boss is not a psycho North Korean strongman.  Seriously, an anti-aircraft gun was the exit interview?  That sounds like a 1966 Batman TV cliffhanger.  Makes a US human resources drone look good.

I did once have a boss at ON whose motivational motto was something like "Garth, your beatings will continue until your morale improves.  Party on! -- Wayne."  Then there was the coke-head at Wang who'd get spontaneous nosebleeds and had fantastic reasons for not coming into work:"I got mugged at an ATM" and "paint fell on my show dogs."

Truth is as weird as fiction.  

Why are the Russians Binge-Reading this Blog?

Dear Binge Readers in Russia,

You never write and we never get any inquiries, but periodically throughout the week we get a few hundred views from you guys in the space of an hour.

What goes?

New Option on Oracle Calendar Server Migrations to #MSFTExchange

When we recreate response states from Oracle Calendar Server 10.x to Exchange we have a new option:

As a default your un-responded meeting invitations are "Tentatively Accepted."

However, you can also set this to "Accept"  "Decline" or "Do not apply a response."

I cannot see a reason you would want to Decline all instances -- but (and I am still flabbergasted) we got asked for it.

One thing that is possible is that if you originally Do not apply a response (i.e., leave them as invitations in user inboxes, you can then go back and "Accept" or :Tentatively accept" since we are keeping track of the responses.

UNDO gives you the option to limit removing guest responses by our alpha limits.

This capability is in oCalReader v 5.0.7.

Meeting Responses in a Full-State Oracle Calendar Server to Exchange Migration

How do we deal with Meeting responses in a full-state migration from Oracle Calendar 10.x to Exchange?

• The response options in Exchange are Accept, Decline, Tentative, and No Response
• Oracle Calendar Server allows you to NOT respond to a meeting and it still shows up in your calendar. So in the field lots of people do not bother to actually Accept. Migrating these meetings to Exchange, we insert a non-response as “tentatively accepted” more as a sensible convenience than anything else.
• Exceptions to guest responses to recurring meetings are not inserted. E.g., if a guest accepts all but declines a few occurrences, or declines the recurring meeting but accepts a few occurrences.  The latter situation actually cannot happen in Exchange but is possible in OCS.

Oracle Calendar Migration to #MSFTExchange #Office365 - Full State via new methods

We've further developed our oCalReader methodology so that now in addition to doing a partial migration it will also execute a full-state calendar migration from Oracle Calendar Server 10.x into Microsoft Exchange or Office 365.

You can see the new configuration options below:

A couple of notes on this:

RESOURCES

• Works best for resources that are booked on a first-come-first-served basis.
• Does not work well when the resource owns the meeting.  You cannot have a resource organize a meeting in Exchange!
• Requires a manual mapping of resource names to Exchange SMTP addresses (since resources in Oracle Calendar server don’t contain email addresses, or, worse, point to the admin managing the resource.)

The mapping file looks like this (OCS Resource name on the left, Exchange SMTP on the right) :

You can get your resource names from OCS with UNIUSER.  A command something like this:

uniuser -resource -ls "R=*" -n 1 -p PASSWORD >resources.txt

should export them.

The new buttons "Guest Response" and "Cleanup" come into play if you are running individual migration steps. 

#MDaemon Calendar Migration to #MSFTExchange Trial Software

Trial software for our MDaemon to Exchange calendar, task, and contact migration may be downloaded here.

Oracle Calendar Migration to #MSFTExchange @Office365 Recurrence Patterns

The question came in: "Which recurrence patterns migrate from Oracle Calendar Server to Exchange?"

The short answer to this is that NONE of them MIGRATE – our technology RECREATES them.
Oracle strips every recurrence pattern out of ICS exports in part because Outlook cannot handle the patterns OCS can produce.
Sumatra technology analyzes these patterns and produces the best matches it can for recurrences.

A couple of rules in this:

• THE WORST CASE is all the data goes in as one-time events or meetings.  You do NOT lose data.
• You need at least 5 instances before we try to form a pattern recreation
• We look for exceptions with a 80% regularity by default  (you can change this – but do not screw with it yet)

The patterns most likely to get picked up and transferred:

• Every 15th (for example) Day of the Month
• Every 2nd Wednesday (for example) of the Month
• Every MTWTF and variations of that, e.g., TuTh, MWF. etc.
• Weekly meetings / every other week / every fourth week
• Yearly meetings

Over the last 15 years of doing this kind of migration – this is over  90% of recurrences in most environments

The patterns that are not going to get re-created as patterns:

• Random selections of dates
• Every 1st AND 3rd Friday of the Month  (sometimes with enough exceptions and a forgiving exception rate these will show up as “every other week” recurrences, but do not count on it)
• ANY recurrence with LOTS of exceptions.  I.e., over 20% 

DIY calendar process to Migrate @MSFTExchange to #Office365 -- here is the application

The situation: you want to move from Exchange on-premises to the cloud aka Office 365.

You were shocked to discover Microsoft does not have a simple migration solution outside of email.  And the email solution is not even as flexible as imapsync.  All the current third-party tools treat calendaring as an afterthought to email leaving half your calendaring data behind (recurring patterns, guest lists, guest responses).

The result is that post-migration your users see what looks to be their same Outlook/OWA mailbox only to discover that their calendar meetings are broken.

We solved that problem.

Inexpensive solution to better calendar data migration
So we created a calendaring / task / contacts migration process for Exchange on-premises to Office 365  that is an improvement over existing methods in that it gives you more information about guests in meetings (it's an improvement over everyone else if we give you ANY information about guests).

On-premises a meeting looks like this:
                   

Migrated to another Exchange server it will look like this in Outlook with our "flat" option:
                   

Note that we can map user names and resource names and preserve information about attendees outside the domain.

And you can download and try it here with documentation here.  The trial version will insert your appointments for a month into the future.  We're licensing it for $299 for one domain for two weeks.  Based on our MDaemon migrations, we've seen under 1000 user migrations easily accomplished in that time.  If you need more time, ask us.

If you manage your own migration you can get your data in for very low cost with imapsync handling email and our tools handling calendars, contacts, and tasks.

For those of you who want fully-functional calendars post-migration, we offer:
Full-state calendar migration for enterprises with full-state sync.

Contact us for additional details on full-state (though the documentation above is a great place to start).

Exchange Cumulative Update 8 - Automatic Profile Re-direct

Folks, especially those doing a DIY migration from on-premises Exchange to Office 365, you should look at CU 8.
The automatic profile redirect we'll need to look at but it sounds like it will be a really big help.

Oh yeah, and modern Calendar and Contacts Public Folders are now accessible in OWA.

Added March 24, 2015:  profile redirect is not the big help we thought unless your main worry is Smart Phones.  See: Exchange ActiveSync on-boarding to Office 365

Time to replace the votive candle....

It comes as no surprise to anyone we've done migrations with that one of us has a superstition about keeping a votive candle burning during a migration.  With a migration this weekend our Misericordia Divina (from a bodega in LA, long story) burned its last.  Now we plan on replacing this with one of these time-oriented secular saints from the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild.

DIY O365 Migration from Exchange - First Pass

Rarely do we get such an outpouring of "gimme gimme gimme."

So since we're really good at turning out stuff quickly, we've got a first pass at our DIY Guide to Migrating from Exchange to Office 365.  

We have focused on the heavy lifting of migrating email (via imapsync), and calendars, contacts, and tasks (via our tech).

Remember: It's BETA, folks.  You have comments, want additions, think you have something to add, we're really happy to take feedback.  

The other issues: like user provisioning, delegate access, swapping MX records, we've not gone into detail at all since those are pretty well documented on line.  If you need details on how to accomplish this, let us know.

Remember, you'll need to license imapsync.

If you need the calendar, contact, and task migration, drop us a line.

We'll have a simple flat version of our calendar migration software up in a couple of days.

It's simple to run, but unlike everybody else it will tell you who was in your meetings like this:

Video of Full-State #Exchange to #Office365 Enterprise Calendar Sync

A short video of sync working in a migration between on-premises Exchange and Office 365.

DIY @imapsync to Migrate Email #Exchange to #Office365 -- We'll add a calendaring process

Your direct costs should never exceed 100 Euros (or $110 at the current exchange rate) for an email migration into Office 365 (From Exchange or any other IMAP server).

imapsync is more than capable of handling your Email migration. Buy the software and support.   

Cards on the table here: we do not get any money from imapsync, but we've found it to be a quality product with a great guy behind it and a good support community.  Add to that it's inexpensive nature and liberal software license and you really cannot go wrong.

You will need to make sure you have permissions on the Office 365 side if you wan to do multiple mailboxes without individual passwords. See our earlier posting on using imapsync to migrate email into Exchange. 

You can also handle migration problems with the wealth of Exchange information in their FAQ:

Pay special attention to the case of read receipts.   Going into Office 365 can re-generate read receipts.  So during your testing if that turns out to be a problem:

imapsync...   --disarmreadreceipts

Other very useful FAQ solutions include what to do when encountering individual attachments over the default limit set by Exchange (10 Mb) and Office 365 (25 Mb), as well as line length issues.

We're working on a DIY document to take you through your own migration.  Frankly, we get lots of questions that could be handled by such a guide.  And we're tired of Microsoft black boxes and over-priced third party offerings.

We'll offer a "flat" calendar migration in an imapsync-like model just so folks can get their migration done if they don't mind a simple calendar migration.  Contacts and tasks are included in this of course.

The goal here is to get your software costs for a migration to Office 365 to under US$1000 with you supplying your own elbow grease.

In rough numbers email, calendars, tasks, and contacts should be about 95% of the data you need to move.

The Absurd Side of Daylight Savings Time

Put your personal politics aside for a minute and remember that this is SATIRE. I have raw memories of an expository writing class where half the people in it did not realize that A Modest Proposal was NOT serious!  Actually, it was serious, just not in the direction they thought.  Some of those people probably work for the Federal government now.....

But OBAMA PERFORMS ILLUMINATI DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME RITUAL TO CAST WORLD INTO LIBERAL DARKNESS, ONE HOUR EARLIER is just darned funny.

Daylight Savings Time is the bane of the calendar server migration expert.   You need to have excruciatingly detailed knowledge about what is happening on both the source and the target server, and sometimes you just need to deal with bad situations.

Addition: March 9, 2015.  Nacho Punch has an entire series of DST-themed comedy.

Enterprise Calendar Migration #Exchange to #Office365 Revised Video

We revised our previous video and made it look prettier, for which we thank video editor Peter Hollander.

Electronic Road Sign Hacking

Does this have ANYTHING to do with calendar server migration?

Well.... a teeny tiny bit.  In why we do not ever want your system passwords and why we purge any of your data as soon as we can if we need to look at it.

But it's also cool and amusing.  

Besides, I'm pretty sure at least one of the signs they have photos of is on Massachusetts Avenue in the vicinity of MIT, so I need to link to it.

Head over to Jalopnik for How to Hack an Electronic Road Sign.

The method is based on the usual lack of physical padlock security, usual use of default password ("DOTS"), and dirt-simple method of resetting the entire system to default (CTRL+SHIFT+"DIPY").

Moral is left for the reader.

MDaemon Migration European Translations - Thanks are in order

This is a shout out of THANKS to the folks who gave us high-quality translations of German and Dutch for the MDaemon calendar migration interface as well as helping us debug some issues in the European market.  

Christian in Germany,  THANK YOU!!!

In the Netherlands thanks go to Jesper Plass at JP Allaround-ICT.  

Jesper also found us one of the weirdest things we've seen in field data in a while: recurring appointments with end dates in the year 4501 AD.  How that happened in real life we have no idea, but we have already fixed the MDaemon migration code.

Latest version of mCalReader is 4.1.08 and contains the above fixes (as well as one that came out of Canada this weekend).

Another useful link on #MDaemon migration to #Exchange via Linux

Gentle Soon-to-be-MDaemon-free Migrating Reader,

Ms. Migrations recommends reading MDaemon to Microsoft Exchange migration for real-world experience going from MDaemon on Linux to Exchange. 

This article focuses on email using imapsync (for email, just use imapsync, really) and mentions nothing about calendars, but that of course is what we are here for.

Enterprise #Exchange to #Office365 Calendar Migration -- Now with Sync!

Things do not stand still at Sumatra.

With Exchange to Exchange full-state calendar migrations about to hit beta, we added and are testing Sync in our labs.  In the spirit of how things like email sync works, we've added sync to our full-state Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft Exchange calendar migration.  You get contacts and tasks as a by-product.

A few teaser images. starting with the Sync button (We're still discussing how we're going to make this work):

So the SOURCE Exchange server had this:

Which resulted in this on the TARGET Exchange account (note live meetings and recurrence!):

We leave the TARGET system alone while the SOURCE system evolves (1 additional item on the 27th and a modified appointment on the 18th, and a change in meeting response on the 26th).  After hitting SYNC these changes come in:

This capability will not be in this week's beta, but we'll roll it out as necessary when we deem it stable.

Migrating live calendars into #Exchange -- Manage Delegate Forwarding

Those of you who have been diligently following the workings of the mighty Sumatra bullpen know that we're nutcases about making sure migrations go well.

One thing in a full state migration into Exchange is that you need to turn off Delegate forwarding if you want us to recreate the meeting responses.

So to turn off forwarding for an entire domain, you use Set-RemoteDomain, like this: 

Get-RemoteDomain | Set-RemoteDomain -MeetingForwardNotificationEnabled $false

To turn off forwarding for an individual user use set-calendarprocessing:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity user email@yourdomain.com  -RemoveForwardMeetingNotifications $true

In the days of Exchange 2007/2010 you would have used set-mailboxcalendarsettings.

Enterprise-Level Calendar Migration #Exchange to #Office365

Last week (which is like forever in Sumatra Development time) we showed you the interface to our full state Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft Exchange calendar migration.

This week we'll show it working in a video:

This is showing the full state migration keeping recurrence patterns, guest lists, guest responses.  You know, everything that makes your calendar useful in an enterprise environment.  The stuff Microsoft does NOT do in a migration.  The stuff everyone else who claims to migrate calendars glosses over.

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.  Again, the stuff Microsoft and everyone else does not do.

Next week we'll release it to the sites we've got as early betas.

If you need Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft Exchange calendar migration after that, feel free to contact us.

Preview #MSExchange to MSExchange Calendar Configuration

Well  it finally happened,  We got folks realizing that bringing your enterprise calendars from on-premises Exchange to Hosted Exchange was not a trivial matter.

But we at Sumatra have radically simplified it and are giving you a preview of the application.

We are offering options to do a full-state migration or a flat migration which will insert your meetings as appointments in everyone's calendar (it's faster and easier, but it's probably not for your executive level).

Watch this space for more info as it becomes available.

And yes, we could theoretically do a Google Calendar into Exchange / Office 365 migration, but everybody who opted for Google is still too deep into denial to deal with that possibility.

Lone hackers and the calendaring connection

My best Internet read of the last few months has been How a Lone Hacker Shredded the Myth of Crowdsourcing.  

What's the calendar connection in this?  In the lesson that in any sufficiently large group of people (let's say a 1000 user calendar migration) you will see the spectrum of all types of behavior.  And this very much includes destruction for its own sake.

We see things like this in raw calendar data all the time: calendars booked through 2039 (no joke), people who have put birthdays in calendars starting in the 1960's (why?) and of course, during a migration the great conference room attempted land grab.

The lesson: any open door can become an opportunity for malfeasance.

#MDaemon Notes migrating into #MSExchange

We got a request from some friends in Canada for MDaemon Notes to migrate into Exchange.

Now there is a small problem with this.  Exchange Web Services does not support creating Notes.

On the other hand over the last fourteen years we all could have gotten doctorates for our work doing the impossible with Microsoft Exchange.  So we insert the Notes into Tasks.

European #MDaemon Calendar to #MSExchange Migration: Field Notes

Short answer:  Version   4.0.xx of our MDaemon calendar migration tool works.

A site in Germany (thanks, guys!) did the pioneering field work that resulted in some minor fixes for time zone issues (and will result in a few more changes).

But we have confirmed that European time zones in translation, international characters, and non-US date formats are working fine.

And we've added the capability to work with localized MDaemon folders (so Calendar becomes Kalender in a German language pack).

One of our guys put the extra effort in to translate our screens as well (these will change):

So if you folks in Europe want to migrate your MDaemon calendars drop us a line.

Inserting SQL data into Microsoft Exchange

When we say SQL data being inserted into Microsoft Exchange or Office 365, it's through our soda straw view of the world: calendar items, contacts, and tasks.

You can of course write one-off code in Exchange Web Services to accomplish a specific task – but why reinvent the wheel?  Sumatra has been  inserting calendar, contact, and task items into Exchange from legacy systems for the last fourteen years.  We’ve created a tool-set that allows you to read data from your SQL databases and insert them into Exchange. 

Most of our users of this feature are using Oracle as the SQL of choice, but there's nothing specific to that vendor.

We call this the Sumatra Calendar Pump or just the "Pump" if you hear us referring to it in casual conversation.

BES 12 is out

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 12 is out.

We have a long history with BES in calendar migrations, usually as an indicator of permissions issues.

We're not making any endorsements on upgrading except for the main recommendation we always make in a migration: test the snot out of it beforehand in a lab environment and have a back-out plan.  

You're only dealing with something that has an impact on all of your users here.