Oracle Connector for Outlook differences from Oracle client and your migration

We take the Oracle Calendar Server export as the definitive source for data that is to be migrated.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

But now and then Oracle has the same sort of acquired inconsistency syndrome we're used to from Microsoft.

Case in point: in OCS create an appointment

and say you're not going to it:

As you see above, it keeps on ticking in the OCS client (and will show up in a UNICPOUTU export), but will not be displayed in Oracle Connector for Outlook, as this side-by-side comparison shows:

Just so you know.

In these cases our modus operandi is to take the data and display it, since it's a lot easier to remove something you do not want than it is to create all over something you do.

Meeting Maker to Apple iCal via Zinsert Field-Proven

We got a call a from a medical school in Silicon Valley asking if we could migrate 2 users out of a Meeting Maker server of 40 into ICS format.

This is not usually cost effective but they just wanted iCalendar files and they were very polite about the request.

Most times this would not be worth mentioning, but they had a novel approach -- they wanted to obsolete their legacy Meeting Maker server ASAP and move on so they took their data from Meeting Maker into Apple iCal before planning on putting it into Zimbra.

The good news: Seems to have worked fine!

To quote their plan:

...for now it will reside in iCal until Yahoo gets done with the updates that
(we) asked for. Then we will be able to sync iCal to Zimbra.

I really have to give them points for creativity.

Changing your Exchange 2007 resource behavior post-migration

So what happens when you migrate into Exchange 2007 with resources that are scheduled on an on-going basis?

Sumatra Development dogma on this is to have your resource AutoAccept turned OFF (i.e., in E2K7 terms to "AutoUpdate"):



This allows us to control how data gets migrated into Exchange. That is, we reproduce your Meeting Maker data as closely as we can (NB: this is mainly a Meeting Maker migration discussion, Oracle Calendar Server already wisely placed limits on how far ahead in time you can schedule). Interesting trivia: In Meeting Maker you can book a resource into the year 2039, which is an act of either supreme optimism or hubris, take your pick.
In Exchange Management Shell the command (broken here for clarity) is:

[PS] C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator> Set-MailboxCalendarSettings cr_testres_1 -AutomateProcessing AutoUpdate -AllowConflicts $TRUE -EnforceSchedulingHorizon $FALSE -ForwardRequestsToDelegates $FALSE -DeleteSubject $FALSE -AddOrganizerToSubject $TRUE -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $FALSE

So you put your data in and then you want to establish some limits, like only allowing conference rooms to be booked 18 months ahead, and to have them manage themselves to avoid conflicts.

What happens then?

It depends on what happens to the meetings. If you have an ongoing meeting and it does not change, nothing, it will stay there quite happily in everyone's calendar.

If like us you live in the real world and you use the dynamic capability that this gives you, the first major update to an ongoing recurring meeting will cause it to be removed from the resource calendar until you give it an appropriate end date:

Now to proleptically answer the question "Hey, you guys know the start and end dates of all this data -- why don't you set this for us ahead of time?"

It's a fair question. The short answer is because there's so much else going on in a migration that hewing to the line of keeping the data we insert as faithful to what we pulled out is invariably the best course. Letting users learn to deal with the situations they're going to encounter in their new environment is better all around.

Google Calendaring and Imports

I have got to give Google Calendar some credit.

Since we got asked by a 4,000 user account about moving users into Google Calendar (there's a lesson for you, sinners, you want to get our attention have a 4,000 user migration base), we started looking at moving into Google via iCalendar files.

Most import mechanisms provide the kind of intelligence Geico likes to claim cavemen have, but Google Calendar actually did some checking and gave me the following error message:

Coolness.

But the cool factor is moderated by my noticing that the interest we've heard is decidedly not from the corporate market. I found 3 Critical Reasons Why Hosted Google Apps Won’t Work for Your Business a really interesting read. Though 10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud does a good job expanding on it.

I also started looking at the issue of making meetings live when we migrate them over. Moving Gmail calendar to Google Apps For your Domain Calendar goes through the single user procedure, but for a few hundred or more users it would be tedious.

I also can't currently get the meetings to come over with guest lists and responses intact.

Perl script for breaking apart large ICS files for a Zimbra migration

A migration can be really confusing and time-constrained. Since we look at the world through the soda straw of converting calendar data it's easy to sometimes forget there's this whole business of bringing in a new system on (possibly) new hardware, configuring it, provisioning users, training users.... You get the idea.

Sometimes your system is not perfectly tuned and you need to simply get the data in.

Michigan Technical University was having time-outs when trying to load large ICS files into their Zimbra calendars. By large we mean 130,000 to 150,000 lines of iCalendar data.

For a quick fix they produced a Perl script to break the ICS files into smaller chunks. Thanks to Cynthia at MTU we can publish this here for those of you who may need it.

The "splitics.pl" script:

• Splits large calendar ICS files into smaller parts.


• Adds a tag (mm) to all meetings.
  

To run this:
Step 1 - collect the files
Make the ICS files and the zcs script. Some of the ICS files are large.
Put the ics files into a directory, perhaps called "calendar-migration"

Step 2 - Use the splitics.pl script
cd calendar-migration
for i in *.ics; do ../splitics.pl $i; done

Step 3 - create the zcs file to use later
cat *.zcs > /tmp/whole.zcs

Step 4 -
move the "whole.zcs" file to the Zimbra server
suppress resource responses with this command:
zmprov mcr zimbraCalResAutoAcceptDecline FALSE
zmprov -f whole.zcs

Step 5 - undo the suppress responses when ready

NOTE: This script also inserts the tag "mm" to all migrated appointments and meetings.

#!/usr/bin/perl # for i in *.ics; do ../splitics.pl $i; done # cat *.zcs > TODO $base_name=$ARGV[0]; $base_name =~ s/.ics$//; print "$base_name.zcs\n"; open(ZCS,">$base_name.zcs") die "Couldn't open $base_name.zcs : $!\n"; print ZCS "SelectMailbox $base_name\n"; print ZCS "emptyFolder Calendar\n"; open(ICS,"<$ARGV[0]") die "Couldn't open $ARGV[0] : $!\n"; while () { last if (/BEGIN:VEVENT/); $headers .= $_; } $event_count=0; $file_number=1; $event=$_; while() { if (/BEGIN:VEVENT/) { # It's a new event! Yay! if ($event_count > 50) { # See if we should dump the output open(OUTPUT,">$ARGV[0].$file_number") die "Couldn't open $ARGV[0].$file_number for output : $!\n"; print OUTPUT $headers; print OUTPUT $event; print OUTPUT "END:VCALENDAR\n"; close(OUTPUT); print ZCS "importURLIntoFolder Calendar http://yourserver/ZIMBRA/USERID/$ARGV[0].$file_number/n"; # print ZCS "postRestURL Calendar $ARGV[0].$file_number\n"; $file_number++; $event_count=0; $event="BEGIN:VEVENT\n"; } else { # Just keep adding it on $event .= $_; $event_count++; } } else { # It's either the end, or it's another line if (/^SUMMARY:/) { # Tag so we know it's a mm meeting $_ =~ s/$/ \(MM\)/; } $event .= $_; } } # We're at the end of our run... dump what is left over open(OUTPUT,">$ARGV[0].$file_number") die "Couldn't open $ARGV[0].$file_number for output : $!\n"; print OUTPUT $headers; print OUTPUT $event; close(OUTPUT); #print ZCS "postRestURL Calendar $ARGV[0].$file_number\n"; print ZCS "importURLIntoFolder Calendar http://yourserver/ZIMBRA/USERID/$ARGV[0].$file_number/n"; print ZCS "\n"; close(ZCS);

Unresponded meeting invitations and your migration

We get this question often enough (at least three separate times from a recent client) that we thought we'd blog on it. They put the statement better than we do:

Will meetings that you have received proposals for, but not responded to
migrate? In other words, if I have been invited to a meeting in Meeting Maker but
not accepted or declined yet will that meeting be migrated?

Short answer: yes.

For completeness, I’ll describe all of the permutations.

If you are a guest, MM records your response.

There are four possible responses to meeting proposals: Accept, Decline, Decide Later, or do nothing.

• If you accept, the meeting WILL appear in your calendar. The meeting request will be removed from your inbox.
• If you decline, the meeting WILL NOT appear in your calendar. The meeting request will be removed from your inbox.
• If you decide later, the meeting WILL appear in your calendar as tentative, and the meeting request WILL remain in your inbox.
• If you do not decide (do nothing), the meeting MAY appear in your calendar as tentative, and the meeting request WILL remain in your inbox. The Sumatra tool does not apply ANY response to the proposal (the tool does not know what your intention was!) However, once you read a meeting proposal, MS Exchange actually forces the meeting to appear in your calendar as tentatively accepted. SO yes, it ‘migrates’.
  
  By the way, there could be instances were the MM exports reports an invalid guest response!! In that case, Sumatra assumes that you have ‘not decided’, and thus leaves the meeting request in the inbox.
  
  The Sumatra rule: Preserve as much information possible. It’s easier for the user to delete something after the migration, than it is to create it.

All of this is for meetings from today forward. In the interests of keeping sanity any unresponded invitations from BEFORE the date of your migration are dropped. If you haven't responded for past meetings by the time of your migration you probably don't want to take it along.

Setting the Outlook Delegate Tab Entries in a Migration

As of January 2009 it is possible to set the Delegates in the Outlook Delegate Tab in a calendar migration. This will work for both an Oracle Calendar migration and a Meeting Maker migration. As is our practice for Delegate / Designate / Proxy migrations, we've built it off existing Microsoft-released and supported utilities.

Follow the procedure for PFDAVAdmin as we have previously documented (this sets Permissions on the appropriate folders).

1. Export your Active Directory data using CSVDE
csvde -f ad.csv -s SERVER -d "OU=Clients,DC=ex2007,DC=sumatra,DC=local" -l "dn,cn,displayname,sn,givenname,objectcategory,mailnickname,mail,homeMDB,distinguishedname,altRecipient,targetAddress"
Note: change the -s and the -d to represent your server and your AD

2. Import the data into the Database table AD_ExportUserList (if you have not already)
NOTES: The CSVDE output will:
· Have more columns of data than is used in the table
· A different order of columns. You must move columns in the output file so that the data align with the table

3. Run the macro M_OutputProxyForLDIFDE

4. Open a command window (i.e., DOS) , and run LDIFDE:
ldifde.exe -f proxy_delegates.ldf -i -s SERVER -k

where -s is the name of your server.

Result will be as follows for your Delegates (In Outlook menus via Tools-Options-Delegates Tab):

For more information on using LDIFDE see:
Using LDIFDE to import and export directory objects to Active Directory

Please note: this will set READ-WRITE (MM Term) permissions only. In Outlook terms it is "Editor."

Why? Because LDIFDE does not let us set READ-ONLY (Outlook term: "Reviewer").

We do the best we can with the Proxy migration tools. In general for setting Delegates we really really really want to be using off-the-shelf Microsoft tools (less chance of an update that makes them obsolete).

Calendar-only Exchange via a server-side rule

We sometimes get asked about running Exchange in calendar-only mode.

Why would you WANT calendar-only Exchange for some users?

Let's say your legacy calendar-only system is on its way out and you need to get with the times (after Exchange, Zimbra, and Google, are there any other options?). It's easier these days to agree on a unified calendar, but there are departments who will give up their legacy email only when pried from their unconscious fingers.

There's no means in Exchange itself of using only the calendar, but some folks at Illinois State University created a server-side rule for calendar-only Exchange.

See http://www.helpdesk.ilstu.edu/downloads/dl.phtml?id=1042
and http://www.helpdesk.ilstu.edu/kb/index.phtml?kbid=1255

Once I found this I found a variety of other universities had solved the same problem.

Virginia Tech's description goes into how to do this on your own (but they kept it client-side).

And UMichigan produced an entire guide for Exchange administrators.

Kudos to all three (and the others I undoubtedly did not find)!

By the way, [MS-OXORULE]: E-Mail Rules Protocol Specification documents as much as you're likely to need to know at the low level about Rules.

The Big Idea

In general, the idea is to Delete any mail not involved with calendaring AND (this is where things get tricky) have your Exchange configured to copy-forward all email to your non-Exchange account.

Since we find enough folks looking to do this, here's our take on the methodology, with screen shots and everything.

I'm going to take you through how to do this using Outlook Web Access. This has a couple of advantages to it: it's simpler for an end-user to do if they're already Linux-enabled and it automatically makes the rule server-side (which is what you want).

1. Start Outlook Web Access, Click Options and select Rules.


2. Create a New Rule for Arriving Messages
   
   
   
3. You will see a warning. Since you want to be calendar-only I cannot see a reason you would want other rules in Outlook -- so nuke away!


4. Let's give this an obvious name like "calendar-only rule" and have it apply if the message is TO you or CC'ing you (you with me so far?):




5. If any message comes in -- we want to DELETE it




6. EXCEPT if it is a meeting invitation or update to a meeting.
   
7. Save it and we are done! (With this part at least -- remember, you need to be configured server-side to copy your email where you want it)
   
8. So NOW let's TEST THIS OUT! Let's have another user (call him "Russ") send email to the poor fellow we modified above (call him "Zyg").


9. At the same time let's have Russ send Zyg a meeting invitation:


10. Logging into OWA as "Zyg" we see that Zyg has the meeting request in his inbox,

and the email is in Deleted Items. It works.



WHAT REMAINS TO BE DONE

• You still need to have your Exchange ID set up to copy all email to where you really want it. Given the variability in configurations, which is obvious even from the university solutions given above, we do not want to start documenting how to do this in general. There are simply too many ways to skin that cat.
• You can also create a rule client-side using Outlook and then distribute it (we toyed with using Illinois State University's rule, and they kindly sent it to us and would have allowed us to put it up for downloading -- many, many thanks, Randy!). We had not seen a solution involving OWA and wanted to add some knowledge to the discussion rather than refer to someone else's.
  

Setting Default Permissions for Exchange Resources

December, 2008. The subject is migrating proxies from Meeting Maker. Among our clients in December were two sites each with 1000 users, about 100 of which were resources. One had 90,000 proxy objects, the other had 5,000.

Why the 1:18 ratio on what were otherwise similar data sets?

The one with 90,000 proxy objects in Meeting Maker wanted to give everybody in Outlook Delegate access to each resource. In round figures 100 resources times 900 people gives you 90,000 Delegates.

So we were looking at using our usual method for setting Delegates (which would take a long time).

But it's actually simpler than that.

Meeting Maker does not have a default level for giving EVERYONE access to a resource.

BUT Outlook DOES!

And PFDAVAdmin makes it easy to propagate these permissions centrally (so long as you have an Exchange Admin who's willing). In this case it's criminal not to use it.

You can set up an import file as we've documented before, using

\Everyone Reviewer

to provide read-only access.

Or (quoting liberally from the documentation for PFDAVAdmin),

The Set Calendar Permissions option enables you to perform a bulk edit specifically to change permissions of the Calendar folder so that a single operation can modify the settings of thousands of users on a server. This is useful for changing the default permissions setting of the Calendar folder of all or many users, so that team members can view other member's calendars. Using Microsoft Office Outlook® enables changing only one user at a time, so the Set Calendar Permissions option is a good solution for this kind of task. In addition to changing the permissions of the Calendar folder, by using this option, a bulk-change also occurs on the permissions of the FreeBusy Data folder (hidden folder) of all the users on a server. If the FreeBusy Data folder permissions were not changed, the users will not be able to access another user's calendar.

I was going to start taking screen shots of how to do this exactly, when I said to myself, "Self, someone must have already done this."

And so they had. Thank Amit Tank whose FAQ: Give Calendar Read Permission on all Mailboxes - PFDavAdmin admirably takes you through this.

For international users, Set calendar permissions with PFDAVADMIN goes over how to filter for translated "Calendar" folders.

CorporateTime versions and migration to Exchange / Zimbra

Usually we see Oracle Calendar Server 9.0.4 ("Coca Cola Classic") but one account in the Boston area is running an older CorporateTime server (looks like version 7) to migrate into Zimbra.

Our new version of the conversion code supports this with the following modifications (they're running on a *nix platform):

uniuser -ls -format %s\:%g\:\:%id\:%no -n 588 -p xxxx > /var/tmp/users.txt
unires -ls -n 588 -p xxxx > /var/tmp/resources.txt
unicpoutu "S=LASTNAME/G=FIRSTNAME" -f exp-lastname.txt 588

unires is the older method for getting resource lists. The format is different from OCS 9.0.4, but we've redone the logic in the OraCalReader to take care of it.

Migrating to Exchange: One Summary from the Trenches

In December 2008 we migrated the school of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois.

Craig there sent us a very gracious thank you note (a rare but welcome occurrence in our line of work) that was also a good summary of what to expect in migrating into Exchange from either Meeting Maker or Oracle Calendar.

He has prepared this version for us to publish here:

With the services of Sumatra Development LLC, Illinois Veterinary Medicine has
successfully migrated 150 accounts from a local Meeting Maker server to a shared
campus-wide Exchange resource.

Interwoven scheduling among administrators and researchers elevates the data to a critical level of importance for the organization. Migrating data from one proprietary package to another, neither of which is governed by a standards protocol, is unbelievably tricky. Yet we were able to accomplish this migration in a transparent manner that our end users expected. They just wanted it to work and it just worked for us.

Looking back, I'd say the hardest parts were organizing our calendaring accounts and training our user base on Outlook. Not coincidentally, these parts took the longest. I started this project a little apprehensive about working with two organizations (outside vendors from my perspective) with me in the middle.

Sumatra was converting our data and a central campus IT unit was inserting the
data into the Exchange service. I am pleased to say it worked wonderfully. The
Sumatra instructions and data sets were easily managed by the campus Exchange
service managers. A little extra communication on the side and things worked
seamlessly. When we needed people to be there for us, they were there. My
compliments go Sumatra for their care and dedication at what they do.

For our part, the role of tirelessly training, establishing resource sharing and
answering the countless questions users come up with when they skip the training
sessions was something we were prepared to handle. The arrangement let us handle
the part we do best and let the calendaring and Exchange experts do their thing.

Meeting Maker Discussion List Closed

The Meeting Maker Discussion List hosted for years at Emory is shut down as of today (not that it's had many postings for the last year or so). They sent out this announcement earlier this week:

Dear MMXP subscribers,
Over the years, this list was a great asset to
those of us who ran Meeting Maker. Over time, the company(s) made
advancements in the support offerings. Thus, we have not needed this list
as much.

Emory has changed direction in how we use calendaring, and
have migrated away from Meeting Maker.
This is to serve notice that this
list
is to be shutdown effective 12/12/08.

Thank you.

Since the world is running ever lower on Meeting Maker, we're very glad that Oracle Calendar migration has stepped in to take its place.

Migrating Oracle Calendar Permissions to Exchange Part 2 DIY

So you want to migrate from OCS to Exchange and you can handle your own data migration (i.e., you don't want live meetings or recreated recurrence patterns) but you still want to migrate permissions.

We'll tell you how you can accomplish that using free off-the-shelf tools from Oracle and Microsoft.

The process proceeds in two phases:

1. EXTRACT the permissions data from Oracle


2. INSERT the permissions into Exchange

You may need to modify your user names between the first and second step, but if you're handling your own data migration this should not be too difficult. You're also going to have to write your own script to convert the output from the Extract phase to the input for the Insert phase. Since we get these requests from universities and they have lots of undergraduate computer talent that programs in between beer blasts we don't think this will be too difficult.

Extracting permissions data from Oracle Calendar Server

This is done using the OCS tool UNIACCESSRIGHTS. See the Oracle Calendar Reference Manual for your full set of options.

Let's take the example of John Lennon giving permissions to Jerry Garcia.

Running UNIACCESSRIGHTS to get the Designate data for Lennon is simple:

uniaccessrights -ls -grantor "S=Lennon/G=Johnny" -grantee "S=*" -n 1 -p PASSWORD

This results in the following output (which you can redirect to a text file), split here for clarity:

Grantee: S=Garcia/G=Jerry/UID=Jerry.Garcia/ID=256/NODE-ID=1 Designate Right: CONFIDENTIALEVENT=REPLY /CONFIDENTIALTASK=NONE /NORMALEVENT=MODIFY /NORMALTASK=NONE /PERSONALEVENT=VIEWTIME /PERSONALTASK=MODIFY /PUBLICEVENT=MODIFY /PUBLICTASK=MODIFY

The connections between the OCS User Interface and the output are pretty clear.

You have now successfully extracted the data. Part 1 is complete.

Inserting permissions data into Exchange

This is done using PFDAVAdmin, whose formal name is the Exchange Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool. You should check out our earlier postings on PFDAVAdmin. First let's say that on Exchange in Active Directory we already have a John Lennon who has created the same Calendar permissions for his co-worker Jerry Garcia. What would those look like in Exchange saved with PFDAVAdmin?

So glad you asked. Running our friend PFDAVAdmin and looking at John Lennon,


we first EXPORT his permissions to see what our end goal is:

Pick the easiest format to read,

We get a LOT of data for folders. I invite you to look at your own output.

However, we can comfortably reduce it to the data we need for Calendars and Tasks:

SETACL Mailboxes\john.lennon\Freebusy Data SUMATRA\jerry.garcia Editor NO SETACL Mailboxes\john.lennon\TopofInformationStore\Calendar SUMATRA\jerry.garcia Editor NO SETACL Mailboxes\john.lennon\TopofInformationStore\Tasks SUMATRA\jerry.garcia Reviewer NO

Your step is to turn your UNIACCESSRIGHTS export into a file of this format that you can IMPORT into PFDAVADMIN to set the ACLs for Exchange. This is not very hard.

Of course it's in our test domain so everything is "SUMATRA," and "TopofInformationStore" should be "Top of Information Store" (but it breaks oddly in Blogger). You might also want to set the INBOX and OUTBOX permissions if you want them to respond to meeting requests for you.

NOTE: Be careful making any modifications to this file – it is very important that it be tab-delimited.

But you get the idea and there is enough information here for you to fly on your own now should you so choose.

Note the key things about this:

• With your own scripting the cost to you is zero for additional tools
• It puts the permissions part of the migration entirely within your hands

Migrating Oracle Calendar Permissions to Exchange

Exchange and Oracle Calendar Server (OCS) are different in how they assign their Delegate / Designate permissions, but it’s less an apple vs. orange difference as a grapefruit vs. orange difference: both are noticeable more for their similarities than their pronounced differences relative to other calendaring systems.

There are two levels of permissions relevant to this discussion:

• Object level permissions (for individual calendar entries and tasks)
• User level permissions (e.g., to an administrative assistant or co-worker)

Object Level Permissions

Let’s deal with Object Level Permissions first since it’s a simpler comparison.

Oracle has four different permission levels for Calendar and Task objects:

Outlook and Exchange have only a “Private” option:



Translating these during a migration is pretty simple: “Personal” and “Confidential” in OCS map to “Private” in Outlook/Exchange. In the case of a Sumatra migration this happens as the data is being converted from OCS export format into our intermediate database.


User Level Permissions
OCS starts with object permissions and then allows the calendar owner to set permissions for other users based on those object permissions. Where OCS is Data-oriented in its permissions model, Exchange is Folder/User oriented. This leads us into the User Level Permissions.

Let’s take a look at the Oracle Calendar Server side.

John Lennon makes Jerry Garcia his Designate in Oracle Calendar:

Here you have the only options relevant to a migration being: “Modify” and “View.”

Why is “View times only” not relevant for a discussion of calendar designate rights migration into Exchange? Because Exchange has no mechanism to deny access to free/busy information on a user basis.

Also note that in OCS a user has the option of specifying different access for different object types. That is – you can be more stringent with Confidential as opposed to Public data. This capability does not exist in Exchange. At all. So we’re going to revisit this issue later when we’re trying to decide how to migrate these permissions from OCS to Exchange.

So let’s turn our attention to Exchange and see what options there are when Zyg Furmaniuk makes Judy Morrison a Delegate via Outlook:

You basically have three levels of access (other than the trivial case of None) you can grant:

Reviewer
Author
Editor

And the scope of these is pretty much on an Outlook Folder level (though in the case of Calendar you need to also grant access to the Calendar and the Free-Busy information). I.e., You can selectively grant access to the Calendar or the Email Inbox.

So you can think of “Modify” in OCS mapping to “Editor” and “View” mapping to “Reviewer” pretty easily.

Oracle Permission "Modify" maps to Exchange Permission "Editor"

Oracle Permission "View/Reply" maps to Exchange Permission "Reviewer"

Oracle Permission "View Times Only" is irrelevant in Exchange Permissions

But there remains a question: Given that OCS users have several gradations not available in Exchange – how do we do a mapping?

We at Sumatra at this point broke it down to as simple a question as we could put to the Administrators: “Do you want to give the maximum rights or the minimum rights?”

The way this manifests itself on our OraCalReader utility is the choice between ALL designate access rights set to Modify or ANY set to Modify.

Since the only other option is “Reviewer” in the target Exchange any rights not set to Modify are set to Reviewer.

Any View rights are automatically set to “Reviewer” rights since the object level access in OCS does not come into play in Exchange.

We do not set “Delegate can see my private items” on the Exchange side. Why? Because there’s enough else going on in a migration – folks can forget that they don’t want some information shared post-migration. Keeping private on means maximum security and you can always dial it to where you want it post-migration.

Other Exchange Delegate notes:

• Exchange has several possible clients (Outlook, Entourage, Outlook Web Access) at several different release levels with varying degrees of cross-platform and cross-version capability. Be sure to examine your own environment carefully.


• The Sumatra process only handles Calendar permissions, not Task permissions. Could we do Tasks? Yes. But you’d need to convince us it’s a valid business case.


• Regardless of the level of Delegate access set by the end user in Outlook, Delegate rights in OWA are read-only. See http://calendarservermigration.blogspot.com/2008/11/seeing-delegated-calendar-in-outlook.html
  
• MOST IMPORTANTLY: Using these methods to set Delegates in Exchange will overwrite any delegate rights a user has set prior to migration. Consider yourself warned.

The User Perspective

What does the user GETTING permission experience?

In OCS, Jerry Garcia as Designate of John Lennon simply selects File-Agenda-Open As Designate and sees the following:

Jerry gets a convenient list of everyone he has permissions for:

And it is very simple to orient yourself:

This user experience is VERY DIFFERENT in Microsoft Outlook. Here we use Outlook 2007 as our example. Zyg has given Judy permission to view his calendar.

In Judy’s calendar, she has no indication of this (except for a possible email notice from Zyg). In order to set up her client to see Zyg’s calendar she must first explicitly open it and select “Zyg” from the directory list:

Once selected once the option to view is a check box.

More Calendar Weirdness in Exchange 2003

We keep hearing about calendar bugs in Exchange 2003.

Cases in point:

A meeting update does not appear in Outlook Web Access after a meeting organizer updates the time of one meeting occurrence in an Exchange Server 2003 environment

When you use a CDO-based application to manage calendar items in Exchange Server 2003, the application crashes intermittently

Keep in mind: None of this has anything to do with a calendar migration. It's what seeps into Microsoft products when the Redmond Belle tries to "encourage" you to "upgrade." Both of these are related to CDO and the most prominent CDO-based application is the Blackberry Enterprise Server.

ActiveSync bug in Exchange 2003 - Warning warning!

November looks like ActiveSync month. First I dropped my Sprint HTC SmartPhone because as a phone it was unusable (despite the fact that sync with Outlook was passable).

But Chris Quinn, one of our pals in the calendaring community, alerts us to a Microsoft KB Article 958781:

Some recurring calendar items disappear from the "Day/Week/Month" view in Outlook when a user uses Exchange ActiveSync on a mobile device to modify a recurring meeting in an Exchange 2003 environment

Much like Snakes on a Plane the title says it all.

But unlike SoaP there's more here to worry about (aside from whether you want the extended edition DVD).

The list of affected files for the fix to this problem includes pretty much all of CDO's associated files PLUS MADFB (the main Free-Busy updater).

This is a scary bunch of sensitive code to be changing all at once. And anything that relies on CDO (Anybody out there have BlackBerry Servers?) could get caught in the backwash.

So our warning to you still on Exchange 2003 is to test this HotFix BEFORE you deploy it if you have anything other than a vanilla Exchange 2003 environment

Seeing a Delegated Calendar in Outlook Web Access

It's really easy to get to another person's calendar in Outlook or even Entourage if they've given you delegate access.

But if you want to view that same schedule via Outlook Web Access (OWA) you need to know a few things.

Check out this article: How to Use Outlook Web Access Web Parts.

You want user interface? Fuggedaboutit.

If "Russ" is Delegate of "Zyg" via Outlook on the "VM" Exchange 2007 server he needs to use this URL:

https://VM/OWA/zyg@sumatra.local/?cmd=contents&f=calendar

Then he gets to view Zyg's calendar (NB: Regardless of level of delegate access it's read only).

Remove "TargetAddress" in Exchange 2007

Forwarding meeting requests is a really bad practice.

See Outlook Meeting Requests: Essential Do's and Don'ts if you want the Microsoft dogma on it.

This is especially true in calendar migrations when you're creating more meeting invitations at once than you probably ever will again.

It is especially true when Exchange is forwarding automatically by defining TargetAddress (as could be done via an identity-management tool).

Such is the lead in to why you want to turn off TargetAddress before a migration.

To turn this attribute off where it is set, you simply need to follow this three step program:

1. ) EXPORT your directory data using LDIFDE

ldifde -s YOURSERVER -r "(targetaddress=*)" -l "dn" -f exportldf.ldf

This produces a file whose records look like this:

dn: CN=Adam Ant,OU=Client85,OU=Clients,DC=ex2007,DC=sumatra,DC=local
changetype: add
-

2. Edit the LDIFDE file "exportldf.ldf"
Replace "changetype: add" with "changetype: modify\ndelete: targetaddress\n\-\n\n"

i.e., the file should look like this:
dn: CN=Adam Ant,OU=Client85,OU=Clients,DC=ex2007,DC=sumatra,DC=local
changetype: modify
delete: targetaddress
-

Notes:

• If you want to restore the attribute after the migration, make a copy of the exportldf.ldf file before editing it!


• The editing works best if you have a text editor that supports regular expressions. We recommend TextPad.


• There must be a dash and a blank line between each command.

3. Re-run (import) your file
ldifde -s YOURSERVER -f exportldf.ldf –i

Why are we not doing this using either PowerShell or some of the other GUI-based management tools in Exchange 2007? Simply because we haven't yet figured out how to or if it's even possible.

Flashback: Those of you who have been through a migration into Exchange 2000/2003 will recognize the exact same worry with AltRecipient.

New option for Oracle Calendar Migration

You asked for it -- so we did it.

As the screenshot shows, OraCalReader will now give the admin the option of converting historic meetings into appointments on everyone's calendar or inserting them as live meetings.

Beware: As we warn folks over and over - live meetings take longer to insert into Microsoft Exchange than appointments (which is why we made this an automatic default in Oracle Migrations).

So if you're migrating to Zimbra and using Palms....

We just moved a site from Meeting Maker into Zimbra and everything was ducky until we got an email stating:

"After taking our Meeting Maker Database and getting it imported into Zimbra,
our Palm OS devices that are receiving over-the-air syncs to their Zimbra
calendars lock up and head into an infinite reboot cycle when they try to
access their calendar data. It appears that something in the formatting of
the calendar data now pretty much just causes the brain of the Palm devices
to explode... because the problem does not extend to Blackberry devices."

Being the responsible guys we are, we freaked. Then we read that the problem doesn't happen with BlackBerry devices. In calendar migrations if we do something really wrong we expect it to fail everywhere. Since they used Notify for both Palm and BlackBerry sync from Zimbra we started looking at Palm. I think I have an old VIIx sitting on my discarded electronics drawer from the days a decade ago when we started this company.

Being exceedingly motivated, however, our client managed to come up with a solution before us. Their significantly greater knowledge of the Palm probably also had a lot to do with this.

Seems to be related to recurring meetings on the Palm, which interpreted some instance as "Zero" and didn't like it -- but didn't gracefully recover either.

They suggest other users with this problem (which I really hope there never are any, but know there will be some out there)

1. Go to http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk5.htm
2. Download the zipped Windows EXE.
3. In Advanced Apps there is a file called 'dbscan'
4. Open this on your PC
5. It should set itself up to install on your next sync. Read the instructions! It is a database integrity checker.
6. It will advise of the corrupt files and give you the opportunity to delete them from your handheld.
7. Run a sync again - but set the options for **handheld to overwrite pc** - this will sort out the problem.

I would really like to thank the folks at Pimlico Software for their really good application for Palms!