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.