Hard Limit of 25,000 on Beehive Calendar Objects

While stress testing our migration methods -- we did a major push for performance optimization aka SPEED -- before a migration this past weekend and of course that meant a few bugs crept in, we got this message from Oracle Beehive.

So if you did not know it before, there's a hard limit of 25,000 meetings in Oracle Beehive Extensions for Outlook.  Hard as it is to believe we do know of users who have exceeded this in other legacy systems.

External Contacts in an Oracle Beehive to Microsoft Exchange Calendar Migration

External email addresses in meeting invitations.

We do not make them live in migrations.  The reason is simple: they confuse the heck out of the attendees and it's not worth it.  While you can communicate to your internal folks that a migration is going on and we are taking care of re-creating the meetings, we cannot reach out of your organization and re-accept or decline for your external guests. 

But we can let YOU know about them.

So as of all forthcoming version of our process we're keeping the record of external guests in the meeting agenda, exactly as you see here post-migration.

When Impersonate Permissions Fail DURING a Migration

Interesting case came up this weekend.  

An 850 user Beehive to Exchange Migration validated fine (notable for two things: First European Beehive migration and first multiple instance Beehive migration) and then while in migration started throwing impersonate errors for what became a total of ten users.

Now ten out of 850 is about 1% -- which to us is still too great an error rate for us to tolerate.  

But it seemed really wasteful to undo the entire migration for ten users.

Here's what we did.

We modified the insertion to allow for a single user.  Not via validation of that user which is a good test procedure but it would be insufficient here.  You need the validation file to be as entire as you can get it -- otherwise there will be inaccuracies.

First fix your permissions issues with those users.

THE ABSOLUTELY SAFEST WAY

Here are the steps we recommend:

•     Create a new sub directory for each of the accounts.  Remember to copy configuration and the two account validation and mapping files
•       Launch the bcalreader UI, and set the lower and upper limit for the first account’s SMTP address root, e.g.:  “jimi.hendrix” to “jimi.hendrix”
•     If there are multiple accounts that have this root, follow the limit values with an “@” sign.  For example, if you have two accounts “jimi.hendrix”, “jimi.hendrix2”, and you only want to process “jimi.hendrix”, set the limits: “jimi.hendrix@” TO “jimi.hendrix@”           Otherwise the tool will migrate “jimi.hendrix” and “jimi.hendrix2”, and you will end up with duplicates in the “jimi.hendrix2”’s mailbox.
•     Validate, then press the “process all” button.
•     Repeat for other users

NOTES

• This inserts all meetings/contacts/tasks owned by the user, and process all invitations received from other users.
• However, it will NOT process invitations sent from this account to other accounts.  Those invitations will remain in his invitee’s in-boxes.  We suggest you leave it that way.
• Communicate to your end users that the migration may have left some meeting invitations in their inbox.  Suggest they process those invites the way they did in Beehive (e.g., if they accepted the invite in Beehive, accept the one in Outlook;  If they declined the invite in Beehive, decline it in Outlook.

THE ABSOLUTELY BEST WAY

The best way in this case means getting the outcome you could have had if the impersonate had not failed.  But it is a little more intricate and has the possibility you press the wrong buttons.

Do this in the cold light of morning.  It is way too easy to hit the wrong button when you are sleep deprived and stressed. 

• Create a sub-directory that you will use to process the accounts that had impersonation problems.
• Copy bCalReader v2.0.11 or greater and the validation file.
• Change the limit to the account.  Put an “@” after the SMTP address, e.g.: “Jimi.Hendrix@”
• Press “Process All”.
• Repeat for the remaining accounts.

Once you have added data from the impersonation-problem accounts, return to the “main instances” of bCalReader.

For each of these instances:

1. Check the “show individual steps”, and re-process the invitations as follows
2. Press the “Respond to Invitations” button on each instance.  When they are all done,
3. Press the “Apply response Exceptions” button on each instance.  When they are all done,
4. Press the “Update Tracking Info” button on each instance.  When they are all done,
5. Press the “Final Cleanup” button on each instance.  
6. When they are all done, you are finished! 

Multiple Insertion Instances in Oracle Beehive Calendar to Exchange Migration

Now that we have Beehive to Exchange migration running reliably and in test in both the USA and Europe, we're working on improving the throughput with our old friend: Multiple Instances aka Segmentation.

Since re-creating calendar state in Exchange requires sending, responding, and creating exceptions for meeting invitations, this technique does require some special handling, which we're detailing here.

First, the screen morphs a little:

As we've done in the past, this is an alphabetic list, so 

1. Make sure when you do this you cover the entire alphabet.  Once a site left out the letter "k" -- yet another great example of why we built "UNDO" capability into the process.

2. Sometimes resources or rooms start with numbers, so make your first installation "SPACE" instead of "A".  If you try to use A this comes up: 

3. Remember what we said earlier about sending invitations and responding to them?  Suppose that Adam Ant invited Lex Luthor to a meeting, but Luthor is in a different segmentation.  It's possible one instance could be trying to respond for Luthor before he gets the invitation and suddenly everybody gets confused.  No worries.  After the invitations have been sent for each instance the code pauses and tells you to wait for all the other instances to catch up.

How to use this:

• Go to each computer you want to use 
• Install bCalReader and its associated .DLLs
• Validate and map all your users on one machine and then COPY the account_validation.txt and alt_account_maps.txt to the other instances.
• Proceed.

As always, TEST TEST TEST before you go live.

Performance Optimization in a Beehive to Exchange Calendar Migration

We've been fine-tuning the performance in the Beehive Calendar to Exchange calendar migration.

A little bit of background is due here.  We use the rate of 850 objects per minute as a rough gauge of Insertion time into Exchange in our Meeting Maker or OCS migrations.  But that is ONLY for insertion into Exchange from our own data structures and does not include the time for any processing of Legacy calendar data (the Extraction phase).

For Beehive, we've combined the EXTRACTION and INSERTION into one application where we read directly from Oracle's relational database.

And needless to say performance varies hugely with the Beehive topology and servers.

So a few general results:

• Your migration performance improves  20-30% if you SHUT DOWN Beehive (technically our results were 18% to 33%, in a variety of configurations, but rounding makes them easier to wield).
• Going into on-premises Exchange yields more reliable performance than insertion into Office 365.
• Extraction involves a certain amount of overhead that is difficult to remove and highly dependent on Beehive system and configuration.  Think of it this way: it always takes a certain amount of time to pull up a user.
• Given that, look at your summary report for you top users and use that data in conjunction with your test experience to gauge your insertion times.  If you need help analyzing this contact us.
• Calendars with more objects take longer to insert so only take data as far back as you need.  If we see serious requirements for lots of past data we'll modify the code to allow you to insert current data as quickly as possible (so you are functional) and then go back and insert your historical archive.  This has been a regular feature of our other migrations for a while now, but Beehive migrations are relatively new.

Contact.Birthday property in EWS

Has anyone else noticed that the Contact.Birthday property in EWS seems to not work?  We noticed the same thing with Contact.WeddingAnniversary.

It's a small nit -- but it's kind of annoying us.

Server-side Holidays for Microsoft Exchange cmdlet

OK, we'll let you use the cmdlet for server-side holidays.

It works with Exchange 2007, 2010, and 2013, as well as Office 365.

You will have to set permissions to be able to access calendars.

You can download it here.  

Update December 10, 2013: Link removed while we consider alternates for the holiday cmdlet.
Update December 17, 2013:  We created an open-source cmdlet project on CodePlex.

Throttling in Exchange 2013

The way you control throttling changed in Exchange 2013.  If you recall, we set a different set of throttling attributes in Exchange 2010 when impersonating users.  Those attributes differ from user throttling attributes (this is a good thing for migrations!!) In Exchange 2010 there were seven throttling attributes.  In Exchange 2013, there are only TWO (again, we're focused on EWS impersonation access):

• EWSMaxConcurrency
• EWSMaxSubscriptions

To define a policy "SuThrottlingPolicy", and set it to your service account, "exsu", use the following:

 New-ThrottlingPolicy SuThrottlingPolicy -EWSMaxConcurrency $null -EWSMaxSubscriptions $null
 Set-ThrottlingPolicyAssociation -Identity exsu -ThrottlingPolicy SuThrottlingPolicy



For the inquiring minds, the following are set in Exchange 2010, but NOT used in Exchange 2013:

• EWSFastSearchTimeoutInSeconds
• EWSFindCountLimit
• EWSPercentTimeInAD
• EWSPercentTimeInCAS
• EWSPercentTimeInMailboxRPC

Here are the errors will you see in our log files if you hit the throttling limit (taken from MSDN:)

Error	Throttling policy parameter	Description
ErrorExceededConnectionCount	EWSMaxConcurrency	Indicates that there are more concurrent requests against the server than are allowed by a user's policy.
ErrorExceededSubscriptionCount	EWSMaxSubscriptions	Indicates that a user's throttling policy maximum subscription count has been exceeded.
ErrorExceededFindCountLimit	EWSFindCountLimit	Indicates that a search operation call has exceeded the total number of items that can be returned.
ErrorServerBusy	EWSPercentTimeInMailboxRPC EWSPercentTimeInCAS EWSPercentTimeInAD	Occurs when the server is busy. The BackOffMilliseconds value returned with ErrorServerBusy errors indicates to the client the amount of time it should wait until it should resubmit the request that caused the response that returned this error code.

Or, the HTTP status codes that are returned by throttling errors:

HTTP status code	Description
HTTP 503	Indicates that EWS requests are queuing with IIS. The client should delay sending additional requests until a later time.
HTTP 500	Indicates an internal server error with the ErrorServerBusy error code. This indicates that the client should delay sending additional requests until a later time. The response may contain a back off hint called BackOffMilliseconds. If present, the value of BackOffMilliseconds should be used as the duration until the client resubmits a request.
HTTP 200	Contains an EWS schema-based error response with an ErrorInternalServerError error code. An inner ErrorServerBusy error code may be present. This indicates that the client should delay sending additional requests until a later time.

Enterprise Calendar Metrics: The View from 10,000 Meters

Our last post was a start at getting at what kinds of time-based information is in Microsoft Exchange / Office 365 calendars that can help you get a hand on what is going on in your organization.

We want to draw the distinction between time management (something individuals either do or not do for their personal schedules) and calendar metrics (something you can read from the aggregated calendar data in your Microsoft Exchange server).

Here we'll start taking a look at some of the global reports you can extract that enable some insight on what your corporation is doing.

Some data we extracted a while ago generated the following results:

Not surprising (to anybody who's worked in an organization with more than fifty people) the number of meetings drops at lunchtime.  We interpret this as people wanting to get some private time, but any anthropologist out there will ask how we normalized our results, set up proper controls, and did double-blind studies.  None of us are anthropologists.  What is more interesting to you the manager are the twin peaks of mid-morning and mid-afternoon for the most popular meeting time.  Plan your resource use accordingly.

The outlying time of midnight - 1 AM we think was either security or manufacturing.

Which hour do people meet leads to the question which DAY is favored.  In the above report we found that meeting frequency peaks on Tuesday.  In LOTS of both legacy and Exchange data we have seen Wednesday and Thursday being the peak, but almost never Monday or Friday.

For the true calendar cartographer a totally nerdy but relevant question is: what kinds of recurrence patterns are established in my organization?  While recurring meetings and appointments are really neat, there data shows that the majority of meeting objects (we'll get to that in the next sentence) are one-time.  But I said objects.  So a weekly meeting counts as ONE object even if it occurs 52 times in the course of a year.

These combined with lists of the top users of calendar functionality are a good place to start to get a handle around enterprise-level metrics.

What can we do about individual resource metrics?

So glad you asked.  Hang on for the next post.

How does your enterprise spend its time?

Linkedin blogs contain interesting thought pieces.  Three recent posts caught my attention – they talk about how to cut down/eliminate unnecessary meetings:

Jeff Weiner (CEO LinkedIn) notes his managers complain about managing their inbox and their meeting schedules in his post: A Simple Rule to Eliminate Useless Meetings, and The Importance of Scheduling Nothing.

Rajat Taneja (CTO, Electronic Arts) wants to Cut Down on Unnecessary Meetings.

I found Rajat Taneja's post most interesting.  He talks about understanding "how we spend our time," and then he tracked how he spent his time.  We think the act of measurement is a critical component that will drive the CEO to force the organization to change the meeting behavior.

Both of these are geared towards the meeting organizer, that is, changing individual behavior.  But both of these being high level executives, the more interesting question they do NOT pose is: can we get a handle on how the enterprise is spending its time?  Are we being efficient or not?  And can we read this out of Microsoft Exchange?


Having been looking at scheduling metrics off and on over the years we've been trying to figure out how to interrogate the Exchange server to derive useful metrics on this for analysis on the organization / enterprise level.

It's easy to use server-side tools to get a handle and do reports on how much email traffic is generated and disk space is in use.  Email analysis has relatively little dependence or significance on job title or function.

But calendars are precisely the opposite!

As a Tech CEO you usually want your engineering staff working on engineering problems and not in any more meetings than they need to be.  But your sales people need to be meeting with clients or they're not doing their job.  In between there's a wide gulf as much dependent on individual corporate culture and goals as on anything taught in a management course at Business School.

We took a cut at that measurement, in our recent Oracle Beehive migration tool.  See "The Oracle Beehive Calendar Metrics" post for a screen shot of the metrics.  Those of you who have been through migrations with us have seen similar reports on your legacy data.

We've learned over years of analyzing data that the top ten meeting users is sometimes a surprising revelation to corporate management -- usually when they find that one of their top users is a conference room.

And this actually is where we made what we think of as our first big break through: that the inanimate objects in the corporation have a lot more importance than you would first think.  

In fact -- since the only major issue with them is "how much are they in use?" it's relatively straight-forward to do reporting on them and we've already sliced that a few different ways for people.

We'll show sample reports in a follow-on post.

More #Oracle Beehive Calendar Metrics

Our latest version of the Beehive to Exchange / Office 365 migration code includes more table of metrics of Beehive calendars.  I show some of the additional stats we generate here using only two users in our test server so it's easier to take in.

#Oracle Beehive Calendar Metrics

We just cannot leave well enough alone so we started analyzing Oracle Beehive data (live, of course) to produce summary reports such as you see below in HTML.  We've been doing it for years for Meeting Maker and OCS but Beehive is relatively new in our demand-space.

If you want to try this in your environment contact us info AT sumatra DOTCOM and please tell us how you will give us helpful feedback.

Updated the Oracle Beehive to Exchange / Office 365 video

Thank you to http://www.peterhollander.com/ for editing our Oracle Beehive to Exchange video so it is more like an actual video.

And here is a more detailed version:

So we updated our website

We got tired of our old website design and re-did it.

Feel free to comment on the new design.

We're also redoing the videos but there's no sense in waiting.

Visual Representation of Calendaring in EHLO

You know, actions tell you a lot.

So just for chuckles we took this screen shot of the Tags on The Exchange Team Blog.

We see that to Microsoft calendaring gets slightly more tags than Compliance and Jobs (as in positions, not Steve).... 

....WAY fewer than Biography (what does the life cycle of a Microserf really have to do with Exchange?)....

.... And lower mention than whale dung to almost everything else.

Now this is not scientific, and it is not necessarily significant.  Tips 'n Tricks and Troubleshooting could be calendar-specific at times and not be cross-classified.  And E-Mail does not get a separate specific mention, which would provide the most direct comparison.

All we're measuring is the relative time it's tagged vis-a-vis the other tags.  Could be it's not mentioned because it's stable and not a problem (we find a lot of problems here, but that's out specialty), or it could be that other priorities are higher.

Interesting Google v. Microsoft in the Enterprise Story

Reading Google Pushed This 4,500-Employee Company Into Microsoft's Arms.  Our experience is that this makes sense.

We do not even bother looking at calendar migrations INTO Google anymore (the sites we found that were considering Google were really light on any kind of enterprise expertise in the first place).

Our prediction: we will soon be seeing people looking for full-state calendar migrations OUT of Google and into Exchange.

Just added Categories to our Oracle Beehive to Office 365 migration

We got bored waiting for feedback from our current Oracle Beehive migration sites so we added some functionality we've been meaning to anyway.

Now you can take categories along.

But there's a little subtlety involved.

Let's look at our favorite test user Jimi Hendrix in Beehive (via the Outlook client): With appointments on International Worker's Day with categories assigned.

Nothing out of the ordinary here.

Now let's run our process and migrate Jimi to Office 365.
Here are the results of the migration into his specific account.
Note that the "Red," "Orange," and "Yellow" categories come over, are retained, and the color pops up as we would expect.

But categories "Migration," "Microsoft," and "Travel" are uncolored, while category "Hayley" HAS a color associated with it.  What goes?

The answer is of course: User Configuration.  Since on the Office 365 side we used an off-the-shelf configuration, the defaults common to both Oracle and Microsoft came in and displayed.  Custom categories need to be created user-side in the defaults (which is a one-time action).  Once you assign a color to a category (as we did with category "Hayley" below, it's propagated to all calendar objects with the same category.

Offers to Acquire our #Oracle #Beehive to #Office365 Calendar Migration Technology

It has been a weird few weeks here at Sumatra.

And it just keeps coming.

A company from the Indian subcontinent and another company from the former Soviet Union both contacted us within days of each other looking to acquire our Oracle Beehive to Exchange calendar migration technology.  I'll let you guess which one started with "Please send us all your source code....."  The other one was a slightly more realistic.

Anyone else pick up a disturbance in the noosphere?

The fact that there were two makes me wonder that is going on here.  We are open to licensing this to someone else but as it needs to be a serious inquiry.

Preliminary video of #Oracle #Beehive to #Office365 Calendar Migration

We're back to normal functioning around here.

We did this preliminary video on how our Beehive calendaring / contacts / task migration into Exchange / Office 365 works.  

Look at it on full screen so you can catch all the details.
Updated July 18, 2013 to point to the final video.

Sumatra will be unresponsive today #keepcalmandcarryon

Most of us being based in the Boston-Cambridge area, and ALL of us having significant ties to the area, Sumatra Development is going to be glued to current events today.  We'll get back to you when we can.