les wrote:Don't try pst export/import. It doesn't work (at least in my case). When i tried it for a client, the export and import "finished without error" i ended up (later finding out from the end users) with missing mail in multiple random folders.
A few comments on how my transition went (it's now finished and I've very enthusiastically entered "omshut" a week or so ago)
I tried going the manual route, by drag&dropping all mails/folders/contacts/... in Outlook manually into a local PST and then re-uploading them into the new server.
However, lots of mail messages and in some cases also the contacts were corrupt and while it was possible to move the mails to the local storage PST, it was afterwards neither possible to upload them to the new server or to move/copy them to a different local storage PST. I'm not very surprised though, since my users have complained several times in the last years that sometimes mails could not be opened or not be deleted - Scalix has a habbit of corrupting mails occasionally...
My workaround: Accessing Mails using IMAP worked perfectly fine - those corruption problems are just in Outlook (tried both 2003 and 2007 - made no difference, also sxmboxexp and sxmboximp didn't fix the corruptions in the mails).
I first tried moving the mails with Thunderbird, but Thunderbird is just horrible when moving large amounts of mails (it just stops in the middle of a move without any error and then you have things partially copied but not removed from the source).
I then tried using Outlook (2007 or 2010, not sure now which one i used for that) to move the IMAP mails but I encountered some problems there too (don't remember what exactly).
Finally I found Mailstore Home (http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx) which is a free Backup Utility for Mails that can among several other protocols download and upload mails using IMAP.
And that one then finally worked perfectly and I was able to rescue almost all mails from the scalix server to move them on to greener pastures. I can really recommend MailStore Home - it's reliable, free and perfectly suited for this job
The only problems I had using this "IMAP" way of moving the user's data to the new system:
- extremely large emails, some users had a few mails with something like 150MB-200MB attachments. Might have been a size limitation on the new system I was moving stuff to.
- IMAP doesn't support folders with a "/" in the name, if those exist in Outlook they will not be visible in IMAP, so you might miss them when moving them this way! (by the way: If you had such folders in Scalix they were also missing in Activesync)
- flags for mails, such as whether a mail had already been forwarded or replied to were lost by transitioning this way (not a major problem, but some users noticed)
- some mails with the outlook flag "important" set somehow got duplicated in IMAP (?!?) - was only the case for a couple of mails and I fixed this by comparing manually whether they were already on the target system or not.
For the non-mail-items:
I used manual Outlook drag&drop for Calendars & Contacts which was a bit tedious but worked fine mostly. For some of the users with contacts that were "corrupt" I did an sxmboxexp und sxmboximp which fixed the contact problems if I recall correctly. It might not have helped though (I don't remember exactly) and I already had written a small C# program that could read the contacts from outlook and then write them again to a different outlook-profile (on the new server). Not really sure if the export/import would have been enough therefor since I allready had this solution ready.
Overall the process was a bit time-consuming but I'm quite sure now that all data on the new system is free of corruptions caused by Scalix. I'm happy with the results, finally I've got an ActiveSync Solution that does actually work as it should (Scalix-Activesync on the iPhone was NEVER showing all users in the contacts folder and sometimes randomly the calendars stopped working for no apparent reason - not to mention that it just doesn't work at all for Nokia Users).
By the way: I did the transition over a couple of weeks and used fetchmail to transmit mails from the already-migrated users to the new system. For the few public folders that I was only able to move in the end I just told the already-migrated-users to use Scalix-Webaccess in the meantime to access those if they really needed to.
Oh, and one final trick: If you sxmboximp a backup file to a new empty user: I would highly suggest to disable indexing for this empty-recovery-user before importing - otherwise the import will cause a huge load of indexing processed that you probably won't need... (the commands to do so are somewhere here in the forum I think)
