Migrating from Zimbra

[David.be]

Hello,

I have a customer running Zimbra and he'd like to switch to Scalix. Is there any way to migrate from one to the other easily ? It's a small infrastructure so the same machine would be used.

My question is : is there a way to backup Zimbra data, reinstall the operating system, install Scalix and finally import data ?

Thanks for any clue/suggestion...

David

[kanderson]

I'd recommend if there are only a few users that he dump each user's mail into a PST on the user's desktop. Then Import it into Scalix.

Test it first, but that should work.

There are also imap to imap migration tools available, but I've seen complaints that sometimes the READ flag is screwed up during the move. Imapcopy and imapsync are two examples.

Kev.

[florian]

If it's only email data, using a imap2imap copy program like http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapsync/ or http://home.arcor.de/armin.diehl/imapcopy/imapcopy.html should also work well - these are freeware tools and can be found easily on GOOG...

Out of curiosity - any specific reason why they prefer Scalix over Zimbra?

Cheers, Thanks,
Florian.

[David.be]

Hello,

Thanks for your answers. How do you consider exporting mailboxes to pst ? They currently use IMAP to access their mailboxes so I could download all e-mails to a pst, but I should do it by POP3, which means my customers would loose all their folder hierarchy, don't they ?

Imap to Imap synchronisation tools seem to be to best idea to me but :
- I'd like to use the same machine to install scalix (so I'll have zimbra OR scalix running but not both of them so I won't be able to sync them).
- my users have huge mailboxes, about 20Gigs total, so syncing would take hours.

Is there any tool ou there to download all imap folders and their content to a pst (so that once done I can reinstall the server and then import them to scalix) ?

The reason why they prefer Scalix over Zimbra (they use community edition) is that Scalix offers 25 premium users, which means to them 25 Outlook Connectors.

David

[florian]

The PST method was thought to be by doing this manually through Outlook. If there is not a large number of users involved, might be the easiest. There are a couple of tools available from 3rd parties that handle PSTs in a more automated way, just google around. Other IMAP clients such as thunderbird also allow you to copy files to local disk storage and later upload again. It will be a dual step copy process, so on 2GB mailboxes it will take a while, no matter what - the internal database formats used by Scalix and Zimbra are both product-specific, so there is no way to directly copy. If you want to use imap2imap, you could setup a 3rd plain imap server and copy from zimbra to that first, running on the same machine, different port number, then setup scalix and do the reverse. Running Zimbra and Scalix on the same machine at the same time would probably also be possible, but somewhat elaborate - lot's of potential port number conflicts and as Zimbra uses quite a bit of memory, might also be overloading the machine easily - so I wouldn't really recommend trying it.

Let us know how it went.

Florian.