Exchange Migration Guide

[keith@wethinkit.net]

Is there a newer version of the migration guide that goes through the steps required to migrate from Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003? The current migration guide all seems to be in relation to Exchange 5.5 and much has changed since then.

Thanks,

Keith

[kanderson]

I'd recommend talking to support for this, as planning a migration can be fairly complex, depending on your environment.

There's also a new tool, sxmigrate which will help facilitate the migration. It's vastly better than the compusven product that was previously used.

Kev.

[les]

Is there a newer version of the migration guide that goes through the steps required to migrate from Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003? The current migration guide all seems to be in relation to Exchange 5.5 and much has changed since then.

Thanks,

Keith

Hi,

in my experience it depends on whether you are going to do a straight cut-over or a phased one. I guess that depends on how many users you have and how long you can have them down.

Generally i find this is the best way.....

1. Setup new scalix server with all accounts and aliases.
2. have new emails come into scalix. People will not see history until you get around to reimporting old mail from exchange. This means that people can send and receive new email, so downtime is minimal.
3. then run exmerge to export all the user old mail from exchange.
4. manually import via pst using outlook into each users new scalix account.

This may seem like a huge manual process, again dependant on the number of users, but pst import/export is the only way to get all mail successfully across including special folders like contacts, calendar etc.
And ultimately your users could import their own pst's.

exmerge is a free microsoft tool to dump pst's.

i have not played with the new scalix tool, last i heard it was still in beta.

even the other commercial solutions mentioned in the migration guide aren't worth what they want you to pay for them. For instance E-Shuttle doesn't do calendar and contacts or it makes you do them seperately (cant remember exactly but it wasn't as easy as exmerge and they wanted big dollars for it!!).
And a phased migration where you have some accounts on exchange and some on scalix just seemed like it would become a huge nightmare and have a big potential for issues. That is why i went to exmerge and pst import/export.

That would be my suggestion, it has worked for me in the past, hope it gives you some insight to determine which way you want to go.

[kanderson]

Les is right here. DON'T do a phased migration.

The Scalix import tool works much better than the eshuttle/compusven tool. I'd recommend it if you want to migrate with less labor than the manual Outlook import would need. Ultimately, it does about the same thing though.

Kev.

[les]

Les is right here. DON'T do a phased migration.

The Scalix import tool works much better than the eshuttle/compusven tool. I'd recommend it if you want to migrate with less labor than the manual Outlook import would need. Ultimately, it does about the same thing though.

Kev.

does sxmigrate do the role of exmerge and then also sxmboximp? i.e is it an a-z solution?

have you used it in this way and successfully migrated special folders like calendar and contacts?

That's the only thing thats made me do manual imports of pst's in the past (only way to succesfully transfer all folders).I'll check out sxmigrate in my next endeavour....

[keith@wethinkit.net]

Thanks so much for all of your responses. I think we will ditch the plan for coexistence and move forward from there.

Keith

[chris]

Hi - here are a couple of answers to questions above:

the Scalix Migration Tool (sxmigrate.exe) takes care of pumping .pst files directly into a Scalix server. The tool is available and fully stable, but not free - talk to your sales rep to get ahold of it or to get an evaluation copy.

How sxmigrate.exe works is completely documented in the migration guide - in fact, the migration guide is the master copy of sxmigrate doc.

The basic idea is that you can pull .pst's from Exchange with exmerge.exe and push them into Scalix with sxmigrate.exe. If you wrap the whole thing in a bit of .vbs it can be done fairly automagically.

As far as phased v. flash migration it really depends on a lot of factors. Generally speaking a single swap-over will always be preferable. However, whether that can be done will depend on parameters like the number of users and number of mailservers etc.

If the project is too big too just flip the switch to the new server, and you do a phased migration, I would recommend getting coexistence running with a handful of pilot users first, letting them work that way for a few days, and then starting in on the rest. The information in the migration guide is still highly relevant for Exchange 2k3, but a couple of things like LDAP fields are different. I've got a quick and dirty howto up on the wiki which highlights the primary differences between EX 5.5 and 2k3 and will help getting contact sync set up - http://www.scalix.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... ntact-Sync

Once coexistence has been established you can go about migrating batches of users over to the Scalix system.

Hope this helps,

Chris