Topic: Dropping Exchange - a few tips?

[Gary]

Finally going to get rid of that dog they call Exchange 2000. Never used the calendaring or public folders anyway - just as a mail server.

Have around 30 clients who use Outlook and the only problem I see with the migration is moving everyones mail / contacts etc. from the Exchange server onto their local machine. If I can do that easily then they shouldn't notice the migration at all. Anyone know of a quick way to do this? i.e. by not exporting to .PST on each machine then importing it again?
I'm far from being an Outlook guru, although I know you can change the location of data files so in theory if I specify the local machine then all should be well - although I'm sceptical - sounds too easy.

[Bob Todd]

call me over cautious but the export & import of mailboxes on a machine by machine basis would probably be how I would go about it. Yes it might take a bit longer but at least you can confirm each stage as you go along for each user. Not that I wouldnt trust MS software to function as specified and without problems you understand

[bob thomas]

Look for exmerge.exe. It will export their mailbox into PST's.

Check out http://www.exchangeadmin.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=24701 and their is a report on techrepublic called brick level backup for exchange with exmerge.

[Steve Bush]

I have migrated small numbers of users by backing up to a PST file and restoring to the users' IMAP directories. This worked well, although one problem is that Outlook sets the received date to the day you move the email.  Mitel has fixed this in SME5.6, so I would suggest you wait for it to be released if you can.

The only other issue you might have is a workable shared address book.
LDAP is cumbersome in Outlook. To work around this we created a PST file with only contacts and copied it down to a directory on each PC via a login script.  My plan is to find a way to automatically have Outlook open the PST file and have it shown as an e-mail address book, so that I can copy updates automatically.  This is done manually now, which is a royal pain.

FYI - I tried Bynari, but it doesn't work well with the wu-imap server in SME.

[Gary]

Thanks for the replies - I tried LDAP on SME5.5 and it stinks as Steve said and the shared address book is something I forgot about!

I'll have a play with Exmerge though haivng read the article I'm not quite sure it will do what I want.

Until then - heres waiting for 5.6 !

[Charlie Brady]

Gary wrote:

> Thanks for the replies - I tried LDAP on SME5.5 and it stinks
> as Steve said

Have you reported any problems to bugs@e-smith.com? Have you posted any suggestions to the Wish List bulletin board.  I don't quite know what "it stinks" means.

Charlie

[Steve Bush]

Here is a bit more details of my experience with Outlook 2002 setup with an SME 5.x IMAP server. Note that the usability issues IMHO are the work of MS trying to push corporate users to Exchange by minimally supporting standards in Outlook, not by bugs or deficits in Mitel's use or creation of open source software.

LDAP - The way this should work is similar to IMAP, in that the user should be able to automatically sync a local copy of their LDAP addresses with a server.
The way it works, is the user must manually search the LDAP store with a field that is common to all LDAP addresses (ie city) to sync the addresses.  Users just want to click on the To button and have addresses magically appear!!!

IMAP - Users can't keep their personal contacts on the server to access from multiple computers.  Bynari gets around this, but it doesn't work well with the wu-imap mail server.  Same goes for personal calendar's.

MISC - Local folders show up seperately from the IMAP folders, each with an inbox.  This can be confusing to users.  Also copies of sent items are kept in the personal PST file's sent folder instead of the sent folder on the IMAP server whose account it is being sent through.  Strangely this works correctly in Outlook Express.

That's about all I can come up with right now.  To me the biggest issue is the corporate address book, now that Mitel/Charlie has updated the IMAP server with SME5.6 to fix the undesirable features included in the previous version of wu-imap....

[James Douglas]

a couple of options for the calendaring and/or group folders without exchange are:

net folders outlook 98/2000 only, gone in xp
team folders and a couple of others will allow for a pst to be in a shared location and allow multiple connections to it simultaneously, almost like public folders.

i found them by looking in download.com searching for outlook

[Adam Lark]

We have just been through this last month with a stack of users.

Of course start with the 1st rule of migration, backup, backup & backup, verify the backups, play with a copy of the backups & leave the original alone.

We spoke with all the users & asked for their help to clean out their exchange mailboxes well in advance of the migration, we set limits of around 50mb on the size of their *.ost's & locked the buggers out if they got over 75mb. That way they know your serious about the clean up.

We posted the size of everyones .ost daily until they cleaned them up. All users were very helpful & wanted to get below the 50mb mark.

Then we logged into each *.ost on exchange exported it to *.pst & placed the *.pst in their user directory on the e-smith server.

It took around 2-3 hours to complete including the client configuration. Exchange can be a bitch so remeber the 1st rule,  backup, backup & backup, verify the backups, play with a copy of the backups & leave the original alone. If your not comfortable pay the money & get someone who is, it is cheep compared with the cost of lost data.

They have been running this way for over a month without any issues, other than they miss there public folders especially

shared contacts list
shared calenders and
task delegation

We are still looking to find the right non pay groupware alternative to run with e-smith.

[Kees Blokland]

did you have a look at http://www.mimerdesk.org  ?