Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

GroupWise 5.5 and Outlook 2003

Status
Not open for further replies.

clined

MIS
Oct 22, 2003
6
US
My company will be migrating from GW 5.5 to Exchange 2003 within the next few months. We feel the migration will be smoother if we can get the Outlook 2003 client on the workstations, get the end-users used to the new client, etc. I have not been able to get Outlook 2003 to work with GW 5.5 or GW 6. I tried configuring it using the "other server" option. Outlook will not launch and then I have problems getting GW to open. A couple of months ago, I was able to get Outlook 2000 to work, and I had my address books. My boss does not want to roll out Outlook 2000 and then after the Exchange migration, upgrade the clients. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how I could make Outlook 2003 work. I appreciate your help very much!
 
Did you ever figure out a good way to do this? We are trying to do the exact same thing right now.

Thanks!

Christie
cnader@ricedelman.com
 
I am in the same boat... I was going to just download the mail via pop. I do not know how to get the archived mail out though... I also am going to export the address book to a .csv using some free program out there on the internet... (that is easy to find)

Advice... Anyone?

Some people suggest using the Microsoft Migration utility to do the mail swap... I really don't want to because I want to create the accounts in 2003 myself...

If all that it would do would be create the pst's that would be great but I need to know that it copies the mail in the archive folder... IS THAT MAIL stored locally?

 
We were not able to get the Outlook 2003 client to work with the GroupWise client at the same time.

As far as how the migration worked, we used the Microsoft Migration Wizard and it worked very well. Archived e-mail has to be unarchived before it will be migrated. E-mail in the Inbox, Cabinet, and Sent Items folder will be migrated. E-mail is stored in a folder outside of the cabinet will not migrate; you'll have to move that e-mail to the cabinet.

You mail-enable the AD accounts first and then migrate the e-mail from the GroupWise accounts to the respective Exchange accounts.

We migrated address books by selecting the items in the book (alt+A), File, Export, Selected Items, and name it (the .nab extension is fine). Then import the address book(s) after Outlook 2003 is installed.
 
Hello,
Good advice! I have a few questions remaining though...
1. Even using the wizard you can create the AD accounts and then mail enable them and then import the mail as .pst's or is this done magically thru the migration tool?

I want to do exactly this, I want to create the AD accounts on my own and then just get a bunch of pst's and import the mail...

2. Do I have to map the relationship between where the mail is stored in Groupwise to where it will go into Outlook... I mean inbox is easy but cabinet is saved items right, and sent items is sent items... anything else?

3. So you are saying that .nab files are supported in Outlook 2003... if I have 2002 will it still import? Do I need to change the ext to .csv or something to get it to work or how does this work exactly...

4. How did you do all this exactly?
 
1. Our AD accounts were created separately. We migrated from NT to Windows 2003 before our e-mail migration. During the e-mail migration using the Microsoft Migration Wizard, it associates existing AD accounts with the GW accounts you are migrating based on the name of the account. We had a couple of AD accounts whose names didn't match a GroupWise account, so the Migration Wizard would "ask" to create a new account. You have the opportunity to match up the correct accounts if the AD account isn't associated with the GroupWise account you are trying to migrate.
2. You do not have to create the folder structure in Outlook to match that of GW before migrating the e-mail. The cabinet folders are created during the migration and sent items are migrated to the sent items folder in Outlook by the "magic" of the Migration Wizard. :)
3. We did not rename the address book that we exported from GW before importing it to Outlook. When you have Outlook loaded, you can import the address book(s) to the Contacts folder, or if you have more than 1 book to import, you could create additional contact folders if you want to keep the books separate.

NOTE: Sharing address books is not the same in Outlook as it was in GW. In GW you could share any address book you created. In Outlook, you can only share the main Contacts folder. There are other ways to share, such as using Public Folders, but for a simple share from one end-user to another, they can only share the main Contacts folder. So in that case, instead of making additional contacts folder, I put all the shared GW books in the end-user's main Contacts folder, categorized them for sorting purposes, and shared that Contacts folder. Also note that while you can export personal address books, any groups the end-user made in their personal address book(s) will not be exported--or we couldn't make it happen. The individual addresses come over fine, but the end-user had to re-create their groups.
 
Hello,
Thanks for the quick reply:
Regarding #1, so it is possible for me to have the accounts precreated and import the mail thru the wizard, or just have the wizard dump the mail to pst files? Is my assumption correct?

2. Thanks... understood
3. Does this import of the address book from within Outlook of .nab files need to be on version 2003, or does it work with 2002 (outlook xp)?

I understand that I cannot share address books... thanks... that shouldn't be a issue for me.



Can you tell me if this plan sounds good?
1. Setup NT domain on 2003
2. Install all service packs
3. Install Exchange 2003 with service packs
4. Create all user accounts
5. Run migration wizard and have mail dumped to .pst files
6. Import mail into each account
7. Poof I am done?

Concern: I know the mailbox doesn't get created all the way until it's sent a piece of mail or opened from outlook... would the wizard create the mailbox all the way if I used the wizard to dump the mail into it? I'm curious...
 
The AD accounts created when you migrate from NT to AD 2003 are all you need. You will mail-enable the accounts (I forgot to mention that previously--sorry for the confusion), when you are ready to migrate. No need to dump the mail to a .pst. Use the already-created AD accounts, mail-enable them, use the migration wizard. That's it. When you use the migration wizard, you pick the GW accounts you want to migrate (you don't have to migrate them all at one time. In fact, we migrated in groups), and as you go through the migration screens, the migration wizard will show you a screen of the accounts you chose and the existing AD accounts it will match them up to. This is where you will see if it cannot find a match (say an AD account name is different from the GW account name--this happened to us a couple of time). You could then select to let it create a new account--we did not have any situation where we wanted it to create a new account, so I know that you can correct the problem at this point. You do not need the migration wizard to create new accounts. It will migrate e-mail from your existing GW accounts to the AD accounts--and you can migrate e-mail from several GW accounts to 1 AD account. NOTE: we did migrate 1 account via a .pst dump just to see if that process was smoother/easier than the migration wizard and it was NOT! The migration wizard was GREAT!

I forgot to mention in my previous post that calendar entries and tasks migrate. Those items come over in an e-mail that is generated to the new Exchange account with instructions on how to import the calendar items (tasks are included with the calendar). The import instructions are very easy to follow. During our migration of approximately 650 end-users to-date, I had maybe 3 accounts whose calendar info did not come over during the migration. The great thing about this was that I could remigrate those accounts without migrating the e-mail--choosing to only migrate the calendar info and that worked very well. Also note that when the migration wizard has completed, it may show a couple of errors. Don't remigrate based on those errors. I don't know how to interpret the errors, but I do know that if you remigrate, the account(s) will get two copies of all items migrated over.

I did not test the import of a GW address book to Outlook 2002. Let me clarify that you can share the main Contacts address books in Outlook 2003; but that we could not find a simple way for end-users to share a user-created Contact folder.

Your plan:

1. Setup NT domain on 2003
2. Install all service packs AND ANTIVIRUS PROTECTION
3. Install Exchange 2003 with service packs
4. Create all user accounts--IF YOU'RE MIGRATING, YOU WON'T NEED TO CREATE THE USER ACCOUTNS. MAIL-ENABLE THE USER ACCOUNTS.
5. Run migration wizard and have mail dumped to .pst files. NO NEED TO DUMP TO .PST--MIGRATION WIZARD DOES IT ALL.
6. Import mail into each account. SEE ABOVE
7. Poof I am done. YOU'RE DONE, OTHER THAN IMPORTING ADDRESS BOOKS!
 
Ok, this is sounding good...
New Questions:

1. What do you recommend I do for the address books, do them individually to a 2003 client and just log in as each user and get the data in that way?

2. Does the export routine just copy data out of Groupwise? So, I don't lose anything if I just give this a whirl on the Exchange side right? It's just a copy right?

3. I do not have a NT domain at all right now, just novell so I will be installing 2003 from scratch and then creating users and then mailenabling them.

4. Any tips on how to automate profile generation for people that need to log onto more than one machine?

5. Do the service packs improve the migration wizard in 2003 at all or can I just run right after the basic install?

Thanks so much.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top