Migration from GW to Exchange 2000

[GWfan]

My company is probably going to be moving to Exchange 2000 within the next year. I am having a tough time coping with the decision. I have supported GroupWise for about 6 years and feel it is a solid product. I guess I fear the unknown with Exchange and am sad that Novell will be losing another user base.
I cannot change the business decision the company will be making...

Any ideas on how I get get over my emotional ties to GroupWise???

 

[Provogeek]

Drugs ..... lots and lots of drugs.



Since you have not been given a choice on the upgrade path, then you might as well capitolize on the project or just be amused with it, depending on your situation.

If you are not responsible for the migration, and your company is bringing in the consultant to do it, enjoy thier frustration. Your company will be billed up the wazzoo and posibly get more than they bargined for. Mostly depends on your current infostructure; are you an NT house or a NetWare house or both?

If your company expects you to do the upgrade, kiss your wife and kids goodbye, cause you won't see them for a month. Hopefully you get paid by the hour also, major overtime here. The actual mail migration from GroupWise to Exchange is not to difficult; it's getting the system setup thats going to be hard. There are a lot of things the training classes don't tell you. WIndows 2K is a good server platform, but it's crap in the hands of an untrained, inexperienced idiot.

Microsoft will tell you that upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2000 will be cheeper than migrating to GroupWise 6, what they don't tell you is that you need to have an Active Directory Forest running on your network BEFORE you can use Exchange 2000. GroupWise is actually cheeper per seat. If you already have an AD implamentation running, then there is no big issue, migration should be simple.

If your company is running NetWare 5.x and above, GroupWise 6 would actually be the most cost efective solution to your company. But more than likely managment thinks Exchange is a better product because the MS marketing machine says it is. What I run into is some CxO that likes the Outlook interface and wants to use that. In some cases I have been able to give them just that, an Outlook front end; don't bother telling them that the backend is GroupWise ... there is a GroupWise plug-in for Outlook.

One product that may help you would be Account Manager from Novell. It will allow you to administer Exchange accounts with in NDS (from console1 or NWAdmin). I have light experience with this product so I am not sure on all of the requirments and features. Brent Schmidt CNE, Network +
Senior Network Engineer

Why do user go into a panic when a NetWare server goes down, but accept it as normal when a Windows server goes down?

 

[GWfan]

Thank you very much for your insight. I agree it is going to be an enlightening technical experience.
We are currently running a Netware 4.x and 5.x backend for file/print. Many of our applications are running on NT/2000. I recently finished upgrading about 35 domains to GW 6. My portion of the future MS Exchange/Outlook project will be to be part of the migration/implementation Team(3 currently support about 3,000 GroupWise users). We will probably be working along side consultants for this huge project. To the best of my knowledge we will be moving to AD and then once AD is in place we will begin the move to Exchange...

I think I am going to need THERAPY to get over this!

 

[ptrigueira]

I'm going to experience the same migration, from GW55 to Exchange 2000. Can you tell me how to preserve all the GW messages and migrate them to the Outlook??

 

[Provogeek]

I'll give you a hint; :::: PST files :::: Brent Schmidt CNE, Network +
Senior Network Engineer
KIS Computer Center -

http://www.kiscc.com

East Bay, California; USA

 

[ashleym]

Hey Brent, we just did said migration from GW 5.5 to Exchange 2000, it went ok, except there seems to be no way to migrate contacts from gw accounts to exchange. How have you coped with this issue in your experience? Do the contacts come over if you export to pst files?

AM

 

[Provogeek]

Yea, if you use the GroupWise plug in for your version of Outlook. It can be done.





Brent Schmidt CNE, Network +
Senior Network Engineer
KIS Computer Center -

http://www.kiscc.com

East Bay, California; USA

 

[ashleym]

Where do you get the plugin for Outlook 2002 Brent? MS or Novell? Do you know the link?

Thanks

AM

 

[Provogeek]

It a Novell product, you can find it at

http://support.novell.com

in the downloads section Brent Schmidt CNE, Network +
Senior Network Engineer
KIS Computer Center -

http://www.kiscc.com

East Bay, California; USA

 

[TheStressFactor]

Hey guys..some good info here..Im being forced to go through the same thing here...pain in the arse...may I ask what is the name of the file for this plug-in? I cannot seem to find it on Novells site anywhere...any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[FarOut]

The GW plugin for Outlook that Brent makes refernce to is gw55ol2.exe. It can be found by going to the URL listed below. I might add that there is a Post update patch, gwpluga1.exe; to the GW Outlook plugin. I have included that URL also.

Full Outlook Plugin Package:

http://support.novell.com/filefinder/1557/index.html

Post Update to Outlook Plugin:

http://support.novell.com/servlet/tidfinder/2957502

FarOut
V-Peace-V

 

[ehartle]

Hey all,
I've got an upcoming migration from GW5.5 to Ex2K in a couple of weeks. Does the Exchange migration wizard not get the gw contacts correctly? (I'm an exchange guy with no gw experience). If I have to use the gw plugin for outlook and export to pst files, is there a way to script it? I've got roughly 700 mailboxes on one gw55 server to migrate and one by one would be murderous.

Thanks in advance,
earle hartle

 

[waznu]

We are getting ready to do this migration, and have been having a very hard time with it. can someone email me some usefull hints? we are going from gw 5.5 to exchange/outlook xp
so far we tried the connector tool with no luck and we tried migrating via pop 3 which seems to bog down our server. thanks

 

[GWfan]

We have been told that there isn't a GroupWise6 Migration tool/Connector.

Is this true?

 

[ehartle]

Well, my big migration is over. whew! It was a lot of work plain and simple. I used Exchange Migration Wizard to bring over the mail which worked almost flawlessly. There were a couple of users who ended up with an empty Filing Cabinet so we attached Outlook 2000 to the GW5.5 server and exported their mail to pst files individually and that worked fine. The only real pain in the neck was the Personal Address Books didn't export and without purchasing a 3rd party tool I don't think you can export them in bulk. What we did was attach Outlook to the GW server one by one and export their Address Books to a pst and then import those one by one into Outlook. Took a while but now it's all done and everything works great. I'm going to bed now....

Earle

 

[Hayley78]

Hello Everyone!

We have also recently Migrated from GroupWise 5.x to Exchange 2000. It's been a very slow and frustrating process. And I would just like to add I STILL prefere GroupWise, So if anyone has any hidden secret's about outlook that will change my mind, will all be appreciated.

But My bigger Problem is, I have a couple of users on win 95 that every time they open Excel 2k, it opens the visual Basic editor, looking for the gwxl97.xla start up code??? I have tried so many combinations uninstalling and reinstalling office and novell, with no joy. When I did a search for this file I found in the location of c:\Novell.
Please can somebody Help me!!!!!!!!!!

Kind regards

Hayley Taylor
IT Communications and support

 

[lupinus]

Are there any tools top migrate Groupwise 5.2 to Exchange 2000?

All the tools I've seen are for GW 5.5

Thanks

 

[ehartle]

If you've got a lot of users to migrate then you should look into one of the 3rd party migration apps like at

http://www.openone.com.

They will handle any version of GroupWise (although I'm not 100% about GW6) and they will get the address books, too. For my migration, that would have been a little expensive - I only had to migrate mail for 27 users so I used Exch Migration Wiz and did the address books manually using Outlook. Also, I believe that the Exchange Migration Wizard included in Exchange will do Groupwise 5.x (not just 5.5). However, it will NOT get any address books.

Earle

 

[34567990]

Hi,
Another IT person migrating from GW5.5 to Exchange 2000. I am an exchange 5.5 and 2000 guru and someone asked why so many people are migrating to exchange and I answer because it is much more of a solid product. I can safely say that after working with both.....I am still planning my migration but for the Novell address book use a tool called GW Migrator.
Good luck to all.
Steve

 

[GWfan]

Is there a migration tool for GroupWise 6 to Exchange 2000???