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???

 

[lgarner]

I did this migration from GW5.5 to Exchange 2000 about 1-1/2 years ago. The Exchange connector worked fine in conjunction with the GW API gateway as long as Exchange was the primary internet mail server. If internet mai hit the GW server first, the sender address got munged when it went to Exchange.

After this time, I still think that GW is the better system for performance, reliability and features. Exchange is not without its benefits, though, such as the ability to have multiple outgoing internet pops, and the address book is much more robust in Outlook.

The bigger issue is that we are subject to SEC regulations, including Rule 17 relating to records retention. As far as I know, there is no way within GW to archive all internal email, which can be done with most other mail systems. Therefore, we cannot legally use GW in our industry. I really think that Novell should look at this.

 

[noveon]

Our company is also going through a GroupWise 5.2/5.5 to Exchange 2000 migration. I have looked at a number of migration tools, but none of them will convert my GroupWise archives directly to Exchange archives. All of the tools need you to move the GW archive back into the live system before migrating.

Has anyone ever found one, and did it work for you?

Thanks in advance,
Brent

 

[snootalope]

We're on the same path as well.. GW 5.5 to Exchange 2k.. I'm seeing that the current status of email in GW is entirely tranferable to Exchange, but what I'm worried about is the status of my users calendar's.. They use them for reminder notes, tasks, and appointments.. is it possible to bring all of those over to Outlook's box?

Snooter "tis better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool..
then open your mouth and remove all doubt" Mark Twain

"I should of been a doctor.." Me

 

[Ace007]

I guess I have been lucky enough or unluckily enough to go through quite a few of these GroupWise to Exchange migrations. As a Consultant I have run in to quite a few companies who for various reasons have decided to migrate over to a Exchange platform.

The key to this migration is testing everything. Everytime I do one of these migrations I find different challenges.

Using the Microsoft gateway and migration works well for co-existance and migration of server side data.

The address books and archives are a whole different matter. On this project we're using a product made by Wingra Technologies (

http://www.wingra.com)

which can migrate the address books and Archives so it's a nice complement to the process and makes the users much happier.

Robert

 

[GWfan]

Is Wingra Compatable with GroupWise 6?

Did you ever have a migration where the company did not want to migrate any data and kept the GroupWise client to view history in a remote mailbox?
Benefits:
* Ability to start with a clean system
* Institute new email policies i.e. Mailbox Limits, Shorter Archive or No Archive Policy etc.
* User not tempted to reply to an email from the old system
* No overhead/troubleshooting of huge .pst's created from archives and existing mailboxes.
* GW 6 allows the user with a remote mailbox to access archive mail. No need to migrate large archives.
* GW Server can be shutdown after the user have downloaded all of their mail.

Negatives:
Outlook and GW Client on the same machine. GW6 and Outlook 2002 seem to be ok on the same machine

 

[Ace007]

I've had several customers think about doing this but managment has always shot that idea down. It also becomes too complicated handling the multiple profiles of GroupWise and Exchange on the same machine.

I am not sure if Wingra's product works with GW 6. We're using it against 5.5.

 

[tsimpson]

Ok, There are several things I want to help clarify here.

The Outlook plugin is not completely supported by Novell, sometimes it works ok, sometimes it doesn't. Outlook XP (2002) forget it, it installs but OutlookXP will not run properly. I have recently installed Outlook XP with the plugin and cannot get it working, it works better with Outlook 2000 and earlier. Plus MS has recently stopped shipping Outlook 2002 with the PocketPC devices, no reason why, but they are now shipping Outlook 2000 with all PocketPC devices, this started in late November 2002.

I have even installed the Groupwise 6.5 Beta client and server and cannot get the 6.5 plugin to work with Outlook XP.

My recommended migration path(Novell does make a gateway to go from Exchange to Groupwise and updates it constantly) is to open the old mail client and the new mail client, both running at the same time, and use the drag and drop functionality of Windows to move the information. This seems to be the only way I have ever gotten 99%+ of the information to migrate over, in either direction. Again the Exchange/Groupwise connectors work somtimes but most times do not. Plus in this fashion you can roll out the migration in a controlled fashion and not have a lot of user training issues and problems all at once.

Again the best way that appears to work most of the time without GPF's or Abends or any other potential problems is to drag and drop with both clients open on the workstation. Yes it is time consuming, but works without all the problems of the conversion tools/gateways.


You will also run into a higher cost per seat not only due to MS software, but now you will have to keep up with more patches. Also make sure you have a good Antivirus package installed and keep it up to date, Outlook is the source for most viri to propagate to begin with.

Something you might want to look at, and I have been setting it up in front of Groupwise and Exchange servers to filter inbound and outbound emails, is a free script that runs on Linux, and interfaces with several different email servers under Linux and several of the Antivirus packages for Linux, is called MailScanner. I use it as a mail filter for SPAM and viruses. This has helped with my own servers as well as ones for my clients.
It's free and doesn't run on Windows, which in my opinion are two pluses. This has been a help for the people that insist on using a Microsoft mail client and/or server more than anything.

Good luck and I hate to here of another regression.


Tom Simpson
tsimpson@tagky.com
CNE, CNA, CCNA, CNS, RSA/CSE, Comptia A+, PMG Certified NetAnalyst

"The significant problems we are facing today, cannot be solved by the same level
of thinking that created them".
----Albert Einstein

 

[Sinfull]

I am currently looking into migrating about 60 GroupWise 5.5 users over to Exchange 2000. I have a test environment setup and when I migrate a groupwise user over to the Exchange side I find that the Tasks are not migrated. Everything else seems to migrate fine (messages, appointments, notes are all migrated). The migration wizard does not report any errors. Any help that you can provide would be most appreciated.

Lab Setup

NetWare 5.0 SP6a
GroupWise 5.5 SP5

W2K Pro SP3
Novell Client 4.83 & SP1
GroupWise 5.5 Client SP5
Exchange Admin Tools & E2K SP3

W2K AD Server SP3
W2K E2K Server (W2K SP3 & E2K SP3)

 

[khWingra]

The Wingra tools do support GroupWise 6.
We have two tools for migration

GroupWise Migrator for Outlook
Migrates the archives and address book

GroupWise Migrator for Exchange
Migrates the server mail, archives and address book.
This tool also includes a 'mail forwarding' manager
that can set the forwarding rules for your users during
the migration.

A major benefit to our tools is that the address book
and calendar items are migrated and the user doesn't
have to import anything like they do with the MS tools.

 

[GWfan]

Thank you khWingra for confirming that Wingra is supports Groupwise 6.

Can you give any insight as to what hurdles we might face that are not so obvious?

 

[khWingra]

Just a few of the issues:

1. Training users on Outlook - politics of moving!

2. Coexistence - particularly calendar -- MS Connector
requires GroupWise API GW which is kind of quirky.

3. Directory synchronization (which is handled by
MS Connector) (see #2)

4. Scheduling your migrations -- depending on your user
population and distribution, this is definitely the
hardest thing to do. The key is migrate users that
send mail to each other the most and schedule appointments with each other all together.

5. Another thing is if you use proxies (like a secretary
that takes care of their boss's calendar and e-mail)
I don't know of many tools that translate these for
you.

 

[ShineOn]

Geez, a lot of you are getting stuck with Exchange. I disagree with a couple of posts in this thread that hint (or declare) that somehow Exchange is more solid than GroupWise. That gave me a chuckle.

As most of the posts seem to indicate, the migration is a pain in the arse unless you've already established (and synchronized) your AD forest with NDS. Even then, it can be problematic, and will surely end up costing the company that does this downgrade (that's for the guy that called the migration an "upgrade.&quot a chunk of cash, up front and ongoing. I managed a 100-user, two site GroupWise installation -alone- for about 8 years (moved from 5.2 to 5.5 to 6) and had very few issues - most of which were environmental as opposed to bugs. This was while managing the rest of the network, plus all mainframe operations, also by myself. Previously, I had a 25-user cc:Mail setup that needed five times the maintenance & support as GroupWise did for four times the users. Needless to say, I was quite happy with it, thank you very much, as were all the end users. When they were forced to switch to Notes, they griped about how much easier GroupWise is to use. The only people I've heard asking for Outlook is those that use it at home, or came from an MS-only environment, and after they find how intuitive the GroupWise client is, they stop whining for Outlook.

But stability, usability, utility, ease-of-management, low-maintenance and all the other "intangibles" that could be quantified in hard-dollars if anyone took the time, don't balance against the "will of the CxO" in this day and age. No wonder companies are losing money left and right. The bottom line only counts when you have to talk your CxO into adding to staff, or not cutting staff, because people aren't a resource any more, just another expense to cut. Buying lots of hardware and software give them that feeling of getting something for their money, because they can touch it.

I guess it's a good sign for the world economy that so many companies have so much time and money to burn. "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"

It would make more sense to switch to an open-source email/calendar/schedule package - less hardware & software investment, with probably just as many techs needed to support it as the MS solution...

 

[GWfan]

Has anybody out there been on a team that has migrated 5,000 users gloabally from a Novell/GroupWise environment to AD/Exchange environment? Would you like to share that experience with a team about to embark on the same adventure?

Thanks!

 

[Ace007]

I have done several migrations from 2000-5000 GroupWise users over to both Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000. I'm in the middle of one right now were we are migrating 1600 users from GW to the Exchange 2000 architecture of a company who bought them out.

The biggest piece of advise is to get some good tools to help you out and plan everything. We are using Wingra to migrate the address books and Archives which has worked fairly well and I'm using a utility written by a MCS guy called GWBulk which has been very helpful in setting up GW proxy rights for the migration account, resetting GW passwords, and setting up forward rules in GroupWise fo co-existance on that side.

I have never had a customer regret the migration from Groupwise over to Exchange. With the exception of a few users who don't like any change in their lives the users are always happy with the new solution. The migration process is not painless by any means but it can be managed to a reasonable level.

Robert

 

[khWingra]

Just an FYI -

Our GroupWise Migrator for Exchange which will migrate
the server mail and all the items mentioned in Robert's
(Ace007) post also includes a tool that can do the
password reset and forwarding.

The tool is not included in the standard download, but
you can request it from our customer support - they
will give you an FTP site to download the tools from.

The difference between our tool and GWBulk is that our
tool is officially supported and uses the same files that
you would use to migrate the users with our 'admin batch'
tool.

Kevin

kevin.horvatin@wingra.com

http://www.wingra.com/solutions/groupwisemigrator.html

 

[wantagofast]

Can someone please help me!!!!!!!!!!

I am testing my migration from Groupwise to Exchange 2000. I am using the Exchange 2000 migration wizard and I can get all the through except I am now stuck on the part where the wizard asks for the Groupwise Domain.

I have entered the GW Domain correctly and a correct username and password. But I get the following error: An error occurred logging on to the Groupwise 5 Admin API.

Has anyone seen this error and been able to solve it? I checked on the MS KB. MS only has one article on it. Article 198013. I've gone through article line by line and still can't figure out what is wrong.

Please help!

 

[Ace007]

What version of the GroupWise client are you using. I've found that GW 5.2 works most reliabily with the MS migration tool since that is the version MS wrote it for. Other versions will work but have issues. There are no data mgiration issues using a 5.2 client against a later version of the GW store.

Robert

 

[GWfan]

To Ace007;

Any chance you would speak to me outside of the forum? You can email me at kovacs96@optonline.net

Thanks

 

[wantagofast]

I'm running GW client 5.5.4. In GW, I go into HELP-ABOUT GW to find the client version...right?

 

[chrismay]

You are correct, the version is found in help|about. I haven't worked with the API in a while, but it basically works by placing specifically coded text files in specific directories. As far as netware is concerned, there is no real "logging" into the API gateway, it is just a directory structure. As long as the text formatting is correct, the API just reads/writes test files into these directories. Make sure the netware account you are using has rights to the correct directories, (usually \domain\wpgate\api\....) for testing just give supervisor rights to the domain directory. To test the account, stop the api gatway, then logon to netware from the exchange server using the same account. From the exchange/bridghead server try and copy any text file into the api_in/out and att_in/out directories. Make sure you delete the test text files before you start the API again. If you can copy the files, you have the correct rights. I am guessing that the netware account you are listing in the migration setup has the context screwed up.
To be on the safe side, watch the API gateway when you run the wizard, you will see if it tries to process anything.
On a side note, I starting to do a very similar process myself, and was installing client32 on my win2k server. The install botched, how do I un-install client 32? It won't let me open network connections in regular boot mode, and client32 doesn't show up as installed when booted in safe/network mode. Does anyone know of any other way of uninstalling client32 with out using network connections|properties - novell client?

Thanks

Chris