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???

 

[wantagofast]

Ok...folks...hold on to your trousers...I figured out my problem. I installed GW Client 5.5 with SP 5. That is the key!

I hope that helps everyone. I had been pulling my hair out for 3 days working on this issue!

I going out for a drink!

 

[trmbr]

Can anyone please advise me how to redirect messages received by a Groupwise user, who has been migrated to Exchange 2000, but still has a mailbox in Groupwise, to their migrated account? I have tried both the Forward and Delegate rules in the Groupwise 5.5.2 client, however the both rules change the orginal sender's detail replacing it with the recipients details. This prevents the user from replying to the orginal sender.
Thanks

 

[trmbr]

I have resolved the problem - contrary to what Novell claimed - it wont work. So much for having to pay US$300 for a support call!!!!.
The problem occurred when receiving both external (internet) and internal (groupwise) messages for a Groupwise recipient, migrated to Exchange 2000, which had to be forwarded to the migrated account.
I managed to get the forwarding to work, using the 'DELEGATE" rule on the mailbox, which forwarded the recieved messages to the migrated account, after hiding the groupwise account (set Visibility to NONE). However groupwise users had to delete entries in their Frequent Contacts list, removing the reference to the existing hidden groupwise account and select the Exchange migrated account from the updated Novell Address List.
We werent able to delete the existing Groupwise account as it had the internet email address, against which incoming external messages had to be validated.
Also, Groupwise distribution lists had to be updated with the migrated exchange email address.
It now all works, but no thanks to Novell
trmbr

 

[liamc]

Ace007, you said that you've worked with GWBulk. We're trying to get it to work, but consistently get errors that it is unable to login to the user's mailbox. We are using GW Client 5.5 with the enhancement pack. Can you suggest some ideas or tips to clarify this? We can't get MCS support on GWBulk.

Thanks!!

Liam Colvin

 

[rackley808]

I am unable to share calendars through the Groupwise connector. I have GW 5.5 servers that connect with a Exchange 2000 VIA GW connector \ Calendar Connector. We are at the early stage of our long migration. Has anyone been able to accomplish this task? I see the exchange users listed on the Proxy access box at a Groupwise client computer but when I add the users to give them rights to the users calendar, they just disappear after selecting apply..... Is this just a limitation of the connector or is something misconfigured????? Any ideas???????

I need closure : )

Thanks,

Rackley

 

[ITsmyfault]

just 2 more cents, fwiw

we've been on GW since 5.2, went to 5.5 then 6 and now 6.5 (this past Friday) We've had secure and reliable mail abot as long as there has been important email to get. I have been able to manage our users easily, i rarely (if ever) have database issues and we've had no unscheduled email downtime that I can recall, at least for the 6 years I've been in the driver's seat. On the flip side, my nephew works at a Exch2k shop. He's been through hell the past 2 years incl completely losing the message store once (bc it was not being backed up properly somehow thanks to some funky exchange-loving virus. Kudos to Norton & Arcserve for missing that.) one of the firms that sublets space from us just recently came asking if we would host their email so they could get *off* exchange 2000 and *on* to Groupwise. they love it. They were tired of all the odd issues and problems.. calendars dissapearing, etc. I think the GW address book needs work (although it's gotten a *lot* better by 6.5 from 5.x) until it can slap outlook around as interface, but in every other way I think Groupwise is the better platform. Less mgt overhead, more users per server (less sunk cost), more reliable, an excellent backup agent (Groupwise TSA introduced in GW6) allows for backups of all email prior to allowing them to be deleted and the clients can handle email backup for their own mailboxes via a common restore area. How cool is that? As for the fellow that said GW may not be "legal" in his industry, I'm unsure of what industry that is?? Here on Wall St with the SEC breathing down our necks, full backups for 7 years are enough. I've been through 4 SEC audits so far, so I'm pretty solid on those facts I think!! One nice feature of 6.5 (speaking of compliance) is the ability to search the whole message store for words/phrases without having to go into each mailbox one at a time.
Please reconsider if you have a voice in the "upgrade" process. Look at the actual costs involved. Webaccess? Groupwise - incl. Exchange needs another CAL. Handheld access? Groupwise = incl. Exch? Another CAL. By the time you add up all the features bundled with GW, it is cheaper per seat and does more with less. Less servers, less headache, less admins, less downtime = you look like a hero. Any suit should be able to grok that.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 

[GWfan]

Thank you for your insight. The reason for us moving to Exchange (believe me I have kicked and screamed all I can) is because of the Exchange out of the box &quot;CLAIM&quot; to interop with everything and anything and that application developers are all making their apps compatible with Exchange and Notes and not GroupWise >:-<

 

[matt426]

Hey There,

My company is also migrating from GW 6. to Exchange, we're still in the testing area, but I was wondering if there is any way to migrate or export the GW archives? I've tried converting them to .pst, .csv, even dragging and dropping them into the *new* archive folder in Outlook. The mail and calender all seem to transfer fine, but the GW archives on some of these users are HUGE! Importing them back in to the GW mail folder has already caused a few crashes on the loacal machines. Any ideas??

 

[sanwanman]

There has been some discussion regarding the Groupwise Bulk or GWbulk utility, I was wondering if anyone has this and / or can tell me where to download it??????

Thanks for your help.....

SanWanMan

 

[Raffle]

I'm posting just as a follow up to a problem that I experienced that was identical to wantago's where I would receive the error, &quot;An error occurred logging on to the Groupwise 5 Admin API,&quot; when I was going through the Exchange wizard. I had installed the GW client application on the migration server but I then installed the enhancement pack for GW since you need that to install the SP 5 that wantago mentioned. However, I tested the migration again before installing the SP 5, and I was able to successfully migrate over to Exchange 2000. Hope this helps anyone else who may be going through the same process in the near future.

 

[ereid99]

We are currently going through the migration from GW5.5 to Exchange 2000. Things have gone pretty well, but we have one problem I'm not sure where to look for the answer. I hope someone here can help.

Here's our problem.

We have two users. User1 is on GW5.5 and User2 has already been migrated to Exchange. User1 sends User2 an e-mail everything is fine. User2 is able to reply and User1 receives the reply. Now we migrate User1 to Exchange. If we look at User2's inbox and try to reply to a message User1 had sent prior to migration we get a System Attendant message saying user can't be found. When we click reply then look at the properties of the name that is put in the To: field (properties of User1) the e-mail address tab doesn't contain any information.

What makes this really strange is not every message from User1 is like this. Some messages would contain the correct information for User1's Exchange account, some would contain the GW account information, but then there are these few messages that don't contain e-mail information for either system.

Any suggestions? This may not make a lot of sense sorry for that it is just a very confusing situation.

Thanks for the help.
Eric

 

[Provogeek]

Please start a new thread; cross post a new thread in the Exchange forum also. Not sure about everyone else, butI only know how to migrate from Excahnge to GroupWise, not the other way around.

 

[skeston]

I am a consultant who does migrations to Exchange 2000 as well. The first thing that has to be done is setting up active directory. If you do not know how to do it, it is not wise to try. The deafult installation is NOT meant for anything more than a single site, simple network.

I have used Wingra for migrating from groupwise. It did a great job. However, it did not seem to have a function to migrate the distribution lists (not personal ones but the system ones available to all users)

Exchange 2000 is a great system and Exchange 2003 is going to be better. The web access in Exchange 2003 is identical to the Outlook client in Outlook 2003. Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 has the ability to do secured rpc. This means you can use the Outlook 2003 client over the Internet without opening RPC traffic on your firewall.

 

[intCraigH]

We are trying to migrate a customer from Groupwise 5.5 to Exchange 2003 and are having some difficulty. We are using Groupwise CLient v5.5.4 and Microsoft Consulting Services says that it will GPF the migration wizard that comes with Exchange 2000/2003 - and it does. We need to get our hands on a copy of 5.2.x which Microsoft says will work. Does anyone know where I can get this version since Novell does not support it any longer? TIA

 

[KathiSmith9]

We are in the process of migrating from Novell Groupwise 5.5 to Echange outlook and the people that entered tasks into their calandars the tasks aren't migrating over to the new Outlook. Everything else is coming over (emails and appointments) except tasks. I though it might have something to do with if they were completed or not, but thats not the case eaither. If anyone can tell me when they think the tasks aren't coming over I would greatly appreciate it. I am using the migration wizard one step process.

if anyone know I would really appreciate it...

 

[intCraigH]

We just completed a 65 user migration from GroupWise 5.5 to Exchange 2003 using the Exchange Server Migration Wizard. We performed a 1 step migration using 6 migration PCs with the Groupwise 5.2.4 client. The Groupwise 5.5 client will crash the migration wizard. Each of the 6 migration PCs were running VMWare with 2 virtual machines. The total migration lasted approximately 3 hours but that was only for messages and calendar data.

The contacts were converted using the Groupwise plug-in for Outlook and were converted manually. Each Groupwise address book was migrated to it's own Outlook contact folder. This was a pain in the @$$ to say the least.

The day after the migration someone noticed that the email addresses of the converted contacts were stored incorrectly in Outlook. So the day after the conversion we needed to run an Outlook Export/Import on all the already migrated contacts. This seemed to fix the problem but there might have been another way to do this.

When we opened Outlook for the first time for each migrated user, we received a strange Schedule+ dialog box that talked about server side information being available, etc. One option was to import this information or delete it. If you import this information the end result will be duplicate calendar items which was another issue that we had.

The other issue we encountered was the fact that staff members stored other staff members in the address books. These converted entries still pointed to a Groupwise address. The customer wanted these entries to be corrected rather than deleting them and using the GAL for staff members. This was done using an Outlook script.

I don't believe tasks were converted during this migration either. The Groupwise tasks might have been converted into Outlook calendar items but I'm not sure about this.

Even with all these pitfalls, we migrated this customer to Windows 2003/Exchange 2003 from Novell 5.x/Groupwise 5.5 in approximately 2.5 days using 4 people. This included setting up Active Directory, Symantec AV for Exchange, Veritas BackupExec, installing Outlook XP on 65 machines (most were Win 98), removing the Novell and GroupWise client, logon scripts, etc...

Hope this information if helpful.

Craig Huck
Integrita Systems

http://www.integritasystems.com

 

[tadduci]

intCraigH:
Thanks for your informative post:
I have the following scanario:

1 Groupwise 6 mail server
going to brand new win2003 ad domain with exchange 2003...

I was thinking of the following plan for migration:
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 and mail enable them
5. Run migration wizard and have mail dumped into users mailboxes.
6. Address books?

Any tips for this plan? How should I do the address books? Should I run a workstation with Outlook 2000, Groupwise 6 client and the outlook plug in and copy the contacts from the server to a local pst for each user? I only have 30 users... Is that possible? Can I copy contacts from the groupwise and add a .pst file to the profile and just drag the contacts down like that?

Thanks