How to perform Notes to Exchange 2010 migration?

Lotus Notes is collaborative client-server software by IBM. Exchange server was developed by Microsoft. Exchange possesses the calendaring, E-mailing and contact management capabilities.

Notes to Exchange migration:

We can see many organizations which migrate from Notes to Exchange. Though there are not much strong reasons, only perceptions that may vary according to users and their requirements. Lotus notes is an application/development platform with simple mail capabilities, it’s not a messaging platform. Exchange provides better E mail handling capabilities. Additional features in Exchange make users switch from Notes to Exchange. Personal preferences or business needs are the most common factors that provoke email- migration. Notes possess some features that aren’t present in Exchange\Outlook such as:  Notes possesses the capability of E mail presentation with active content, Outlook doesn’t possess such functionality. Multiple applications can be hosted in Domino, which cannot be done in Exchange.

Both the Email applications (i.e. Notes & Exchange) have their own feature set. We cannot conclude which one is better or dominant than other one. It’s totally based on the user’s choice, business needs; personal preferences cost factors, organization structure, and change in technology or a personal preferences that makes one email application preferable than other. We cannot decline the existence of both of them. Both have their own feature set and market demand.

In year 2007, Microsoft launched the ‘Microsoft Transporter Suite’ for performing Lotus Domino to Exchange migration. This tool performs migration of all the mailbox data from Lotus Domino servers or generic POP/IMAP servers to Exchange and Active Directory.

About Microsoft Transporter Suite:

Microsoft Transporter Suite supports migration for:

•    Lotus Domino to Exchange migration

•    Lotus Domino Servers to Exchange

For Lotus Domino to Exchange migration, It has Migration tools for migration from both Lotus Domino Servers to Exchange, and generic IMAP/POP sources to Exchange.

For Lotus Domino Servers to Exchange, it possesses tools for Directory and Free/Busy interoperability between Domino and Exchange. (Supported versions:  Lotus Domino 6, 7 and 8 and Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Server 2003/2008 Active Directory)

Set of migration tools (Lotus Domino 5, 6, 7 or 8 to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.)

For generic POP/IMAP servers to Exchange (support the POP3 or IMAP4 protocol to mailboxes in Exchange Server 2007)

Microsoft provides The ‘Microsoft Transporter Suite’ For Notes to Exchange 2007 migration, But for Notes to Exchange 2007 migration; it doesn’t provide any free migration tool. If someone wants to migrate from Notes to Exchange 2010, he can use an Exchange 2007 Server and the Microsoft Transporter Suite to first migrate to Exchange 2007 and then transition to 2010.

To upgrade Exchange 2007 organization to 2010:

Firstly install an Exchange 2010 server into your Exchange 2007 organization

Move the Exchange server 2007 items to Exchange 2010 .If you have a 64-bit virtualized environment and Exchange 2007 then you can simply perform this migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. To do so you just need to install another VM with Exchange 2010 integrated into the 2007 organization. Once the Exchange servers (Exchange server 2007 & Exchange 2010) are in coexistence and all the items have been migrated from Exchange server 2007 & Exchange 2010, then the old Exchange 2007 servers can be dropped.

Isn’t it a clumsy process?

You must like some easy, efficient and less timing migration procedure. Here comes the need for Notes to Exchange migration software.

Here emerges the need for a migration tool!

There are many third party Notes to Exchange migration software available that can efficiently migrate the Notes email messages, sent items, attachments, notes, reminders, calendars etc. to Exchange server 2010.

If you are going to migrate from Notes to Exchange, You must keep a few things in mind before migration:

  

•    Make a clear choice between Notes or Outlook according to your personal or business requirements. After that do a strategic planning for Notes to Exchange migration.

•    Perform Test migrations and analyze the whole migrations infrastructure used. Study the migration logs to know about the success and failure points that occurred during migration. Get the failures or migration issues resolved.

•    The Exchange logs must be correctly scaled. You must use log volume scaling so that the logs must contain the entry for data that has been migrated to exchange before committing the changes to the database. You have two alternate options one is circular logging or take more frequent backups to avoid log volumes filling up during migration.

•    You must also focus on domino maintenance during the migration procedure. Domino maintenance can be planned at low productivity days/hours so that it will not hamper the regular work.

•    Database replication must be opted in order to avoid mail loss

How to migrate from Notes to Exchange 2010?

Simply choose efficient Notes to Exchange migration software that supports Notes to Exchange 2010 migration and accomplish the successful migration within few clicks without any botheration. 

Most common features of Notes to Exchange 2010 migration software:

•    It must extract all the notes mailbox data to Exchange without any hassle and need for high tech knowledge

•    It let you perform selective migration of only your desired mailbox items.

•    The email formatting is kept intact before and after migration.

•    Preview of converted items is shown before performing actual migration.

•    It must provide wide compatibility with various Exchange, Notes and Outlook versions.

Before purchasing any software carefully read out the features and other instructions mentioned at product page. Also check the product specifications. Do they seem suitable? You can find many similar software available form different vendors. Make a comparative analysis. Run the demo versions of the software. Choose the best one that seems to be the best according to your budget and requirements.

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Why Should You Upgrade to Exchange 2013?

Should we move our email to Office 356? This is surely one question that has bothered you for quite some time now. The fact is that it offers practically unlimited storage and keeps you up-to-date with the latest developments in technology, but what also works against Office 365 is the fact that it can severely restrict your ability to integrate existing business applications and also make you dependent on third party to respond to service issues. And here we haven’t even mentioned the lack of control over the pace of the upgrade. So what is a better alternative? 

Microsoft Exchange 2013 packs in all the advantages that meet the present day needs of any business. If has undergone an evolution in architecture and manageability helping reduce the total cost of ownership, supporting multiple databases per volume and bringing in a single web-based administrative interface. Most importantly it offers you more control that Office 365 would not offer you. So staying with on-premises Exchange is a sound business decision and with Microsoft working on Exchange Online it would be worth the wait. In this article we shall discuss a few benefits of upgrading to Exchange 2013 and also talk about ways in which you can achieve this. 

Simplify the Infrastructure      

         
One notable different in Exchange 2013 over its predecessor is the fact that has simplified infrastructure requirement. It has reduced the number of roles and recommends installing Exchange as a multi-role server. This is a great advantage for small and medium businesses as they can now deploy Exchange on a smaller infrastructure compared to in the past. For instance, if you plan split the Client Access and Hub Transport roles on your mailbox servers Exchange 2013 would facilitate that. 

Make Better Use of Existing Hardware       

   
Reducing the cost of ownership is one of the key elements in any technological development. Exchange 2010 had demonstrated this by reducing disk throughput requirements, allowing you to run it on slow SATA disk storage. This also allowed businesses to maintain virtual environments without straining the resources. Exchange 2013 takes it a step further and introduced features that allow businesses to make better use of the infrastructure. Notable among these are Automatic Reseed features that ease swapping out disks. In simpler terms it allows you to return a substantial amount of storage to the virtual infrastructure. On the front end it means an increase in mailbox quotas without investing anything on storage infrastructure. If your hardware is still due a few years upgrading to Exchange 2013 makes the best business decision. 

Worry Free Environment 

You don’t want to about your email server when you go to bed, do you? Exchange was always conceptualized to run with minimum intervention as long as you adopt the best practices for running it. Making it a worry free too is the inbuilt engine that keeps track of all the events and also performs corrective actions when required. It has introduced a feature Managed Availability that deals with failures. It offers the right set of instructions to external systems such as load balancers that identifies the cause of failure and takes corrective measures to ensure the end users aren’t affected.  

Public Folders Reinvented

There has been talk about getting rid of public folders for quite some time, but Microsoft has reinvented the concept in Exchange 2013. The use of the public folder has though been streamlines and you would no longer need to manage them through the separate Public Folder Management Console. Instead, you will be able to manage it using the Exchange Administration Center or the EAC. This makes them function like regular mailbox databases, allowing administrators to make a part of a database availability group for disaster recovery. The Systems Center Operations Manager, administrators also has been overhauled and the alerts generated by SCOM consume fewer resources on your SCOM servers.

With all these benefits Exchange 2013 offers businesses a number of advantages that are worth the upgrade instead of moving on to a completely new technology.

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How To Resolve Exchange Server Jet Error Codes – 1601 and 1605?

When you talk about business communication, then paying no attention to the significance of emails would be a big mistake. The reason is pretty clear. Emails are soul of business communication and facing any situation that prevents you from reading email could be a real big nightmare that you certainly not ever wish to dream about.

To keep the business communication active, every enterprise trust MS Exchange Server due to its superior features. Though, a circumstance gets complicated when a business enterprise trusting upon Exchange Server faces undesirable errors in an effort to access the emails or important user data. In fact, the actual game begins when Exchange Server database gets corrupt. Each and every stored mailbox item, right from emails, tasks, notes, appointments, contacts, attachments or, calendar are on the edge of becoming inaccessible.

Fix Exchange Jet Errors & Restore Mailboxes with Microsoft Exchange Recovery Software

The universal method to deal with the corruption of EDB files which is recommended by professionals is - making use of ESEUTIL.exe inbuilt utility. This utility comes with Exchange Server and in most of the circumstances performs Exchange Database Recovery by defragmenting the EDB file. But as you are aware of, ESEUTIL re-forms the complete EDB file and at times makes the intensity of corruption worse in case when Exchange Database recovery does not succeed. 

To know the actual complication, consider a circumstance where you were running the database repair due to the 'database inconsistency' error. Now, after some time the moment you made any effort to mount the information stores, as anticipated all exchange services starts, but unexpectedly information stores declined to mount. You ran: Eseutil /p priv1.edb, but the edb repair course of action got terminated with any of the below error messages: 

"Operation terminated with error -1605”

Or

"Operation terminated with error -1601 (JET_errRecordNotFound, The key was not found) after 2.354 seconds.”

The above mentioned errors-1601 and 1605 are called Jet errors. Jet errors are fairly common in Exchange Server. Every Exchange user might have faced one or several jet error at times. Exchange's jet errors cause a great problem for the users as EDB database falls to kill corruption leaving all user mailboxes inaccessible.

Cause of Error -1601

This error usually takes place either when you are making use of an inbuilt utility for analyzing and repairing database but the version of inbuilt utility is not sure about it or both STM and EDB files are having different structure. Another potential reason for this error could be the severe corruption in the EDB file structure.

Cause of Error -1605

You will get this error notification after an early exit of Eseutil /P while carrying out EDB database repair. This condition generally takes place when the Eseutil tool rebuilds B-trees improperly.

Resolution for Above jet errors

When you come across the above mentioned error messages, you can't go on with using the EDB file as the EDB file becomes completely inaccessible. These errors signify that EDB file is badly damaged or corrupt and therefore instant recovery of damaged or corrupted database is needed. 

So for safer side, it is good to restore damaged or corrupt database using an updated backup. Most up-to-date backup proves to be elixir in case of Exchange database disaster. If you have legitimate and updated backup, you can effortlessly restore your database from the backup and save your important data and time. But, in case the backup is either damaged or not updated or is unavailable, then what you could do at that time? To deal with such circumstances, the most relevant solution which can take you out of this situation is making use of any third party Exchange Mailbox EDB repair tool. 

A third party Exchange Database recovery tool saves the time when Exchange server users descry a database disaster. One of the widely used and most trusted software available is “Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery”, which is a powerful repair utility that helps in repairing severely damaged or corrupt exchange database files. You can find the more details about the software from here: http://www.stellarinfo.com/edb-exchange-server-recovery.htm

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How to resolve Numeric Code: 5.3.5 in Exchange?

The SMTP server takes care of handling the mail flow from the sender to the recipient. The SMTP server works on the SMTP protocol i.e. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.  The message sent by the sender is first delivered to the SMTP server after that, the SMTP server delivers it to the receiver. The mail is like below: Mail user agent (MAU)/mail client/ webmail >Mail transfer agent (MTA)/ SMTP server. The mail is then relayed to another incoming server or is immediately delivered to the recipient if the recipient domain is directly connected to the server. If the recipient server is down or busy then the message dropped by the SMTP host is stored in the backup server.

The above mail flow seems simple. But several situations may arise when the SMTP server fails to deliver the message or the user faces troubles while delivering the mail.

Various error messages will be prompted at the screen. The most common among such error messages are:  "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable" or "421 Try again later", other SMTP errors and reply codes

In this article I am going to discuss the Numeric Code: 5.3.5.

This numeric error code indicates the server loop back situation. In such case, the SMTP server loops back to itself because of configuration settings done for loop back.

How to resolve the Numeric Code: 5.3.5?

If you have multiple SMTP virtual servers configured on your Exchange computer:

•    If your Exchange server has multiple SMTP virtual servers on it then, check that unique incoming ports are being served by the virtual servers. And also ensure that you have a valid configuration for the outgoing SMTP port. Also check that you haven’t set the ‘All Unassigned’ option for the multiple virtual servers.

•    You also need to verify the configuration of the server connectors to prevent back loops. The connectors should not hold back the address space of the local organization. The connectors can have the address space of the local organization if you are sharing the domain and have enabled the ‘Use DNS to route to each address space on this connector’ option.

Follow the given steps to share an SMTP address space in Exchange 2000/2003 Server:

You need to do some configuration settings to the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000/2003 in order to make it support a shared SMTP address space.

To do so, you can use two methods:

•    Share the same SMTP address space with a different e-mail system

•    Share the SMTP address space by using contacts to redirect e-mail to a remote e-mail system

How to Share the same SMTP address space with a different e-mail system?

What happens when the e-mail system is not authorized for some particular SMTP address space?  What happens when the recipient may not be able to receive the message? In such case, a non- delivery report will be generated indicating that the message cannot be delivered to the recipient due to some reason.

Multiple email systems can be configured and chained together to share same address space. Messages from the first e-mail system are transferred to the second e-mail system, then from second to third and so on till the message is delivered to the recipient. If the message couldn’t be delivered to the recipient, then a non-delivery report is generated by the last email system in the linked chain.

You need to authorize Exchange for the primary SMTP address space specified in the default recipient policy.

For that you need to:

•    Add the shared SMTP address space to another recipient policy,

•    After that make it as the primary SMTP address space,

•    Then open SMTP Address Properties dialog box and un- select the checkbox ‘This Exchange Organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address’.

Note: If Exchange is authoritative for a SMTP address space then it cannot be shared. To check if Exchange is authoritative for a particular SMTP address space or not, follow the given steps:

1.    Open Exchange System Manager, Open the recipient policy Properties by right-clicking it.

2.    Open E-Mail Addresses (Policy) then select the e-mail address and Click Edit.

3.    Now check if Exchange is authoritative for the SMTP address space or not.

4.    If the checkbox ‘This Exchange Organization is responsible for all mail delivery to this address’ is not checked then Exchange is non-authoritative for the SMTP address space. Otherwise it is authoritative for the SMTP address space if this check box is selected.

If you want to share the SMTP address space with a different email system follow the given steps:

•    Modify the default recipient policy by editing the primary SMTP address space.

•    Do Configuration settings for  the shared SMTP address space

•    Remove message forwarding for unresolved recipients by modifying  the SMTP virtual server properties

•    Configure SMTP connector for the shared SMTP address space

•    Restart the Routing and SMTP services

You can also share the SMTP address space by using contacts to redirect e-mail to a remote e-mail system.

Follow the given steps to Share the SMTP address space by using contacts to redirect e-mail to a remote e-mail system:

•    Set the recipient policies Configurations so that can be  used with contacts

•    Add the contacts to Active Directory to represent remote users

•    Remove message forwarding for unresolved recipients by modifying the properties of SMTP virtual server properties

•    Route e-mail to the remote e-mail system by creating an SMTP connector

•    Restart the Routing and SMTP services

Using the above method described in the article, the Numeric Error Code: 5.3.5 will be resolved.  Read my next article to know the step by step detailed procedure for sharing the SMTP address space by using contacts to redirect e-mail to a remote e-mail system.

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