5 Important Activities to Perform Before GroupWise to Exchange 2010 Migration

There has never been a better time to migrate to MS Exchange from other email communication platforms such as Novell GroupWise. With the launch of MS Exchange 2010, Microsoft’s messaging system took a big jump forward in terms of expenditure of ownership, flexibility of combination, and simplicity of both use and administration, and it’s now undoubtedly the leading messaging platform across the world.
In this write-up, we are going to discuss some challenges that organizations face during the migration process along with some tips to ensure the successful migration from Groupwise to Exchange 2010.

Technical Challenges

Migration to an existing target Exchange 2010 system normally consists 2 technical stages:

1. Ensuring coexistence

Some organizations decide on to go with a “big bang” strategy, migrating from GroupWise to Exchange over a tremendously aggressive time, such as a weekend. This reduces migration complication and presents a consistent experience to all users. Stellar GroupWise to Exchange Migrator can be scaled out to move huge quantities of mailboxes in corresponding.

Though, most of the organizations migrate from GroupWise to Exchange Server over a longer period of time and need coexistence, which means the two e-mail systems work, look and feel to the end users as a solitary system.

2. Migrating data 

The second stage of migration, and typically the best and most noticeable to the end user community is moving data.

Start by asking the following questions:

- How much data are you planning to move?
- How much space does it use now?
-  How much space will it use after it is moved?

The options for migration include:

- Legacy Exchange Server Migration Wizard

- Third-party tools such as the Stellar Groupwise to Exchange Migrator , for an easy migration of a single or more mailboxes of GroupWise to Exchange 2010

Cultural Challenges

The migration can lead to great anxiety to both your end users and IT department staff. Not everyone is going to welcome MS Exchange Server. End users may have strong trustworthiness for Novell GroupWise, and you may have to pact with fear, ambiguity, hesitation, and probably passive or even vigorous opposition. Admins may defend against the transform, particularly if the migration to Exchange 2010 is likely to lessen the number of IT staff members.

Don’t undervalue the work involved in corresponding and managing this culture change.

Five Things To Do Before Migrating Novell GroupWise to Exchange 2010

1: Perform a pre-migration evaluation

Try to get a clear understanding of what will be drawn in and what criterion you will make use of to evaluate success prior to starting the migration. Be practical. For different reasons, not each message in GroupWise will be undamaged after the migration, so it is unfair to anticipate 100 percent of your data to migrate effectively. Pick an attainable threshold -- for example, 97 percent of messages should migrate for 97 percent of mailboxes -- and monitor your percentages. Tracking outcomes is the solution to any thriving migration, and that is achievable only if you initiate with a pre-migration evaluation.

2: Provision your Exchange 2010 mailboxes

When generating AD objects for mailboxes of Exchange Server 2010, keep in mind that the GroupWise directory is different from eDirectory, and that GroupWise resources don't require eDirectory user objects. These objects may require to be created using a diverse mechanism than normal user objects, if you prefer to migrate user objects from eDirectory

3: Integrate GroupWise and Exchange 2010

Find out how directory synchronization among GroupWise and Exchange 2010 will be accomplished to make sure that the GroupWise Address Book and Exchange Global Address List replicate the same users, resources and distribution groups. Use SMTP routing to route mail between GroupWise and Exchange and among the united GroupWise/Exchange hybrid system and the external world. Note down message formats and message size limits.

Mail flow among GroupWise and Exchange can be accomplished in either of two approaches:

• Exchange 2003 Connector for Novell GroupWise
• SMTP forward domain

4: Run a pilot migration

The objective of a pilot migration is to recognize challenges you may encounter once full migration starts and find out how to avoid or resolve them. Thus, you should anticipate, and even welcome, troubles in the pilot migration.

Prior to running the pilot migration, find out how fast the data can be moved by carrying out a controlled migration of a known amount of production GroupWise data on a solitary migration server. This will present you a migration baseline based on the output in GB per hour

The pilot migration also will assist you find out the amount of disk space needed on the target, which can differ to a great extent from the source, depending on your version of Novell GroupWise and the platform on which it is running.

5: Migrate the data and track migration progress

After each set of mailboxes is migrated, find out the total number of messages moved, the total number of messages left out, and the total number of errors or notifications per mailbox to calculate the success rate.

Success Rate = [(Total Number of Messages Moved + Number of Messages Left out) – Number of Errors] / Total Message Count