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Friday 29 August 2014
8/29/2014 02:58:00 am 0

How to successfully migrate from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange?

If you require migrating from your existing Novell GroupWise platform to Microsoft Exchange,then the first very important thing you need to do is a proper planning.

What a migration plan must include?

  • The first thing you need to evaluate is you current exiting system. You need to formulate a complete assessment of your current infrastructure.
  • After that decide what your objective is and enlist all the challenges that you are going to face during this migration process.
  • The final thing you need to decide is “how to gain those objectives and perform an efficient migration”. This would include planning and finalizing all your pre migration and post migration requirements

Common issues while planning GroupWise to Exchange migration:

  • The plan must be strategic, logical and easily implementable. Each phase of the migration process and the requirements must be clearly defined. 
  • Proper resource requirement analysis, resource scheduling and their management should be done.
  • This is not always true that the plan with which you begin will be the same as the migration process goes on. You need to a timely measurement of what’s going on and then may also require monitoring and updating your plan in accordance with the ongoing series of migration events.
  • You must keep justifying and testing each phase of migration as the process on. So that if any issue occurs in between you could easily fix that.
  • You would require training the administrators and the users so that they can adapt themselves with the changes in technology and user interface.
  • You must retain all your previous data after migration. Any kind of data loss is simply intolerable and cannot be born.

How to migrate from GroupWise to Exchange?

The Exchange version before 2007 contained connectors for migration from GroupWise. But these tools are unavailable in later versions of exchange.

Exchange 2003 provides following tools for co-existence/integration with GroupWise:
  • Connector for Novell GroupWise: This tool enables GroupWise and Exchange directories to be synchronized so that they can have a consistent address book. Using this connector the Exchange mails can be routed to the GroupWise system.
  • Calendar Connector: It facilitates the users to view scheduling information for GroupWise and Exchange both.
  • Migration Wizard: This let the users migrate from the GroupWise mailboxes to Exchange
As these tools aren’t present in Exchange 2007 so, if you want to run Exchange 2007 in co-existence/integration with GroupWise during migration then first you need to install Exchange 2003 into the organization. Thus the systems Exchange 2007 and GroupWise system can be run in co existence via the Connector for GroupWise and Calendar Connectors.

The most important step in GroupWise to Exchange migration is selection of a GroupWise to Exchange migration tool.

Now, you have two options either you can use the native Exchange 2003 Migration Wizard or get some third party GroupWise to Exchange migration software to make the migration process a lot easier and want to save time..

There are several features that the native migration wizard doesn’t support. 
Some of them are given below:
  • Address book and contacts cannot be migrated by the native migration wizard.
  • You cannot migrate proxy access using the native migration wizard.
  • Shared folder permissions, Archives, GroupWise Distribution Lists and membership, Rules cannot be migrated by the native migration wizard.
So in order to get these requirements fulfilled, you will require a third party GroupWise to Exchange migrator.
 
The third party GroupWise to Exchange migrator also provides several other features that make them more preferable than the native Exchange Migration Wizard.

Some prominent features of a GroupWise to Exchange migrator are:

  • It provides an easy to use and interactive interface.
  • It let you easily migrate from the GroupWise mailboxes to exchange. You can also convert the GroupWise mailboxes to .pst, .eml and .msg formats.
  • It also supports newer GroupWise, Outlook and Exchange versions.
  • Let you perform an easy and quick GroupWise to Exchange migration.
  • Let you successfully accomplish a risk free, reliable and real time migration without causing any loss to data and mailbox integrity.
  • Let you perform selective mailbox migration i.e. you can select one or more mailboxes to be migrated.Also you can choose particular mailboxes as well as particular folders to be migrated from GroupWise to Exchange
  • Let you preview the migrated items before actual migration.
So, if the native Exchange migration wizard is able to fulfill your requirements then you can opt for it. But if you want to avail the advanced features of a third party GroupWise to Exchange migrator then choose some software that best suited your needs. You can find a huge list of such software online. Most of the software are available with free demo, you can run the demo versions and can verify their Output. Just do some research about the available software and finally choose the one that best suits your needs and budget.

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