Live @Edu migration

[andyturpie]

Morning my good people,

 

We have decided to migrate from easymail to live@edu and would like to hear of your migration experiences. We also have for the last 6 years ran an exchange server (hosting a max of 20 accounts) which we want to put out to grass and force everyone to use a proper school email address with a one person one address policy.

 

Has everyone who has performed this type of migration, managed to get everything migrated ie exchange shared calendars, distribution groups etc and what barriers did you come up against.

 

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

 

Andy T

[PiqueABoo]

What's the Exchange server version?

[andyturpie]

Hi we are running exchange 2003 at the moment.Thanks!

[PiqueABoo]

Location:Watford? If that is where your school(?) is located then I do know the LA there have done a lot of Live@Edu, so I suggest you talk and assuming they are willing, get them to suffer this because your scenario is not straight-forward: There are a couple of hard bits, several issues to consider, and possibly some kind of RBC(?) as well as the RM you're ditching to contend with. Some key points that might help explain why I think this is non-trivial:

 

1) Exchange 2003: You definitely can move entire mailboxes (mail, calendars, contacts, task etc.) to Live@Edu. For 20 it might be easier to dump them to PSTs and manually use Outlook to import them into Live@Edu mailboxes, but I wouldn't want to do that unless the mailboxes are small. Alternatively you configure an RPC Proxy on your Exchange box (a relatively arcane task) and get Live@Edu to do the work, and it does work but won't do contacts and distribution lists kicking around in AD so you will either need code/script magic for that, or to remake them at Live@Edu manually. If you've got shared calendars/contacts in Exchange public folders you can use PSTs and Outlook to get those across.

 

2) RM EasyMail:

 

a) If the users only use the web UI or IMAP4 then the mail is all on RM servers and Live@Edu can do the work, but the process will only get mail items and folders not contacts because they are not supported by the IMAP4 protocol. Last time I touched this an Easymail *user* could export their personal address books in some prehistoric Outlook CSV export format that the Live@Edu import doesn't understand, so that CSV needs a format conversion before the users can import them into their Live@Edu mailbox. So how good are your users at doing what they're told? Easymail address books also implemented some kind of grouping which got permanently lost.

 

b) If your users have used POP3 to download all their e-mail then you have a problem. If Outlook was used you'll have PSTs scattered around and the most efficient strategy might be to round them up, exmerge them into Exchange mailboxes and then use the RPC proxy method in 1. If Outlook Express or anything else was used to download & delete from the RM server, then you're on your own.

 

3) You have Easymail *and* an Exchange, so you have two different domains and there is always a risk that you want to move to using a shiny new third domain? Does "one person one address" imply any merging of two source mailboxes into one target Live@Edu mailbox? Regardless there is some potentially "interesting" complexity to work through here, and you may need two tenancies subject to whether staff are happy for students to see their mail address in the GAL and various other factors.

Edited February 2, 2012 by PiqueABoo