Saturday, October 21, 2006

Well havent update the blog for a while..... A very late thanks to LordOfThePing .......

Just some feedback on our migration from lotus notes to Exchange....

We have test some migration clients , and found that the one that looked superior above the rest and it was Quest migration tool fron Exchange..... After the normal red tape we have pruchased a couple of licenses and will be migrating the users mailboxes soon.

Just a note on this tool is that it migrates all items nearly perfectly ... Follow there migration document and you will be okay.... But one think our local destributer could help us with the following:

When migraiton a calender item from lotus notes to exchange the migration tool will use (in our case) the transation file to translate the mail address so when you reply or change the calender entry it would'nt generate a NDR. But it will add the user's smtp entry. Now if you have configured the lotus notes connector for exchange to sync with AD as we have (FirstName LastName/Notes@Notes on AD and FirstName LastName@MDSExchange.. and using the Busy/Free connector). When editing a calendar(that was migrated) item the entry will not generate a NDR, BUT when trying to view busy free information on the item the smtp will be used thus no busy free info.( this is only to view a notes users calender item....from exchange.... and that is only for a short while as the user will be migrated eventualy \.... but again we are working with users that think we live in a perfect world....hahahaha..

Currently Quest locally doesnt have a solution for us.. but you never now..... Maybe we will just migrate the users and they can handle the pain of selecting the user out of the GAL

I will post on a later stage on how the final migration went and the pains we have experianced..

Saturday, July 29, 2006

After reading and trying some other stuff I got the Microsoft migration tool up and running. Just for the folks out there here is wat I have tried>.. As per previews post...... installed Lotus Notes Connector onto Exchange 2003 SP2 server and lotus notes client 6.5.4. Stopped lotus notes services and tried to use the migration tool to migrate lotus notes mail boxes. Didnt work..

Why well I couldnt figure that out yet.. but due to time constans I created a new server with w2k sp1 and installed Lotus Notes Client 6.5.4 on the server with the latest migration tool... and .... well you will never guess!!!! it worked...

I could migrate a mail box 100%.. now what is the def between the 2 servers(except for the connector that was installed) I couldnt really tell you....

Okay so 1 mailbox migrated seemlessly lests try more than just one .......

Darn did work 100% ,,,only the mail items migrated from the notes to exchange....checked permissions on the lotus notes mail file . The user we are using has full mail box right (this includes calender,mail.......)....I am no notes guru but it still looks like this could be a permission error.... need some investcating....

To migrate notes mail boxes to exchange ant a piece of cake....

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Dudes this lotus notes migration is giving me a pain..... we there must be now pain!!!!!!.....
Still having probs with the migration wizard of ms trying to understand why this is happending .... I have know change the client version to 6.5.6 of the notes client. ( found some TID on IBM site that there is a problem with the client when migration a mail box from Lotus notes to Exchange when using client versions 6.0.5 - 6.5.4 .Check out this link http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=3025&context=SSPQ69&dc=DA400&uid=swg27005918&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct3025lotus) and yeu having the same problems....Is The ANY body out there with an resolution >>>
mm after that nice crash and burn... I tried and deleted the message that was causing the NSD error. But no luck.. it just stopped on 877 and not 878 ..... how did i find out which message number ?>.. well you can open the pri files that gets created when you specify the temp dir.. this is a comma delimeted file(csv) and you shoud see where it stopped or on which mail message the conversion failed.

Also disabled all antivirus software... custom monitoring applications..... still not luck . Found on a blogger site that he changed to the pre version of the migration wizard... well lets give that a bash...

My First Blog

My First,

Well my first.. blog.... aa what the F768 lets try this..
I will blog some tech stuff on this .. other wise redir to my prod site .....

For today migrating lotus notes mailboxes to exchange 2003 ...

Enviroment:

Windows 2000 Native AD domain. Exchange 2000 native mode. 28 Exchange 2000 servers where 7 are at HO the rest are remote branches over slow diginet links.

Installing the first exchange 2003 server in to the enviroment.

1. Make sure AD is not in sambles..
2. Forest prep
3. Domain prep
4. Wait for synchronization thought the enterprise and that all domain controller are up to date.
5. Check for any funny in AD ... (there was reported that some attribute could be currupt..but there is a vbs script that shoould fix this.)
6. Install windows 2003 with sp1 and join to domain
7. Patch server
8. Install exchange 2003 with sp2
8.1 Install Lotus notes client 6.5.4 on Exchange server.
9. install latest lotus notes connector( 7 June 2006)
9.1 No configuration done on the connector
10. Install latest migration wizard (June 2006)..
11. Try to migrated a mail box ... and cabammmm the notes client brakes with NSD errors... dammm I thought that microsoft has sorted out these stablilty issues with this... but you never know .. may be it is something that I am doing ..... lets do some debuging...