Groupwise 7 to Exchange Server 2010 approach

The preparation

In the first technical blog I would like to write about the migration approach for Groupwise 7 to Exchange Server 2010 and the interoperability between the two messaging systems.

Before you are able to migrate Groupwise 6/7 or 8 to Exchange Server 2010 you must design a migration strategy. In this migration strategy the following questions needs to be answered;

• Is the migration based on a big bang scenario or is the migration based on several phases?
• What kind of information needs to be migrated?
• If a phased migration scenario is valid, how long must there be interoperability between Groupwise 6/7/8 and Microsoft Exchange 2010?
• Are the personal archives subject to migration?

After you answer the questions above you are able to design a good migration scenario for your environment. In this blog and the future blogs the following migration scenario will be explained;

• Source: Groupwise 7
• Target: Exchange Server 2010
• Migration scenario: phased migration
• Interoperability: yes, for a couple of months. The use of free/busy information between Groupwise and Exchange is important.
• What needs to be migrated?: All the emails, appointments, tasks, proxy rights and documents in the store.

Analysis of the migration scenario

Now we know what we need to migrate and how long the two different messaging systems needs to work together we need to analyse the scenario and define the migration approach.

When analysing, the following issues come above;

• There is no direct interoperability between Groupwise 6/7/8 and Exchange 2007/2010;
• Microsoft and/or  Novell do not have migration tooling available to migrate all the needed data.

The solution / the migration approach

To solve the issues above, two things needs to be done. There must be found a way to create an environment where Groupwise 7 and Exchange Server 2010 can work together and there must be found a third party tool to migrate the data from Groupwise 7 to Exchange Server 2010.

The first issue can be solved when you install a Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server which you can use as a “middle tear” between Groupwise 7 and Exchange Server 2010.  Exchange Server 2003 has an optional peace of software called the Exchange Calendar Connector for Groupwise and Novell has a peace of software, called the Groupwise Exchange Gateway 7.03(x) .

The second issue can be solved when you use the Quest Groupwise Migrator for Exchange version 8.

Recap

The migration approach described in this blog is not officially supported by Novell and/or Microsoft, but when you use the Exchange 2003 environment as a middle tear you are able to manage an Exchange 2010/2003 environment and a Groupwise 6/7/8 environment working together.

The Quest Groupwise Exchange migrator is used for a nice and smooth migration of almost all Groupwise data.

In the following blogs I will describe the migration process in detail.

The migration process described above is based on the scenario described on MSExchange.org

(x) to be able to get the 7.03 version of Groupwise Exchange Gateway you need to contact Novell Support. The public available version 7.02 of the gateway may not install when you use an empty Active Directory root domain.

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