Hosted Exchange to ISC Exchange

From Provider Notes

For more information about ISC's Exchange Service, visit the Provider Web at [1].

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Migration Notes 2.1 Calendar, Contacts, & Rules 2.1.1 How the export is handled 2.2 Mail 2.3 Gotchas 2.3.1 User Education

Introduction

This document is intended for instructing LSPs that would like to migrate their users from one Exchange server to another. One example of this would be moving users from a hosted Exchange service (like Mi8) to ISC's Exchange service.

Migration Notes

There are several ways to go about migrating a user from one Exchange account to another. One method would be to just export everything into a PST file on the local computer, and then re-import once the new account is set up. The major drawback to this is that the received dates on email messages are reset to the date the PST was re-imported. A preferred method is outlined below where the received dates are retained.

Calendar, Contacts, & Rules

Each of these data types should be exported into their own, separate, comma or tab-delimited file. Once the new Exchange account is set up, the files can be re-imported into the new Exchange account.

How the export is handled

• Go to File, select Import and Export
• Select Export to a File and click Next
• Select Comma Separated Values and click Next
• Select the data type you wish to export and click Next
  • Note, only one data type may be selected at a time. If you are doing calendar items, contacts and rules, you will have three separate data files when you are finished.
• Name your exported file and select the location where you would like it saved.
• Confirm your selections and click Ok.

Mail

• Create a new Outlook profile, create an Exchange account setup in new profile, connect IMAP connection to Mi8 and bring mail over to Exchange account. Dragging folder structure over may re-create folder structure on Exchange server.

Gotchas

One major item to watch out for are contacts that are pointing towards old Exchange server. In particular, the auto-complete feature of Outlook stores automatically created contacts in an .nk2 file. This file lives in:

• Windows XP
  • C:\Docuements and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
• Vista
  • C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

In order to edit this file, you can either:

• Manually correct each auto-complete address that comes up in Outlook.
  • This is only recommended if you have small numbers of users that were on the previous service, and are comfortable maintaining their own information.
  • Basically, you double-click on the suggested address, and make the necessary corrections in the E-mail Properties window that is displayed.
• Use a free tool, like the one available at Ingressor.com to edit the file by hand, and make the appropriate changes to the auto-complete addresses.

Either way, you need to make sure that you have removed or changed everyone (including yourself) that may have been on the old Exchange service. Otherwise, your recipients may not receive the email, or you will get a bounce back message.

User Education

Even after editing the .nk2 file and fixing all of the addresses in the address book, there is still a problem with old emails. Any message received when the user was on the old Exchange server still has information about that server contained in the header of the message. If the user replies to these messages after migrating to ISC's Exchange service, the recipients will not receive the message and the user will get a Message cannot be delivered bounce back. Your end users need to be educated about this problem, and told to either copy the contents of the old message into a new one, or hand type in the appropriate addresses.