Talk:Best Practices, Migrating from Meeting Maker to Exchange
From Provider Wiki
Step 1: Create a profile of your users and organization
- How many users will migrate?
- How many computers?
- What is the laptop/desktop breakdown?
- What platforms and OS?
- How many and what types of PDAs and smart phones are supported?
- * Who are the VIPs to consider?
- * Do you have users who need to retain their full calendar history? ISC is proposing a 24 month window of data for most users with roughly 6 months of forward looking data. For example, if your organization is migrating in December 2007, ISC would recommend migrating calendar data from June 2006 through June 2008. Storage estimates are 2 MB per calendar year of data, but individual users will have individual requirements.
Step 2: Read Networking & Telecommunications' Exchange Documentation
Step 3: Determine what software clients will be used
Unlike email which does offer some options for accessing Exchange with clients other than Outlook or Entourage, users of ISC's Exchange service who wish to use the calendar features of Exchange must use a licensed Microsoft product or access their calendar through the Exchange Web client.
For Windows users, an early decision point is which version of Outlook to choose. Outlook 2007 is supported and recommended at the University, while Outlook 2003 is only supported, and there are definite areas of Outlook 2007's superiority (configuration is only 17 steps versus 27, for instance).
Organizations that have recently deployed Office 2003 may wish to retain it for compatibility reasons, as Office 2007 introduces multiple new file formats and a significantly revised interface, however, since ISC's Exchange service is running Exchange 2007, ISC recommends that all organizations migrating to Exchange also consider moving to Office 2007 to enjoy the full feature set of Exchange 2007.
- For more discussion, see document: Exchange Transition Use Cases
Step 4: Determine dependences on other organizations
It may be helpful to coordinate your migration with other departments who are also considering migration. The main challenge within your unit, and across units if cross-scheduling is conducted regularly, is to minimize the length of time it takes to migrate everyone's calendar. Functioning in a two calendar is very cumbersome for users and not recommended for any extended period of time.
Therefore, coordinating calendar migration is very important. View information about other units who are considering migration. Please add your own information as it becomes available.
- What is the calendar-use like? Mostly internal? Across units?
- With what other divisions do you regularly schedule in Meeting Maker?
- What are their migration plans?
Also read document Working in a Two Calendar Environment.
Step 5: Determine overall migration strategy
Work interruption will be minimized if users’ calendar migration occurs in a condense period of time.
- Email for everyone first, followed by a coordinated calendar migration for everyone, second (recommended for larger groups)
- Email and calendar at the same time (ideal for very small organizations or for a limited number of users)
Step 6: Determine specific email strategy
See Email Best Practices document for full discussion.
Step 7: Test strategies for each component
Before migrating, support providers should test their planned migration paths thoroughly. It is not only possible, but likely that support providers will discover specific use cases for email and calendaring that are not covered in ISC's first generation documentation. In particular, support providers should make note of clients that are likely to involve “exception processing” (such as those with smartphones) and attempt to test those types of configurations.
Side Note: Support Providers are strongly encouraged to update documentation on this wiki with information, tips, tricks and gotcha's discovered during their testing and migration. Your lessons learned could greatly help other Penn staff who are working towards the same end--you're not only being a good colleague, but saving valuable university time and resources! To get an account on the Wiki, please contact the Provider Desk, 3-4017.
