Migration to Exchange
erm
2000
bxtr
>Can anyone tell me if there is a migration path from notes to exchange 5.5 /
>2000
>
You need to check the MS web-site for information. You are better
served to stay with Notes.
bxtr
erm
"bxtr" <bx...@nospamepix.net> wrote in message
news:bh9b80pjl4pehmgdv...@4ax.com...
loca...@127.0.0.1
>If that were an option I wouldn't be asking the question
>"bxtr" <bx...@nospamepix.net> wrote in message
>news:bh9b80pjl4pehmgdv...@4ax.com...
>> On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 22:50:51 +0100, "erm" <e...@not.likely> wrote:
>>
>> >Can anyone tell me if there is a migration path from notes to exchange
>5.5 /
>> >2000
This is not possible as far as Lotus Domino Administrators are
concerned - You can only Migrate to Notes.
Exchange administrators may tell you something different.
bxtr
If you go to E2K, you will need Windows 2000 servers and Active
Directory in place. Active Directory schema will have to be modified
to add the Exchange extensions. There is a migration wizard to move
the mail files from Domino to Exchange. Archive databases and
personal address books are a different story. Best browse the
Exchange groups and the MS web-site.
bxtr
Al Tsiemers
> 5.5 / 2000
>
>
If you know what's good for you, migrate your ass to another company as
fast as you can. Before we went to Exchange, I thought it was junk. Now
that we are there, it is way worse than I ever imagined.
1) You will find that a "migration" to Exchange 2000 and the required
Active Directory will be more work, money and headaches than you could
POSSIBLY have with Domino.
2) Even though Exchange gets you in the door with slightly lower cost per
user for licenses, you need to look at the TOTAL cost structure to realize
that Domino is actually cheaper. After you factor in the cost for
everything, Exchange is actually pretty expensive for what you get.
3) You didn't say how many users you have, or the size of your current
Information Store, so I'm going to use some real world examples from my
place of business. I maintain one of the 4 servers in our Site, and we have
6 Sites. Anyway, each of the servers has about 1000 users with a 200M
mailbox limit. We currently have an IS that is about 100G. The Notes
servers that USED to hold mail now only do applications, and a few
mailboxes. They also hold about 100G of data apiece.
The Exchange server is expensive. It needs a lot of horsepower. I just
retired 2 Notes Enterprise servers that were still running fine. Pentium
133 EISA w/96M, and Pentium 150 EISA w 128M. Both were still working fine,
with no complaints from users (granted, not a lot of users on them, but
still handling mail and database applications). You can't even load
Exchange on something like that.
4) Since we would have an IS larger than 16G, we needed to buy the
Enterprise (expensive) version of Exchange. Same is true even in Exchange
2003. Domino will run on just about anything.
5) If you need to do any IS maintenance on the Exchange machine, you need
to have at least 110% free space on the IS partition (technically, it can
be elsewhere, but no one does it that way). That means we are now having to
expand the 205G IS partition because it could not ever do an offline defrag
or IS repair without more space. If you need to do a mailbox restore, you
need to have a near-twin server sitting around doing nothing most of the
year, waiting to be called on once or twice. Yes, I know about brick-level
backups, but I also know about the drawbacks. That 100G IS file is single-
instance storage. Brick-level backup is about 4 times as large, and takes
about 4 times as long. We stopped doing brick-level backup. I know servers,
disks and tape drives are relatively cheap nowadays, but that's still a lot
of real nice hardware that sits around doing nothing most of the time.
6) The Domino servers, whether they do mail, apps, or both, only really
need about 20G free space to give you room to breathe, not 120G. If you
have a problem with last nights backup, just run it the next day. No one
even notices the load. We tried that with Exchange. Once. Brought the whole
system to a halt. No one got to their mail until we got the job cancelled.
7) If one user needs a restore on Domino, since they are individual
databases, you do a restore of that file from tape to an alternate
directory. Tell the user to get out of his mailfile or application. You can
copy/paste documents from one database to another with your Notes client,
or replace the whole database. No one else is affected. Takes about an
hour.
8) An Exchange restore, unless you want to shut everyone else down, has to
be to a recovery server (the near-twin server that sits idle most of the
time). The 4 hour backup takes 11 hours to restore to a different server.
We use an ADIC 8000, which isn't the fastest, but it's pretty decent, and
it's physically attached to the recovery server. Takes 3 times as long to
restore the backup to the local machine because the System Attendant
service knows that the Registry isn't for the same server the backup came
from. After you get it restored, you have to get the Directory to match up
with the IS. More fooling around. Then you have to connect to it with a
client and export the mailbox in question (or exmerge from the server) to a
.pst file. Then you take that .pst file and either import to the users
mailbox on the production server, or open it and copy documents. Calendar
stuff shouldn't be copied, because it won't recognise updates to meetings.
An import without duplicates is best. This is about 2 days of fooling
around, and that assumes you have no problems getting the IS or DS services
to start. It sucks. Exchange 2003 has a limit of 20 Stores. Still not as
good as individual databases. If one of those IS corrupts, all users in
that store are down until you get it fixed. Oh, and backups won't run until
it is fixed, just in case it DIDN'T crash. We had this happen, when a
transaction log corrupted, and Exchange committed it to the IS, corrupting
it. We restored from backup, and let it play back 3 hours of transaction
logs, before it again corrupted the IS. Another 2 day job that should have
taken an hour. And no mail in or out of that server during that time, and
no users able to access their mailboxes.
9) Domino has a built in Certificate server, and can do S/MIME with about
10 clicks. Microsoft will sell you their Exchange Keyserver. (yes, you can
run it on the Exchange server, but there is a reason they tell you in all
their white papers and Knowledge Base articles to run it on a separate
server. Actually, they tell you to run everything on a separate
server....). More hardware and more licenses. And it gets really ugly with
Active Directory. HA, we issue certificates from our Notes servers. Getting
a certificate and installing it and backing it up is about a 45 step
process in the MS world. Takes about 10 clicks in Notes. Oh, and if you use
XP and don't have Active Directory, it breaks every time you change your
domain password. You have to delete your certificate from IE, and restore
from backup. Notes keeps the certificate in your ID file, and you don't
have this problem.
10) Secure access from the internet to a users mailbox, or database apps,
on Notes, consists of forcing port encryption on the Domino servers, and
opening port 1352 through the firewall. Done. Secure. On Exchange, we had
to set up Outlook Web Access on another server (there we go again, more
hardware and more licenses), set up and secure IIS (that's an oxymoron),
set up Certificate Services (another real pain, with almost every Knowledge
Base article telling you do it differently), and force it to always use
SSL. And it took a lot of time and firewall testing to get it to work. And
it only works with IE.
11) Calendar and Scheduling are awfull on Exchange. It doesn't get any
better on the newer versions. They just don't care. They have no tool to
enable rooms to automatically accept or reject meeting requests. We use
what most other people do, the free AutoAccept Wizard. It's a pain to set
up for each room, and hardly a week goes by without 2 groups showing up
somewhere for a meeting at the same time, and the room accepted both
meetings. Or it won't accept a meeting for a time that the room shows as
empty. Then you have to create a profile for that room, go in and turn off
the autoaccept script, wait for the user to send the meeting request, and
manually accept it for them. Then you have to remember to turn the script
back on again. The Domino Rooms and Reservations database is centrally
administered, from your Notes client. You don't need to configure each room
from a separate profile. And Calendar or Schedule problems are an annual,
not a weekly event. Oh, and Domino understands time zones. Set up a group
calendar, with users in multiple time zones, and everyone knows that you
are on vacation Wednesday. On Exchange, if they are in a different time
zone, they can't tell if you are gone Wed or Thur. It shows you gone for 2
days. The other coast thinks you are gone both Tues and Wed.
12) TNEF. Stands for Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format. Sounds like
some sort of internet mail standard for Microsoft to play nice with the
rest of the world. Actually a proprietary format. Outlook composes, by
default, in Microsoft Rich Text. Other mail systems do not understand that
format. When you create a Custom Recipient in the Global Address List, or
create a Contact, if that Recipient does not use Exchange, you have to
remove the default check telling the system to always send in Microsoft
Rich Text format. Otherwise, your formatting, and all attachments will be
received as a winmail.dat or ATTxxxx.dat file. We currently have two
executives having a problem with this, even though the GAL and Contact
entries say NOT to send in TNEF format. Even when Outlook is started in
safe mode (outlook.exe /safe).
13) Support costs. We used to have about 5 end user calls a month when the
mail was on Notes. Now we have about 5 a day (we have been on Exchange for
about 2 years, so it's not teething problems). In 2 years, I printed out a
2 inch tall stack of docs from the Lotus Knowledge Base. In 2 years with
Exchange, I am now on my third 6 inch stack. We used to have time to
proactively look for small anomilies occurring on the servers. Fix small
problems before anyone complains. Now we spend so much time with end users,
we only have time to deal with the bonfires. Small problems get ignored
until they are big problems. And Domino stores "events" in a log file. It's
a database that can be configured to contain x amount of days of activity.
We keep 30 days on line, and if we pull the oldest backup tape, we can look
at activity for the last 75 days. It can be configured to log a LOT of
different things. It's searchable. Exchange keeps most everything in the
Application Event Log. We don't have a lot of logging turned on, but even
with it set to 16M, it keeps less than 24 hours of "events". Good luck
searching. It's very time consuming to T/S problems with it.
15) Antivirus apps. Another example of superior design. Domino anti-virus
apps check mail before it ever hits the mail.box of the server, from which
it is distributed to the user mailbox. It gets scanned, even if it is
destined for another domain. Exchange gets scanned only if it is destined
for the Information Store on that machine. If not, the infected message is
just passed on to the next server. Yes, I am also aware that the latest
versions of AV software have FINALLY addressed this issue. We aren't using
one of the latest. If Exchange wasn't so poorly designed, it would have and
should have been possible 10 years ago. Stop it at the gateway, or as soon
as possible.
And when a virus is detected, on Notes, we got a message From the server,
with a Subject of "message to Recipient". The message body said who sent
it, what the attachment was called, what virus it contained, and whether it
was sucessfully cleaned or quarantined. The Exchange system passes it on as
appearing to come from the original sender, with the original subject, and
all plain text that was in the original message. If successfully cleaned,
there is a plain text attachment with a huge file name:
VIRUS_DETECTED_AND_REMOVED_info.pif_VIRINFO.TXT, and inside that file it
tells the user that it was successfully cleaned. There are two problems
with this. We spent 10 years telling our users to never open suspicious
mail or attachments. The Outlook client doesn't show the complete file
name. The user sees the VIRUS_ part and wigs out. Everytime a new virus
comes out, the HelpDesk gets buried with calls from users where it was
successfully cleaned. Even when the AV software does it's job, they get
buried. Can you say mo' money? When we were on Domino, the Helpdesk only
got calls when a new, undetected virus came in. That's the way it should
be. Notes also has this thingy called an ECL, Execution Control List. Sets
permissions on who can do what on your system. When malicious code wanted
to something nasty to your system, you had to grant it explicit permission
to go screw with your computer. We almost never got an infected machine.
A user had to do about 3 dumb things in a row to have a problem. Now they
just need to have the Preview Pane turned on, and they are in a dodgy spot
already.
16) SPAM. Ok, I'll let Exchange off the hook for this, but only because
now-and-then comparisons wouldn't be fair. We all know that SPAM gets twice
as bad every year. Suffice it to say that I found mailbox rules easier to
create and maintain for users with the Notes clients.
17) Did I mention that Domino is also a web and application server. Mail is
about 15% of the real power of Domino. We have 100's of application
databases on our servers, and most can be accessed with either a Notes
client or a web browser. Even real browsers, like Mozilla or Galeon. And
even if you have Sun Java. And those databases have lots of neat features,
like unread marks. So you can QUICKLY see what documents have changed,
without having to open every damn one of them to see if anyone has updated
it.
18) If I didn't have to pee right now, I could go on and on and on. Believe
me, and there will be a pile of other folks agreeing on this, Domino is the
way to go (hey, it is a Notes group after all, and Exchange proponents
would be too embarrassed to be in here, lest they find out what they are
missing).
Rethorb
This is simply the best comparison I have ever read. Would you be
willing to be interviewed by IBM?
Al Tsiemers <Al.Ts...@icantremember.net> wrote in message news:<Xns94D3B000FA2...@216.168.3.44>...
Al Tsiemers
news:ff5ab22b.04043...@posting.google.com:
While I consider the offer to be very flattering, I would have to
respectfully decline for the following 2 reasons:
1) I do not consider myself to be authoritative enough for an interview.
While I do plan to be taking the CLS test in the next 2 months, I know
enough already to consider myself fairly ignorant on the design end (the
more you know, the less you know).
2) While the company I work for uses Notes, the customer I support has
migrated mail to Exchange and only keeps Notes for the database
applications. I still have a family to support, and my company believes
that the customer is always right, even when they have made a wrong
decision.
My examples are just from a real world, side-by-side comparison of the 2
systems running in parallel. Please feel free to copy, forward, slice and
dice as you see fit.
Care to ask me how S/MIME is working out with Outlook? I am spending at
least half my time supporting users with mail encryption broken. I am
dealing with the migration of my business unit to Active Diretory right
now, and all the users are broken again. Migration did not break the
internet certificates in Notes, Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox or AIM. Only the
Microsoft stuff is hosed. I can hardly wait until our customer pushes
Exchange 2003 on us this summer. Hopefully, I can find a company by then
that has a real mail system, and intends to stay on it.
test
Madison
More Info:- http://www.nsffile.org/outlook/