Exchange to GMail

Ed Crist

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Mar 14, 2012, 12:17:06 PM3/14/12

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Folks

We’ve had our GAFE domain up for a few months now and by this Fall, I want to move from our hosted Exchange server to Gmail

I’m reading ferociously about how to do this.

Any tips, tricks, videos, etc that you can throw at me, please do.

I need to nail this down for all my users before I begin the migration process.

Couple of issues….

Can the Exchange folder structure be copied over per user?

Does the migration include messages, calendar, contacts?

I have about 90 faculty/staff users. We’ve used our Exchange server (hosted) for over 7 years.

Any thoughts as to how long the process would take with that many users and that much data?

Thanks so much for your time and input!!

Edward Crist

Technology Manager

City Charter High School

OUR NEW LOCATION!!!

201 Stanwix Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Main office - 412.690.2489

Fax - 412.690.2316

Skype - ejcrist

MCP - MCSA – MCSE

Joseph Hartman

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Mar 14, 2012, 1:42:18 PM3/14/12

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Hi Edward,

Everything you want to know is included in the Exchange Migration Tool documentation, but details can be hard to come by outside of user forums such as this. To answer your questions:

I believe the folder structure does not copy over, although folders do get translated into "labels". I don't think sublabels get transferred over as such though. Therefore, a folder in Exchange that exists at "expense reports/january" will be labeled "january" without reference to the fact that it is under "expense reports". At least that is how I recall things went when we did it.

Messages, Calendar events, and contacts all transferred over.

90 users will take only a few hours unless they have an immense amount of data to move. Install the service on a hefty computer and set it to only migrate one user at a time. The error reports from the service are next to useless, but if you have to run the migration a second time, it is smart enough to know to only migrate over information it missed on the first pass. The exception is contacts. We had to do 2 passes and people ended up with duplicate contacts. Fortunately Google Mail has an easy tool to detect duplicates and consolidate them.

The key will be to migrate only one user at a time (I think the default is 3 or 5) and to do it on a hefty machine. Test the heck out of it until the settings are correct and let 'er rip.

BTW, nothing should change as far as your exchange environment until you switch your MX records, so even if you have a catastrophe and muck up your Google environment, your users can still use Exchange for everything while you patch it up. Good luck! -Joe

Ben Courtade

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Mar 14, 2012, 2:02:54 PM3/14/12

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Folder structure translated into labels pretty well for us. There is one thing that did not transfer at all: distribution groups... spent some time recreating those for people.

---

Ben Courtade

Technology Specialist

Elk Rapids Schools
(231) 264-8642
Ext. 3121

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Ed Crist

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Mar 14, 2012, 1:55:42 PM3/14/12

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Ahh, good to know…we have quite a few of those

Edward Crist

Technology Manager

City Charter High School

OUR NEW LOCATION!!!

201 Stanwix Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Main office - 412.690.2489

Fax - 412.690.2316

Skype - ejcrist

MCP - MCSA – MCSE

Curts, Eric

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Mar 14, 2012, 2:13:55 PM3/14/12

to Ben Courtade, Joseph Hartman, k12ap...@googlegroups.com

Correct, subfolders came over fine but were named with the full folder path. What does not come over would be distribution lists (people had to recreate those) and any email in their Trash folder (which believe it or not some people treat as a valid folder to store important messages.)

All in all the process went very well. We moved about 600 mailboxes over in about 6 hours. For those few mailboxes where something went weird, we used the client-side migration tool instead to process those individually (see here: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=176213 )

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

* (330) 497-5600 x377, FAX (330) 497-5618

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