Migrating from Zimbra to Exchange 2010

[pfosshage]

My business is looking to Migrate to Exchange and the only issue that I am coming across is migration the Calendars. Any suggestions?

[Krishopper]

I don't think you are going to find any help with migrating away from Zimbra here. Most people who are moving away from it don't monitor the forums, and Zimbra won't bother researching ways or tools to migrate away, especially to exchange

[stevieg]

Originally Posted by pfosshage

My business is looking to Migrate to Exchange and the only issue that I am coming across is migration the Calendars. Any suggestions?

Glad to hear you're migrating to Exchange. I'm not a Zimbra expert and sorry to see you haven't had much help from the Zimbra community so far but I can offer a suggestion that may be helpful.

Zimbra and Exchange both support the iCal format - so you could direct your users to share their Calendar in Zimbra as iCal; then subcribe to the Calendar via OWA/Outlook 2010. Finally they would be able to copy the items across using Outlook from their old Calendar to the new one.

It's not an ideal solution as it may lose some fidelity with appointments, attendees, categories etc; but for a small number of users it may be suitable.

If it's a larger migration; so long as you can get your data out of Zimbra, it's easy to get into Exchange. I've done some migrations from Unix platforms in the past where the source data was open and putting it into Exchange using Exchange Web Services was fairly easy (this was for 12,000 users). If you can get the calendar out in a machine readable format it can go into Exchange.

Steve

[pfosshage]

Steve,
Thanks for the information. I have a total of around 250 mailboxes that I will be moving. I am aware of some of the issues with the calendar moving so that is my biggest hurdle. Is there a tool that you would recommend using when migrating to exchange 2010?

[apatosaur.9]

Originally Posted by pfosshage

My business is looking to Migrate to Exchange

Why are you migrating away from Zimbra? Did you have specific problems, or was it a lack of familiarity with Zimbra that prompted this. Sounds like a LOT of work.

[pfosshage]

The higher ups want to go back to Exchange.

[lindsey]

Originally Posted by apatosaur.9

Why are you migrating away from Zimbra? Did you have specific problems, or was it a lack of familiarity with Zimbra that prompted this. Sounds like a LOT of work.

Different person, same issue.

We're moving away because of a campus-wide initiative to move everything to Exchange. There may have been more resistance internally if Outlook 2011 support was available on the Mac, but without it people were too limited in what they could do.

[tgx]

IMHO just drop the fat client support. Most everyone knows how to use webmail at this point and the 'functionality loss' is mostly in people's heads because they don't know how to leverage the new software. You have to be proactive in rooting out any change over difficulties before it reaches critical mass. People like to silently suffer because they don't want to appear to be idiots in front of IT staff that can be unforgiving. At the CxO level it is even worse because they are in higher positions. I do think that Zimbra often is not proactive enough in addressing enterprise concerns via bugzilla which can create a toxic environment for IT dealing with perceived limitations.

[lindsey]

Originally Posted by tgx

IMHO just drop the fat client support. Most everyone knows how to use webmail at this point and the 'functionality loss' is mostly in people's heads because they don't know how to leverage the new software. You have to be proactive in rooting out any change over difficulties before it reaches critical mass. People like to silently suffer because they don't want to appear to be idiots in front of IT staff that can be unforgiving. At the CxO level it is even worse because they are in higher positions. I do think that Zimbra often is not proactive enough in addressing enterprise concerns via bugzilla which can create a toxic environment for IT dealing with perceived limitations.

In our case we have many people who travel and need local copies of their email to refer to because they may not have Internet. Generally they'll go through all of their messages while on a flight or something, compose replies, and then send once they get back on the network.

Limiting access via the Web restricts their usage to times when they have Internet connectivity, which won't work in our case.

[tgx]

Zimbra Desktop not working for you then?