GroupWise Migration

This is an older topic but one that I’ve run across recently with education customers. I’m planning to migrate from Novell to Microsoft and I have GroupWise. What are my options?

Well, we deprecated our migration tools when we launched Exchange 2007. So we don’t have a tool to go directly from GroupWise to Exchange 2007. That being said you can use Exchange 2003 to migrate mail/calendar from GroupWise to Exchange. Then you can move the mailbox from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 easily.

If co-existence is needed you need to have an Exchange 2003 in your org to provide free/busy connectivity with GroupWise. The free/busy connector in 2003 doesn’t support HTML over the connector. So a choice needs to be made between support for HTML or free/busy you can’t support both options. As you can see HTML can be a big impact on your email migration.

Size of your migration will be a deciding factor on how you do your migration. The smaller migrations can be done quickly and don’t require coexistence. The larger ones do need to have a coexist period which requires free/busy, directory sync, and mailflow. This is all outlined in the Exchange interop and migration guide - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997840(EXCHG.65).aspx

If coexistence is not needed there are options to migrate directly to Exchange 2007. Check out the Quest tools. Quest acquired the Wingra toolset which included the Groupwise Migrator for Exchange. It converts users’ mail, calendars, tasks, personal address books and frequent contacts and stores them on users’ new mailboxes on Exchange server. The big option they offer is migration of Groupwise archives to psts’. To find out more check this out: https://www.quest.com/groupwise-migrator-for-exchange/