How to: Migrate from MS Exchange 2003 to Google Apps

This step by step how to is about performing a migration from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Google Apps Premier Edition or Non-Profit Edition, but not with the standard edition (Google only supports IMAP migration on premium accounts).

There are many reasons why you would want to migrate to Google Apps from Exchange. These include: Ease of use (control), less down time of mail servers and cost savings.

So where do you start?

1. Establish the Google Apps Account
Sign up for Google Apps Premier Edition - $50 / user account / year.
Sign up for Google Apps Education Edition - Non-profit organisations sign up here as well.
Note: Google says that it may take 1-2 weeks to review requests for the education and non-profit editions, but I have found that they usually reply within a day or two.

Already running Google Apps Standard Edition? Pay for the upgrade to Premier Edition or submit a request via the upgrade to Education Edition form. (Note: If you are running Premier Edition, and require the Eduction Edition you will have to downgrade to Standard before requesting the Education Edition.)

Once you have established the account, you will be directed to the management dashboard for administrators. You can customise Google Apps under the ‘Domain settings’ tab, where you set the organisation name, user support info, timezone, custom logo and control advertising.

2. Setup User Accounts
I recommed starting off with setting up user accounts, Google Apps supports several different ways for setting up/syncing accounts:

• Creating new users one by one - Put in first name, last name and a username. Google can issue a temporary password or you can set it.

• Bulk account update - You can upload a CSV file with the user account information.

• Google Apps LDAP Synchronization Tool - A package for synchronizing Google Apps for Your Domain with an LDAP server.
  • synchronizes users from Active Directory or openldap into Google Apps
  • detects new and exited users automatically and changes Google Apps accounts accordingly
  • handles user id / account renames automatically
  • handles attribute updates automatically
  • keeps track of changes and only propagates deltas (to allow syncing every 10 minutes for example)
• Additional user managment options are available from Google Enterprise Professional Partners.

If you are migrating less than 100 users, the easiest thing is to create a spreadsheet with username, first name, last name and a temp password (unless you know the passwords) and perform the bulk update. The Google LDAP tool my be little difficult for the less experienced, unless you are very comfortable working with Python and LDAP or if you have a large user base, it is probably worthwhile to take a serious look at some of the Google Solution Partners to assist with the migration.

3. Activate Email/DNS Cutover
Give your users a heads up that a new email system is on the horizon and define an outage period. The length of the outage will be mainly dependant on how much mail you have to move and how fast your upload bandwidth is. You should set aside an entire evening/night for the migration or do it over a weekend or other time that the mail is quiet for your business.

Google has clear instructions for changing mail exchange (mx) records on the ‘Activate Email’ link. Make sure that you have the same set of users created before cutting over. The DNS changes may take a few hours to propagate.

4. Begin moving email archives with the IMAP Migration Tool
You will need to make sure that IMAP support is enabled on your Exchange Server and port 143 or port 993 (SSL) is open on your firewall. You will also need an account that has privileges to access all the users mailboxes or each user’s password.

You can access the IMAP Migration Tool under the Advanced tools tab by clicking on ‘Setup up Mail (IMAP) migration’. Enter all the information for your Exchange server. You may not need an IMAP path prefix but you should consider excluding serveral folders (if you don’t exclude calendar and contacts they will show up as email items). It is not recommended to have more than 1 or 2 connections to the server unless your Exchange box is sitting at a data center.

Next you will be asked to specify the user accounts to migrate, once again you have a choice whether to do this one by one or via bulk upload. It is recommend to test at least one account manually before moving to bulk upload.

When entering user accounts to migrate, you will need to specify a username of the format:
YourDomain/AdminUserName/UserMailbox. The password you specify in the next field is that of the AdminUserName you designated.

When you test the connection, if successful, it will list the folders found and the matching excluded folders.

Once the migration job is submitted, Google will give a job details page that will keep you up to date on the progress. Login to the test user account and verify all the email is moved over correctly then repeat for the rest of the users.

5. Export/Import Calendar and Contacts
For clients that issue temporary passwords, you may wish to go ahead and exported CSV files from each users Outlook for calendar and contacts and then import them into their Google account (an effective but cumbersome process). See Google help for details:

Calendar:
How do I migrate events from Microsoft Outlook Calendar to my calendar?

Contacts:
How do I export CSV files from other mail providers?
How do I import a CSV file?

There are more advanced/capable migration solutions available from Google Enterprise Professional Partners.

Note: There are no direct equivalents in Google Apps for Journal, Notes, and Tasks. Remember the Milk is a good alternative option for tasks that integrates well with Google Calendar. However, Google Tasks may suit and is now included in the standard mail set up.

6. Introduce your users to the world of Google Apps
Rather than inundating users with too much information, you may with to start them off with just the email and calendar portions of Google Apps. Once these are accepted well then you can plan on rolling out Docs and Spreadsheets.

Need more information or assistance in performing the migration? Then do not hesitate to contact me at info@clarityaustralia.com.au or call 0414 748 578.

This post has been adapted from an original found by performing a search on google.com.au

I received an email from Google about this post. (see below)

Hi Matthew,
I wanted to say thanks for the great step-by-step Exchange to Google Apps migration instructions. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but your last step may be enhanced by our deployment kit - where we give suggestions on how to get the word out to your users here:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=67775

Hope that helps!
cristin

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Cristin Frodella
Product Marketing Manager
Apps - Education Edition