Microshat Exchange migration to Google CrApps

clean2g · 07-21-2008

Well I was asked to migrate the corporate email running on Exchange to Google Apps. All I have to say is, it sucks. Here is just a few of the issues I'm running into:

- Can't figure out how to migrate external contacts
- Can't create mail groups without users
- Can't create a mail group that forwards to another mail group
- Can't set individual accounts to forward as an admin
- Can't check if any of this will work because Exchange is still active and mx records will need to changed

I feel bad for the person who is going to upload all the mail, the process looks brutal. No idea what will happen to the BlackBerry enterprise server, it already freaks out with Exchange if you just update the Exchange server. Why can't people create software that works and that is cross-platform compatible? That's like the first rule you learn in programming, cross-platform compatibility. When you get to the price factor though, Google Apps > Exchange, it's free basically. Exchange costs are stupid, not to mention the overhead of hardware. Ugh, technology is a bitch.

Matt D. · 07-21-2008

Whose bright idea was it to do this in the first place, and why are you doing it with a live production server and not in a replicated test environment first?

Why are you complaining about hardware overhead? Learn to use virtual machines.

The reason you're having those problems is simply because those features most likely don't exist in Gmail.

clean2g · 07-21-2008

The company is shutting down but they want to keep things in a minimal state to give customers time to find new solutions. I never set any of this up and it's a mess, I was just asked to help migrate. We did use virtual machines, but the douche sys admin that set all this up wasted servers by putting different VM's on different machines for all sorts of bs apps, obviously one of the reasons he was fired. He bought two blade servers to run BGP ??? Yea, I just wish Google would've taken more of this into account, esp. since the majority of corporate email runs on Exchange.