Managing Co-existence While Migrating From Groupwise To Exchange

By Author: Technova
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While performing migration from GroupWise to Exchange, organizations come across a time period of interoperability or co-existence of both servers. Running Exchange and Novell GroupWise message systems, only small-scale organizations can perform GroupWise to Exchange migration within a period of one night. Hence while performing migration from GroupWise to Exchange, organizations are suggested to maintain coexistence, so that Exchange 2000 and GroupWise users can continue to communicate and collaborate with each other at the time of migration, no matter whether the messaging systems are on.
Activation of Distribution List Expansion in GroupWise- In order to facilitate coexistence and directory synchronization between Exchange and GroupWise messaging systems, Exchange comprises of Connector for Novell GroupWise. Also, Exchange Service Pack 1 (SP1) introduced the Calendar Connector to allow GroupWise and Exchange users to schedule meetings with each other and share calendar information.
At the time of coexistence, Exchange users can see GroupWise distribution lists in the Exchange Global Address List. Also, when ...
... Exchange user sends a message to GroupWise distribution list, only a single copy of the same is sent to the GroupWise connector. Moreover, if the user wants to activate distribution list expansion, GroupWise can deliver message to all distribution members in the list.
Co-existence and Migration requirements for GroupWise - In order to make GroupWise to Exchange migration successful, user needs to have the GroupWise version 4.1 API Gateway Netware Loadable Module (NLM) in your GroupWise system. Moreover, to activate distribution list expansion, user needs to install GroupWise Patch 2 for API NLM/OS2 (gw41api.exe) released in '99. Both of these are available from Novell.
Activating Distribution List Expansion - When the distribution list is activated in GroupWise, the GroupWise API Gateway receives the message and sends the same to all members of the distribution lists. In order to activate Distribution List in GroupWise:
Search for Ngwapi.prm file installed in your GroupWise system in the API Gateway root directory.
Open the Ngwapi.erm using Notepad (Windows) or Edit (Netware)
Find the line containing string ;/group, and remove the semicolon from the string
Save this file and restart the API gateway for the changes to take place.