cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

EmailXtender migration for a small site

McCu
Level 4
Partner

I have a customer that wants to migrate from EMC EmailXtender to Enterprise Vault.  Is there a Symantec approved method for doing this rather than resorting to an expensive solution like Transvault?  I have talked to Transvault about this customer but the price would make the migration unfeasible.

 

Any ideas?

 

McCu

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

PST_Accelerator
Level 3
Partner Accredited

How small a site are you referring to? Is it possible to export the data from the EMC EmailXtender archives to "containers" (PST Files) and import them in to EV .. If the site is small enough, and you can ensure the data owners of the data before import, it would be a very cost effective way of going about it.

View solution in original post

8 REPLIES 8

Rob_Wilcox1
Level 6
Partner

Symantec don't have a product piece that does this.

 

Contact other Symantec partners like QUADROtech, bluesource and others... perhaps?

Working for cloudficient.com

PST_Accelerator
Level 3
Partner Accredited

How small a site are you referring to? Is it possible to export the data from the EMC EmailXtender archives to "containers" (PST Files) and import them in to EV .. If the site is small enough, and you can ensure the data owners of the data before import, it would be a very cost effective way of going about it.

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

I've been doing a migration from MailXtender to EV90 using TransVault. The problem you will run into is that MailXtender does not store all data in the archived messages. We found for instance that the folder-location (where is the messages shortcut in the maibox), bcc information etc is not stored. This poses a problem if you want to perform a good and identical migration. I've worked closely with TransVault, but it basically came down to 'what you don't have, you cannot migrate'. We reverted back to exporting data from MailXtender into PST's, and importing that into EV. That works like a charm.. It is a lot of work, but fortunately I am not the one doing the export to PST, only the import :)

We're doing 360 mailboxes (+ MailXtender archives + the legal archive from MailXtender) which is taking approximately 2 months.

It will take more time to think about a solution for the shortcuts to the archived items (like removing the shortcuts referring EMC archived data, and ingesting EV shortcuts), but that is possible.

Regards. Gertjan

McCu
Level 4
Partner

The customer has 150 mailboxes.  I think the manual process is the way I will be going,

McCu
Level 4
Partner

Thanks for sharing your working knowledge, it's been hard hard to find any information on this process!  It looks like the only way to do this for a smaller site is manually.   I don't know a lot about MailXtender, do you know if it is possible to "rehydrate" the user mailboxes or is PST the only way to go?

GertjanA
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hi McCu.

AFAIK it is possible to restore items from EmailXtender back into the mailboxes (ie 'unshortcut'), but I am not sure about the process. The disadvantage is that you need more space for your Exchange stores.

I think it is up to you what you do.

Restoring items in the inbox, then re-archive in EV might be easiest, restoring to PST, then importing to EV might be quicker. In both cases, you need to verify if you can delete the EMC shortcuts (message class can be used to search for them (IPM.Shortcut I believe))

 

Regards. Gertjan

Prone2Typos
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited Certified

Hello.

 

I know this is addressed but I thought I would share my expirence in this. This is what I am actually doing professionally right now... so I have some expirence in it. My organization does is a leader in doing these sorts of migrations. We are a TransVault partner and have a similiar migation utility we made and sell (globanet migrate).

 

A lot of this depends on what you want. You can restore (rehydrate) the items back to a users mailbox and then migrate have the items archived in EV. This is one way to do it. Prior to letting EV touch your site.... I would strongly encourage you to disable the EMX message class from being archived in EV. It causes all sorts of problem for any migration.

 

That said every solution has its shortcomings. We can certianly do migrations that rebuild the message location and folder structure, and we can also rebuild bcc information that was initially captured by EMX into an envelope created for archived messages so that you can have consistancy in discovery and compliance searches.

 

I think there are a few things you have to consider:

1) Do you want to migrate Journal content from EMX to EV? If yes is this data going to be used for Compliance or Legal discovery?

2) Do you only want to migrate items that are represented as shortcuts in a users mailbox or do you want to migrate all contents that is in the EMX archive for that user?

3) Do you want to convert shortcuts as part of this process?

 

All of this can be done and there are a lot of options within each of these. I think this gets you off to a start.

 

There is also the issue of understanding some of the differnces between EMX and EV's archiving methodology. In an EMX enviornment that is Journaled, most times the content is archived by the Journal..and then is retroactively shortcutted in the user mailbox. This leaves one single archive where users have access to the content they were sent.

 

EV has seperate archives for each user.. and a Journal can be associated with several targets.

The reason this is important is because if you are seeking to migrate the Jouranl and all the users archived content... you end up migrating about double what you presaently have. It gets Single instanced by EV and does not take up double the space (depending on EV config) but it still goes through the migration process.

 

There is a third party partner product that emulates EMX access functionality in EV>....but I dont know much about it outside of its existance.

 

I hope this helps. If you would like to talk to someone about this so you can have some help in guaging what direction is best for you... please let me know and I will get someone in contact with you.

I hope this helps.

 

J

Gert i have a giant load of questions and stumbled on your answers, I was wondering if you could help me out.

I have an old EmailXtender box, where i need the data exported to pst files (on users basis) how when why what (narrowed down to simple questions) :)

I don't have the old exchange server that was used for it before (otherwise i would have used the search plugin) and i don't have the user once created for the webinterface.

can you help me, contact me on Xtender@fairware.dk

Thanks in advance.