1. NetMail 3.5 to GroupWise 7 Migration E. Axel Larsson Drew University elarsson@drew.edu TTP EMEA Conference - January 2007

2. Agenda Background and Motivation GroupWise 7 System Design Migration Process and Timetable Tools and Integrations

3. Some background… Drew University  Located in northern New Jersey  Consists of a College of Liberal Arts, Theological, and Graduate school  Approximately 2,500 student FTEs  Largely residential  Standard laptop program for all CLA students Highly managed student computers Enterprise services on student notebooks.

4. History Drew has provided basic email service to all students, faculty, and staff since 1989..  DEC All-In-One (OpenVMS) through 1998  PMDF IMAP w/ Netscape Communicator 4.x + IMP Webmail (1998 – 2002)  Novell NetMail IMAP w/ Mozilla Mail + NetMail WebAccess (2002 – 2006)  Today: Novell GroupWise 7 SP1 w/ Windows and Cross-Platform clients + WebAccess

5. Previous NetMail Deployment Originally on Solaris (2001-2003)  Sun Enterprise 450 Migrated to Red Hat AS 2.1 in Summer 2003  Single-server, HP DL 360 G3  300GB of Fibre-attached SAN storage  Supported all employee and student mail, alumni forwarding addresses, and mailing lists.  Symantec CarrierScan for Anti-Virus GWGuardian Anti-Spam/AV added in 2004  Deployed on Windows Server 2003

6. Why Switch? Change in administration and change in expectations…  Calendars  Mobile device support NetMail futures…  Insufficient information / transparency re: Hula to make a business decision. Already contemplating a change to client software for existing solution.  Mozilla Suite to Mozilla Thunderbird

7. Why GroupWise? Relevant experience already on hand…  Novell Cluster Services for 3 years  GroupWise trial within technology area for 1 year  Confidence in our ability to support the solution BlackBerry support recently available. GW 7 client compared favorably with Outlook Cost containment  No additional software licensing budget allocated for this project.  Administration cost needed to stay at 1 FTE or less

8. Pilot project (Fall 2005) Moved all technology staff to GroupWise. President’s Office migrated.  Most pressing need was getting the presidential calendar in GW with appropriate proxy access for his staff. BlackBerry Enterprise Server rollout.  Technology staff.  President.  Selected cabinet-level staff.

9. Moving forward – Formation of a GroupWise task-force. Representatives from all technology areas:  Computing and Network Services Systems Administration Enterprise Applications User Support / Helpdesk  Instructional Technology Services Training Documentation  Administrative Computing

10. Objectives Use this as an opportunity to improve email service levels.  Implement clustering for fault-tolerance Streamline the migration process  Self-service tools.  Copious training and support resources Give people a reason to switch  Greater enterprise feature set, calendars, mobile devices, etc.

11. GroupWise System Design Best practice reference:  “Success with Clustering GroupWise 7” - Gregg Hinchman 2 node NetWare 6.5 SP5 cluster built for pilot in Fall 2005  Standalone GW system used by University Technology migrated. 1 PO + 1 domain.  New primary domain, GWIA, WebAccess, and Employee PO added. 2 nodes and 2 student POs added in March

12. GroupWise System Design Final layout:  4 nodes, 9 cluster resources One primary domain / MTA Two GWIAs / domains  Internet mail (SMTP) GWIA  GWIA to support IMAP/SMTP clients One WebAccess agent / application / domain GroupWise Messenger Four Post Offices  University Technology PO (100 accounts - 50GB)  Employee PO (900 accounts, 500 used regularly - 150GB, 1gb mail quotas)  2 Student POs (1,500 accounts each - 150GB each, 200mb mail quotas)  GW agents run from clustered volumes and in protected address spaces

13. GroupWise System Design Additional servers and services  HP DL360 G3 running Win2K3 for GWGuardian  2 VMWare ESX virtual machines BlackBerry Enterprise Server, GWMonitor service, and IDM Remote Loader for GW SLES 9 Postfix / Mailman server  Replacement for NetMail listserv  LDAP alias replacement for @alumni.drew.edu forwarding  Coming soon / in progress GroupWise Mobile Server GW WebAccess migration to SLES 10

14. GroupWise System Design IDM Integration  Where to run the driver? IDM engines running on SLES 9 servers GW driver needs filesystem access to GW domain DB. Remote mount from a linux box is not supported. Solution - Remote Loader service on Windows box, domain DB access over NCP with Client32.  Policy decisions Creation - based upon aux class attribute Placement  Employee / Technology POs - based on group membership  Student POs - Random placement

15. A Phased Deployment Phase 1 – Early Adopters  March 1, 2006 – May 1, 2006  New users were still set up on NetMail by default.  Users could “opt-in” through a self-service web site. Faculty/staff only.  Migration tools available: Transend Migrator (third-party) for moving IMAP mail and Mozilla address books.  University Technology student employees moved to GW for training and support purposes.

16. A Phased Deployment Phase 2 – Full Deployment  May 1, 2006 – November 1, 2006  New users created on GroupWise.  New computers come with GW client preinstalled – all existing images updated.  Self-service tools available, GW now available for students. Enhanced migration tools available: Home-grown server-side IMAP copier Home-grown Mozilla address book converter.

17. A Phased Deployment Phase 3 – Compulsory Migration  All remaining GW accounts turned on November 1, 2006.  Old NetMail system remains available for migration of old email messages only.  Users have until March 1, 2007 to retrieve old messages. Phase 4 – NetMail discontinued  March 1, 2007 – Old email server decommissioned.

18. Tools to help with the Migration Self-service account activation  Web-based “wizard” points user to docs, client install instructions, etc. and allows for one-click account activation.  Sets up forwarding on the old NetMail system.  Creates GW account by toggling aux class attribute which triggers IDM driver. Self-service address book converter  Converts exported Mozilla address books into a.vcf format which can be imported into GW.  Web-based  Developed by a student employee in PHP

21. Tools to help with the Migration Self-service mail copy utility.  Moves users mail from NetMail to GroupWise using IMAP  Web-based Users are presented with a list of folders to migrate Actual migration is submitted and performed as a background task.  Users don’t need to keep browser open or wait while migration proceeds.  Long-running daemon process maintains a pool of IMAP copier worker processes to complete migration jobs.  Developed by a student employee in PHP

23. Aftermath… Customers who were asking for the GW featureset have been very pleased with the results Surprised that compulsory migration (Nov. 1 st ) did not trigger a substantial increase in Helpdesk calls. Some complaints about performance of the Mac client. Unanticipated demand for automatic mail forwarding High GroupWise system reliability.  Minor issues with the cluster servers - Java related ABENDs on the WebAccess node.

24. For more information… depts.drew.edu/cns/groupwise E. Axel Larsson elarsson@drew.edu elarsson@drew.edu