Macquarie University, is home to approximately 35,000 students and 5,500 members of staff. The beautiful 126 hectare of park-like campus is an ideal setting for discovery and learning. Located within the high-technology corridor of Sydney’s north-west, Macquarie University graduates are highly sought-after. Macquarie University is one of Australia’s leading research universities, it is a dynamic, flexible and engaged university committed to excellence in research, teaching and global citizenship. Formed in 1964, the University prides itself on being enquiring, open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new ways of ensuring a sustainable institution.

Business Need

Macquarie University have been providing a number of email systems for staff with the main system being a Novell GroupWise system. The GroupWise setup catered for approximately 80% of staff with the remaining 20% on a variety of other systems and provided email service to staff since 2005. With approximately 5,500 users, the Novell GroupWise system spanned over 29 GroupWise Post Offices. Beneath this impressive email infrastructure ran a well managed 8 Node Novell NetWare cluster.

In 2007 Macquarie University migrated the entire student body over to Google Apps for Education. With staff and lectures on GroupWise and students using Google Apps, managing multiple systems became a very costly undertaking.

“The main issue for Macquarie University was to remove the costs and complexity of managing multiple email systems and to consolidate on one system” – Norbert Attard, Technology Project Leader at Macquarie University

Solution

With a large student user base already happy on Google Apps, the choice was obvious. Macquarie University decided to migrate away from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for it’s staff users.

Marc Bailey CIO at Macquarie University says:

“Success at cloud-sourcing email depends entirely on two factors beyond feature/benefits, namely out-of-box experience and consumer confidence. Cloud Technology Solutions delivered Macquarie University the best possible impression of our new system from the very first customer click. Combined with a great project team, some intense planning, training and communication, we were able to engender the confidence needed to rapidly reach an adoption tipping point, then smoothly proceed to completion”

Migrating staff would have been an extremely complex process as the users all took advantage of calendars and scheduling, along with maintaining contact information within the GroupWise address book. The University did not have the option to simply move to a different email system, as it did with students, it needed to migrate everything, email, calendar, chat and contacts.

Cloud Technology Solutions

Cloud Technology Solutions were the migration partner of choice to provide assistance and support with the Cloud Google Migrator, the market-leading migration tool widely used to migrate organisations to Google Apps from Novell GroupWise. The tool allows entire organisations of any size to migrate to Google Apps efficiently and with no downtime. As the Cloud Google Migrator had proven ability to migrate to Google Apps and supported email, calendar and contacts, it was a perfect match for the Universities requirements.

The migration was smooth and efficient. Simultaneously running the migration tool on 8 Dual Core 4GB workstations, Macquarie University seamlessly migrated all 5,500 users from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for Education over the course of a few weeks and with no data loss.

“Cloud Technology Solutions were invaluable in helping us migrate our staff to Google Apps. The migration tool itself was excellent and meant we reduced our migration time by about 30%. Where any problems did arise the support response was first class”

Benefits

Currently 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions around the world are using Google Apps, so Macquarie University are not alone.

Google Apps for Education now provides the entire campus community, including students, faculty, staff and alumni all the tools they need to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Providing over 7GB of email storage per student, Google Apps for Education delivers all the email and collaboration needs of Macquarie University.

“Cloud Technology Solutions Google Migrator allows organisations to seamlessly and easily migrate legacy email platforms to Google Apps significantly reducing the cost of running an IT department” – Steve Kaye, CEO, Cloud Technology Solutions

To learn more about how we can help your organisation Go Google, please contact us now.

For a PDF version of this document please complete your details below.

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Also included with the tool is updated documentation, with new advice regarding getting the best performance from the tool. The central advice is ensure that many users are processed simultaneously. More information can be found on our news post about peformance.

As usual, if there are any questions about the tool, migrating to Google Apps or for reseller enquiries, please contact us.

To download the latest build visit our download pages.

Usually the best way to obtain optimal performance, after making sure all local factors are as favorable as possible, is to migrate many users simultaneously. Google often restrict the speed at which users can be migrated, but this is on a per-user basis and not usually on a domain basis. This means that migrating one user (if the rate is limited for that user) can often take as long as migrating twenty users. It is therefore advisable to migrate as many users as possible simultaneously.

The best way to get great performance from the tool while migrating to Google Apps is to migrate many users simultaneously. Often, migrating one user can take as long as migrating twenty users.

The number of users that can be migrated simultaneously can be affected somewhat by local bandwidth restrictions. For example, if there is limited upstream bandwidth, then in this case it can make sense to limit the number of simultaneous users that are migrated. If bandwidth is high, then migrating many simultaneous users is highly recommended to achieve the best throughput. An upper limit of 20 simultaneous users is recommended. With higher numbers performance can be adversely affected by CPU and memory usage.

To migrate more than 20-25 simultaneous users, we recommend setting up multiple migration workstations, each processing many users. This way CPU and memory is only an issue per-workstation and very large numbers can be migrated at one time, providing bandwidth is high.

A recent customer, migrating over 5000 accounts, was running 8 cloned workstations each processing 20 simultaneous users, and achieved migration of thousands of users in just a few weeks.

The best way to determine performance for your site is to perform a pilot migration with a representative number of users and examine performance. Often a migration of just one user may be carried out to ensure that mails, appointments and contacts are migrated correctly, but this alone does not give a true indication of the performance that can be obtained from migrating many users simultaneously. When the performance from your site has been established, a full migration plan can be established.

To set the number of simultaneous users the tool will process, adjust the setting ‘Maximum User Threads’ in the ‘System’ section of ‘General Migration Settings’. For more information, please also see the tool documentation installed with the program.

To discuss appropriate migration strategies for your site, please contact us and we would be happy to help.

To download the migration tool, visit our migration tool pages.

Statistics

In addition to these additions to aid with setup, progress reporting in the tool has also been enhanced. Statistics were always provided on a per user basis during a migration, but the new versions of the Cloud Google Migrator feature live migration statistics for all users. This provides an at a glance view of the current status of the migration and includes detail including the average rate of items exported, the size of messages (mail only) that have been exported and imported and the total number of each item processed. If more detail on individual users is required, including down to the individual item level, this is always available on a per-user basis by clicking on the statistics information provided for each user (not shown in these images).

Setup and Configuration

Occasionally, first-time setup and configuration can be a little tricky due to the settings required in all of the connected systems.

The latest builds of the tool help address this by adding an enhanced connection tester, and (in the case of GroupWise) to allow re-registration of essential system DLLs directly from within the tool. Sometimes, following the install of the GroupWise client, some of the system DLLs required by the migration tool are not registered correctly. This can now be corrected by navigating to ‘Tools->Re-Register GroupWise DLLs’. This will attempt to locate and register the files needed for the migration tool to work correctly. Of course, if the GroupWise client is not installed, or cannot be found, this is reported to the user.

The connection tester has also been enhanced to provide more feedback about more parts of the system to help accurately diagnose the status of connections between the migration system and the Google Apps domain. This includes attempts to connect to the various systems, the location of essential files and the checking of license details. Any problems are clearly highlighted in the connection tester, and give indications of how to fix the issue. This functionality is extremely useful for first-time setup and configuration of the tool, yet also helps those more experienced with the tool to setup a new migration quickly and effectively.

Recently used configuration files are now accessible directly from the application file menu, and both the configuration file in use and the latest imported user file (if used) are both displayed in the tool. If an organisation is running many migrations with different configuration files, or sets of users, this can prove extremely useful to keep track of the configuration files in use.

Of course, detailed configuration instructions come in the documentation included with the tool and provide much more information about to configure and use the tool, including a troubleshooting section should any difficulties arise.

For more information about the tool, please see our migration tool pages or contact us.

For more information about the tool, or to download a demo version, please visit our migration tool pages.

The Cloud Google Migrator can migrate your organisations Novell GroupWise or Microsoft Exchange system to Google Apps.

This latest release of the Cloud Google Migrator is a bug fix release and fixes the following issues.

• Fixed an issue with configuration saving, importing and exporting users
• Fixed a rare issue with skipping migration of some system address book contacts
• Fixed an issue where a malformed message would result in a spurious warning

Download a trial of the tool now from our download area.

For more information about the migration tool or if you have an support queries, please contact us.

The Cloud Google Migrator can migrate your organisations Novell GroupWise or Microsoft Exchange system to Google Apps.

This latest release of the Cloud Google Migrator brings the following new features and fixes:

• Full support for Exchange 2000
• Made GroupWise Archive label name configurable
• Fixed an issue with resolving Exchange 2000 user URLs

Exchange 2000 is now also fully supported by the migration tool. That brings the list of supported systems to:

• Novell GroupWise 6.5 to 8
• Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007

Download a trial of the tool now from our download area.

For more information about the migration tool or if you have an support queries, please contact us.

• Check installation integrity on application startup
• Fallback on alternate message export if normal GroupWise message export fails
• Fixed an issue with removal of attachments on oversized messages
• Made maximum permitted message size configurable
• Fixed a problem with some Exchange 2000 installations with invalid XML characters

Download a trial of the tool now from our download area.

For more information about the migration tool or if you have an support queries, please contact us.

• Support for Microsoft Exchange 2000 migrations
• More flexible licensing scheme

BETA support for Microsoft Exchange 2000 has now just been added to the tool. The same technologies used for Exchange 2003 and 2007 are used with Microsoft Exchange, but if you do run into any problems with Exchange 2000, please let us know.

For more information about the migration tool or if you have an support queries, please contact us.