Those of you who have rebooted
their connector servers or experienced a performance hit with
message conversions already know what I’m talking about. Those
considering a migration to Exchange from cc:mail or Lotus Notes in
particular should pay close attention.
Here is the scenario; you are
currently running cc:mail or Notes in your environment and you are
planning to move to Exchange. You know that there are connectors that
come with Exchange to make the job much easier and want to use these
connectors to bring over the directory and provide a message transport
during the migration. The whitepapers paint a glorious plan for you in
black and white; Install the connector - provide directory sync and
message transport to the other system – move accounts - disable the
connector.
Having followed this procedure
countless times at many customer sites I can tell you that it works
famously as long as your migration goes quickly. The less you have to
depend on the connectors, the happier you will be in the end. The
trickiest part of the migration is the co-existence with the different
systems. I have heard of improper directory updates totally wrecking
both systems, I hear (and have personally experienced) the connectors
lock up in the middle of the day or night. In fact, I have encouraged
businesses for the last several years to build separate connector
servers so that a reboot would not affect any mailboxes.
I know all of this sounds bad and
some of you perhaps have had a better experience, but the bottom line is
support. Microsoft provides the connector tools as a migration tool and
not a long-term solution. Take a look at the readme files to learn about
the support options. If you build a long-term dependency on these tools,
you may be setting yourself up for trouble. Microsoft does not consider
these tools for long-term use so neither should you.
