Migrating email from SchoolZone to Gmail

In so many ways, the webmail component of Telecom SchoolZone is terrible. It's based on an outdated form of SquirrelMail I think, and my rollout of Google Apps at school is an attempt to replace it with something far better, Gmail. Google Apps comes with Gmail for all of our users, and they get to keep their existing email addresses. Switching to Gmail is a fairly straightforward process itself (that I'll talk about later I suppose) but trying to migrate users existing email and contacts is turning into a big job. SchoolZone email has no facility to export messages, so the method involves downloading a users emails into an Outlook pst (one folder at a time) and then uploading them using the Google Email Uploader tool. This in itself is a huge, time consuming job, but here Google falls down a bit too. The problem is that the email uploader tool doesn't support proxy authentication so fails through our school internet connection. Faced with these issues, I'm seriously thinking about not migrating messages at all, but giving the users shortcuts to SchoolZone email for their old email, and Google for their new stuff, at least for a while anyway. I can get them to forward any important messages in their own time and I'm comforting myself that it's a good opportunity to clean out some unwanted emails (even though they did this at the start of last year when my predecessor moved the school from Exchange to SchoolZone). It's ugly but easy, and will probably be all forgotten about in a few months anyway...


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About the tagline

Like a lot of people who work in IT, I didn't plan to spend my life working with technology and computers. I come from an artistic family an thought I'd be a sculptor when I grew up. Maybe I will...

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Google Apps implementation part 1

Welcome to my blog. Over the last few months I've been planning to roll-out Google Apps for Education at our school, and during the recent Christmas break, I've made a start. At the time of writing this, I've got Active Directory populating and synchronizing users and passwords with Google Apps (using the Google Directory Sync Tool). So far, I haven't publicized it to my end users (as they are all on holiday anyway...) and I haven't enabled Gmail as I need to do some more work on migrating from our existing email system. The only real gotcha that I came up against was synchronizing passwords. Active Directory stores it's passwords in binary, and the Sync tool can only read plain text, MD5 or SHA-1. To get around this, I've got this filter installed and configured on my DCs, which in turn populates an LDAP field with an SHA-1 password which is then read by the sync tool. The field doesn't get updated until the user's AD password is changed at least once, but after that it seems to work well. I haven't got Single Sign on going (and am not sure if I will try yet). So this next week it's the bit where I get to further explain to staff what Google Apps is, how it can benefit them, and how they can logon. Then it's implementing Gmail, and then rolling it out to the 800 or so girls at school