Why We Can’t Automatically Migrate Users’ Oracle Calendars

We have recently received some inquiries as to why we can’t migrate users’ Oracle calendars to our new Exchange environment. We would like to provide further explanation as to why this is problematic.

As mentioned previously, our vendor partner recommended strongly against using the automated migration tool that was available to us, as it did not reliably migrate calendar appointments or the associated data.

We also tested a manual process for moving entries into Exchange; unfortunately our testing found that the calendar data did not migrate reliably. Calendar data that was exported from Oracle calendar and imported into the Exchange environment was missing key elements. The list of specific issues includes:

• room resources are dropped
• meetings do not retain meeting ownership
• meeting confirmations were dropped (all participants are listed as ‘did not confirm’)
• recurring meetings are split into individual meetings

Our choices were to:

• use an automated migration strategy that could not be trusted and would require a lot of manual cleanup
• have users manually export and import calendar entries that would require a lot of manual cleanup
• start fresh and recreate calendar entries manually

After much research, testing and discussion, the latter choice was taken.

Populating Your Exchange Calendar

We are asking each meeting owner/designate (i.e. the person who originally created the meeting in Oracle calendar) to recreate their entries in the new environment.

Our recommendation is to create calendar entries in Exchange working forward from November 5th, using Oracle calendar as your guide. Remember to only re-create entries where you were the meeting owner. The entries created by someone else will begin to appear as others undertake the same process.

While there is significant effort required to populate the calendar in the near term, which should not be underestimated, the work is spread over many hands.

Thanks to everyone who will be putting in the effort to create the new calendar entries.