Using Epicenter Server With Hosted Exchange

February 25th, 2010

Outsourcing your Exchange Server to the cloud is becoming increasingly common. We do it ourselves and have been very happy with the result. Because we use Hosted Exchange internally, Epicenter Server has supported Hosted Exchange since version 5.0, released summer of 2009.

Epicenter Server sits on top of Microsoft Outlook. If Outlook works, then Epicenter will work. Epicenter Server does not require any software to be installed on the Exchange Server, so there are no issues with custom protocols, firewalls, or complicated configurations. 

The one thing that does change with Hosted Exchange is the security configuration. With Hosted Exchange, the Exchange Server is usually on a different domain than your workstations. It also means that you don’t have unrestricted administrative control of the Exchange Server. This makes it a little more difficult to set up your permissions so that Epicenter Server can open mailboxes for other users.

For a private Exchange Server, you’d run Epicenter Server under an account with “Receive-As” privileges. This is the same way that the BlackBerry Enterprise Server is configured. In our manual, we call this Technique #1. This can’t be used in a Hosted Exchange Environment.

The best strategy for Hosted Exchange, so-called “Technique #2″ in our manual, is for the administrator to configure the Exchange account used by Epicenter Server to have All-Access permission to each target mailbox. This allows all changes to be performed by your Exchange administrator, so users don’t have to be involved. Our primary hosted testing service is Sherweb. They allow end-user administrators to configure All-Access.

The final fallback, Technique #3, requires end-users to manually share their contacts folder and configure the permissions. This is done by each user from within Outlook.

So Epicenter Server works great with Exchange in the cloud, it just requires a change in how you configure the security.

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BlackBerry or iPhone? The Corporate View

January 5th, 2010

I routinely poll our customers about the question of “BlackBerry versus iPhone.” For most end users, the deciding factor is how much email they send. The keyboard on the BlackBerry wins hands down - the virtual keyboard on the iPhone slows most people down by half.

Today I was talking to Ryan Hawkins at www.pointandclicktulsa.com.  He’s evaluating Epicenter Server for his customers. He had several excellent points about why most companies might want to stick with the BlackBerry:

  • BlackBerries are extremely durable, much more so than the iPhone. They’ll keep working after significant abuse. The iPhone isn’t fragile, but the touch screen is easy to scratch and easy to break.
  • You can pay a few dollars per month and get insurance on BlackBerries, which generously covers theft, loss, damage – most of the common problems. You can’t get this insurance for iPhones. AppleCare doesn’t cover theft or loss.
  • BlackBerries are cheap, so much so that buy one get one free is common. iPhones can cost $600 or more if you buy one outside of the upgrade cycle.

In my own experience, the ability of the BlackBerry to automatically shut off at night and turn on in the morning is a real marriage saver – my wife and I have been woken up many times in the middle of the night by the iPhone when I forgot to shut it off.

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Does Epicenter Server work with BIS?

January 4th, 2010

Our web page that describes how Epicenter Server can update BlackBerry devices shows how updates are distributed using BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), but does not say anything about updates using BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS).

It’s not possible to distribute updates wirelessly through BIS, but BIS users can get updates through the USB cradle. Here’s how it works:

  • When you configure Epicenter Server, select “Attachment” updates instead of “Exchange” updates.
  • Updates will be sent via email. Users who receive updates must be running Microsoft Outlook.
  • When users receives an update, they must double click the attachment to update their local address book.
  • Finally, each user synchronizes the BB using the USB cradle.

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Converting Large Filing Cabinets from AOL to Gmail

December 16th, 2009

Every so often we hear from a potential customer who has been using AOL for ten or fifteen years and has a very large personal filing cabinet. They are concerned about whether ePreserver can convert AOL to Gmail with such a large filing cabinet.

The answer is yes, and a customer recently sent us a screenshot to prove it:

95000 messages converted from AOL to Gmail
95000 messages converted from AOL to Gmail

This is the summary screen after ePreserver completed, showing that over 95,000 messages were converted to Gmail. Because the customer had a slow Internet connection, this took almost two days, but ePreserver completed the conversion successfully.

Posted in AOL, Message Conversion, ePreserver | No Comments »

Converting Multiple Lotus Notes NSF Files

December 14th, 2009

I am commonly asked how to use Address Magic Enterprise PLUS to convert Notes to Outlook archive, an address book, and a server-based mailbox are all in different NSF files. The solution is to provide a separate conversion path between each source and destination.

Most users want to do the following conversions:

  1. Convert the Lotus Notes names.nsf file to the default Outlook Contacts folder in the Exchange mailbox.
  2. Convert the Lotus Notes a_xxx.nsf archive file to a PST file on the user’s local hard drive.
  3. Convert the messages and calendar in the Lotus Notes server-side mailbox to the Exchange mailbox.

Performing these three conversions requires the following three command lines:

Addrload nsf pst
Addrload -mrv nsf:server!! pst
Addrload -mv nsf Archive.pst

The first command converts the names.nsf address book, the second command converts the server-side messages and calendar, and the third command converts the Lotus Notes archive to a PST file in the default Outlook data directory.

You would normally place all three command lines in a batch file so that they will be run all together.

Address Magic Enterprise PLUS provides the flexibility you need to convert Notes to Outlook, supporting virtually any required mapping from folders to mailboxes or PST files. You can also convert to files on file servers, non-default contacts folders, PST files at a particular path, or non-default mailboxes.

Posted in Lotus Notes, Message Conversion, Outlook | No Comments »

How to convert Thunderbird to Outlook

December 8th, 2009

I’ve seen many questions about how to easily convert Thunderbird to Outlook. There are several “free” solutions that require no money but do require large investments in time, comprising drastic steps like sending everything out to the Internet and copying it back, or setting up a server and manually copying a folder, or even more complicated ideas.

Not only are these strategies time-consuming, they also require significant technical prowess. Many people just want a simple way to get it done.

Address Magic Personal PLUS makes it easy to convert your address book and email from Thunderbird to Outlook 2002, 2003 or 2007. (Outlook 2010 support is coming soon!) It takes four clicks to copy your email and another four clicks to copy your default address book. You can see screen shots for how easy this is:

Address Magic Personal PLUS Screen Shots

By following this short wizard, all of your email is copied. Your folder hierarchy is maintained, your messages are transferred with the urgency, dates, read/unread indicator, and other flags. Large files are supported with no difficulty; 2-GB mail folders are routinely transferred at up to 300 MB/minute.

Address Magic also takes care of putting everything in the correct folder. For example, the Thunderbird “Sent” folder is converted to the Outlook “Sent Items” folder.

There are two folders that aren’t converted. The “Trash” folder is ignored. If you want to convert your trash, then copy the contents to another folder. The “Unsent” is not converted so as to prevent messages from being sent by both Thunderbird and by Outlook.

To transfer your default address book from the Thunderbird Personal Address Book to the default Outlook Contacts folder, run Address Magic again and choose to convert Address Books. You don’t need to choose the folder names in this case – Address Magic automatically handles using the correct default folder in each email application.

You can learn more about using Address Magic Personal PLUS to convert Thunderbird to Outlook.

If you have more than 25 users, you should instead use Address Magic Enterprise PLUS.

Posted in Message Conversion, Outlook, Thunderbird | No Comments »

Why are mbox dates converting wrong?

December 8th, 2009

I received a problem report from a customer today that Address Magic Personal was converting the dates in his mbox file to the wrong time in Outlook, but that the dates transferred correctly with our competitors’ products. It’s a rare day that our competitors do a better conversion than we do, so I took a look at the data. The first line in the mbox file (the “mbox time”) looked like this:

From ozt@test.com  Sat Jan 18 19:15:01 1997

You’ll notice that there’s no timezone on this line.  For other dates, such as the sent date and the SMTP received date, the timezone is included. For example:

Date: 18 Jan 97 16:08:00 +0100

Since the mbox line doesn’t have a timezone, Address Magic uses the local timezone. This customer was in a different timezone from where the mbox file had been created, so the dates were transferring with the wrong timezone. You might think that copying the timezone from one of the other lines would make sense, but in fact that is usually wrong because SMTP servers can be anywhere in the world.

With Address Magic Enterprise mbox conversion, you can use the command line parameter “-i IgnoreMailboxDate=1″ to force Address Magic Enterprise to ignore the “From ” line, but this choice does not exist with Address Magic Personal. The workaround is to change your system timezone for the duration of the conversion.

The reason that our competitors’ products worked was that they ignored the mbox time and instead used the last “Received:” time. Since this customer was using webmail, the “Received” time matched the mbox time and so appeared to produce the correct date. In fact, the date would have been wrong for anyone who used POP3 instead of webmail.

There are actually three date fields in an mbox message (which includes Netscape and Thunderbird.) “Date” is the date that the email was sent. “Received” is when the message passed through a particular SMTP server. The “From “ line before each message is the date that the email was written to the mbox file, which matches the Outlook “Received” date (which is NOT the same as the mbox “Received” field.)  There is no way to have Outlook display the “Received” date from the SMTP server.

If you’ve gotten the impression that determining dates is complex, you are right. There are other problems, such as rounding versus truncation, that make it a complex task to determine exactly why any two dates do or don’t match.

Posted in Message Conversion, mbox | No Comments »

Does the software work?

December 7th, 2009

The biggest question we get from our customers is, “Does your software work?” Converting some of the formats we support, such as AOL, is exceptionally difficult.The answer is yes, it works, and it works well. If it didn’t work well, we wouldn’t ship it. We’ve actually removed features from the products when they haven’t worked well for our customers.

We’ve spent twelve years making our software the best it can be. We sell our software to the government, the Fortune 500, small business owners, and many, many home users. We are a small company and keeping those customers happy is why we’ve been here for twelve years.

Does our software always work? The honest answer is that because of viruses, damaged system configurations, hardware failures, and other problems beyond our control there are some situations where our software does not do what you want it to. That’s true of any software you buy, and that’s why we offer an unconditional money back guarantee. The difference between us and most software companies is that we’ll give you a refund even if the problem isn’t our fault.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »