It seems like lately I’ve morphed into the pied piper of e-mail. The MAPI Man. The Exchange Evangelist. Don’t get me wrong, e-mail is different things to different people. And I’m no Microsoft zealot – quite the opposite. I’m fully aware of the Open Source alternatives out there. There’s just been a convergence of sorts that has made e-mail, or Microsoft Exchange to be specific, a key theme in the work I’ve been doing in the past month.

On the one hand, I’ve been immersed in a large corporate e-mail migration, which I already touched upon in Hot Times, Summer in the City. My role in that effort has expanded, so I’ve been working with other US locations for this company to migrate off of Exchange 5.5. I find the work to be both interesting, and a little bit mind-numbing, at the same time. For example, we’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual Server technology during the migration, which I find to be pretty cool. I’m really fascinated by the various virtual server (and workstation) technologies out there. But the other aspects of the migration are not different from watching paint dry. Still, it’s satisfying to see the progress we’ve made in getting of a decade old e-mail platform. I still have some long days ahead of me as we tend to schedule the batch migrations to kick off at 4PM. And since I’m helping out two locations in San Diego, that means 6PM for me.

Besides this large-scale corporate project, I’m also helping some small shops move off of POP and IMAP platforms to Exchange. The other weekend, I helped a two-person IT recruiting agency migrate from IMAP mail to hosted Exchange 2003. IMAP isn’t a bad platform, but they had clearly outgrown it and needed something more industrial strength. I have to pat myself on the back, as it was as seamless a migration as they come. I coordinated with the person who had managed their DNS so that the MX records were re-pointed to the new Exchange host. I had both laptops their in my possession, which had been using Outlook Express (!) for their IMAP accounts.

Once I had their Exchange 2003 mailboxes ready, I setup Outlook 2003 and pulled in all their e-mail folders and messages from OE, then synched everything back to the Exchange server. They had quite a lot of e-mail data, so there were some times I just had sit back and wait for the import engines to complete. Once that was done, I tested message flow, which was working perfectly in both directions. Next, I fired up a remote control session into a desktop PC at the home office of one of the partners to configure Outlook 2003 for the new Exchange mailbox. The final act was performed when they came by to pick up their laptops. One of them had a Treo 650 that they had been using with VersaMail to send and receive messages wirelessly. I loaded up the Goodlink software and linked it with his Exchange mailbox. Now his Treo became an always-on extension of their Exchange mailbox, with calendar, contacts and all e-mail folders linked over the air.

I have a couple more clients that I will be migrating to Hosted Exchange in the coming weeks. It hasn’t quite gotten to the point of being routine, because every migration has something different about it (Macs, BlackBerries, PocketPCs, etc). I just love being the catalyst of change for some folks who have been slumbering in POP-Mail land. Sure, it’s quite a bit more money to go from a POP mail account to Exchange, but once I explain the benefits, it’s an easy sell.