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Painless Migration to Gmail (4493)
Track:
Portal, Communication, Process & Information Management
Program Code: 4493
ADDITIONAL PRESENTER / PANELIST:
Chris Bonhorst, IT Systems Architect, Pima Community College
LEAD PRESENTER / PANEL ORGANIZER / BOF LEADER :
James Cresawn, IT Advanced Analyst, Pima Community College
Description
In December 2009 Pima Community College (PCC) migrated 122,000 student mailboxes from iPlanet to Gmail in 28 hours using an IMAP client. PCC's transition time was much less than if we had used the methods provided by Google. Google provides two methods for importing e-mail into their Google Apps for Education domains. The first method requires CSV files containing user credentials for iPlanet and Gmail. Google's servers connect to the iPlanet IMAP server and transfer messages. The second method burdens schools to write a program which wraps each message in XML and uploads them to Google's servers. Both methods are so greatly rate limited we could not use them. We chose to use an IMAP client to connect our Luminis IMAP server to Google's IMAP servers. PCC customized the open source software 'imapsync' and developed a scheduler to submit migration jobs in parallel. This scheduler proved invaluable as it allows dynamic tuning of the number of jobs run in parallel to match the performance of our IMAP server. Performance was not limited by Google's IMAP servers. PCC's IMAP client solution enabled the migration of 122,000 student mailboxes in a little more than a day without one complaint.