Blog Entry

I am sat in my hotel room in Alabama getting ready for another week at a customer site. I quite enjoy travelling, but the nature of support means that most of these visits are organized at the very last minute with no time to prepare yourself. I was sat in Jim 'N Nick's BBQ restaurant tonight where the waitress commented on what good English I spoke. Erm, because I am. Made me smile anyway. :)

The other benefit of travelling, besides stuffing my face on new foods (collared greens was a new one on me tonight), is it gives me time to catch up on work and blogging. Tonight Alias Migration is on the menu.

Many people have probably missed it, and probably just as many don't care, but in 7.0.1 we included an alias migration tool. This is especially useful for customers in Europe and Asia that have been needing to use aliases for users that have extended characters in their names. Extended characters are illegal in email addresses so the only solution for years was to use an alias instead.

In GW6.5 we added a new field on user objects - preferred email ID, or freeform address depending on what you know it as. This allows you to enter the part before the @ on the user object and allow Internet Addressing to resolve the name. The benefit of this over the alias is that:

1. This address appears in the GW System Address book
2. It populates the eDir Internet Email address field
3. It gets returned on LDAP queries

The problem for a long time was that people weren't using this field as there was no way to migrate the data from the aliases to this new field. Well, that's where the new Alias Migration tool comes in.

The tool is found in ConsoleOne, as long as you have the SP1 snapins installed, under Tools -> GroupWise Utilities -> Gateway Alias Migration. It searches the domain for all the Gateway Alias Types and the aliases defined on them and lists them (the list will depend on what object was selected when you invoked the tool):

You are then able to select the aliases you wish to migrate. If the idomain on the alias does not exist in your Internet Addressing configuration then it will be added by the tool. The user portion will be added to the Preferred Email ID. Pretty excellent all round really.

You can read the docs here. My next post will cover another new hidden option in ConsoleOne.