Designing a Source Extractor

You must consider many issues when designing your source extractor. For example, your source extractor will ideally extract a reasonable amount of data overnight. If you have international users, the source extractor should be easy to localize and should include appropriate code-pages. You should also consider these questions:

• What level of sophistication is required to install and configure the source extractor?
• Does a user-driven source extractor make sense?
• Where are the files going to be edited after export and before import?
• How will the files be transferred from the extract location to the import location?
• Will file transfer modify the files?
• Is the existing system going to be in use?

Also consider the following additional issues when creating your source extractor:

• Existing data If possible, copy, don’t move, the data from your existing system, so that you will have an additional copy of the data.
• Group migration If your existing system has account information in the directory, select accounts to migrate by department or location.
• Permissions Administrator or user authentication should be required to copy data from the source system.
• Primary mailbox files Mailbox files need to be edited if you’re changing the directory name. It is best to put all the directory entries into one primary file.
• Mailbox names You cannot change the common or directory name of a mailbox after you create it. If you have a new naming convention, modify every primary file that contains mailbox creation information, or modify the source extractor to select the new directory names from a file.

You should also consider each of the following issues:

• Choosing the addressing conventions
• Choosing information to extract
• Configuring command-line options
• Configuring special features

For more information, see the Microsoft Exchange Server Migration Guide.