Migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Sun Communications Suite

It has been a challenging week for me so far. There are requests to migrate users from Microsoft Exchange platform to Sun Communications Suite. One from Vietnam for a 10,000 user base; another in Philippines for a 3,000 user base.

The main talking points are always:

1. How compatible is Sun Communications Suite?

2. How to migrate Exchange information to Sun Communications Suite?

Sun Enterprise Messaging Reference Architecture

To promote understanding of the Sun Java System Communications Services architecture, Sun created the Sun Enterprise Messaging Reference Architecture (SEMRA), which simulates a corporate Microsoft Exchange site consisting of 5,000 users. This reference architecture proved the concept that migration from Microsoft Exchange to a new Java Enterprise System target deployment works from a functional point of view.

In this architecture:

Tier 0 contains the load balancer (software or switch).
Tier 1 acts as the front end that provides access to the messaging applications.
Tier 2 forms the layer where the messaging data is handled by the applications.

Compatibility is easy to comply; Migration is more challenging. Luckily, Sun has a tool called SGMT (Sun Groupware Migration Toolkit).

I'll cover more on SGMT later. For now, you can read from here.