Summary: The choice between good emailing platforms is endless. GroupWise and Office 365 are both great in their own league, however, for an organization looking to take their on-premise email setup to the cloud, Office 365 seems to be a natural choice. Performing GroupWise archive to Office 365 migration in such a scenario can be a challenge, but with a product as competent and efficient as Stellar Converter for GroupWise- Technician, the task becomes a lot easier.
Novell GroupWise gives its users access to dynamic flexibility, administrative features, social threading, ease of management, and more. It also provides top-notch security to users at a reasonable cost. Even so, many GroupWise users are migrating to Office 365 because of the platform’s user-friendliness, security, and speed as compared to GroupWise. Plus, there’s the added advantage of having and emailing system on the cloud which is way more cost-effective than an on-premise platform and it is easy to learn.
Migrating from GroupWise to Office 365 is not an easy task, and especially difficult is GroupWise archive to Office 365 migration. There are a lot of steps involved and it comes with its share of risks. But when an organization-wide email migration is undertaken, archive mailboxes cannot be left behind.
So if your organization is planning to make a shift from GroupWise to Microsoft 365, you’ll need to include the below-mentioned steps for GroupWise archive mailbox migration in your migration strategy to make the process complete.
Steps to perform GroupWise Archive to Office 365 Migration
The process of migrating archived emails from GroupWise to Outlook PST is essentially an easy process of clearing your current mail in GroupWise, moving archived e-mails back into your current GroupWise mailbox, and then migrating to your Office/Microsoft 365 account.
By following these simple steps below, you can perform GroupWise archive mailbox migration in no time.
Note: If you have never archived your mails in GroupWise, these steps do not apply to you.
- You need to be logged in to your account, which can easily be done by putting your username & password into GroupWise client application on your laptop/PC.
- Please confirm that all your current emails in GroupWise have already been migrated to Outlook before you carry out any further steps as these e-mails will be deleted from GroupWise as part of this process. To do this check your Outlook account and make sure the e-mails are visible there.
Note: DO NOT continue with the procedure if any earlier migration was unsuccessful or remained incomplete.
- Once you have checked that all your e-mails are visible in Outlook, delete all your current e-mails in GroupWise except the archived mail. ONLY delete current e-mails DO NOT delete archived e-mails. The steps to do this are mentioned below:
- Clear your inbox by first selecting the mailbox folder on the left. Click any email in your inbox and then select all mails by hitting CTRL + A.
- Now press the Delete key on your keyboard. Or you can also right-click at the selection and select “Delete”. This will delete all the mails in your Mailbox folder.
- Follow the same procedure to delete sent mails by selecting “Sent Items” on the left-hand panel to delete all mails from “Sent Items”.
- You will also need to delete any folders you have created within your inbox, sent box and cabinet. To do this, select a folder from the left-hand side of your screen. Press DELETE or right-click and select DELETE from the drop-down menu.
- Repeat this process for every custom folder, until all folders are deleted.
- After deleting all the emails only an empty mailbox and the original built-in GroupWise folders should be visible.
- Click on “ONLINE” button in the upper left corner of the window and then select “Archive”. This will take you to the existing archive folder.
Note: This option is visible only for existing archive folders. If not visible that means the GroupWise software is not correctly configured.
- In the archive folder, manually un-archive all the items.
- Select a folder from the left side.
- Highlight any email in that folder.
- Press CTRL + A to select all the emails.
- Right click on any highlighted email and uncheck the “Archive” checkbox.
Repeat steps (a) to (d) to un-archive all the emails in each folder or sub-folders inside the archive. Please note that folders can’t be un-archived themselves, only the emails inside the folders can be un-archived.
- This is an optional step. To prevent un-archived email from intermixing with live Outlook mailbox, move all the un-archived mails into a single folder before migration. For this, follow the below-mentioned steps:
- Exit the archive by clicking “Archive” button on the upper left corner and select the name.
- Right-click over the GroupWise mailbox on the left and click ‘New folder’. Rename the folder as GroupWise Archive.
- Drag and drop all the un-archived emails into this folder.
- Now to complete the migration, you’ll need to initiate a re-migration of the account into Outlook.
Note: It is strongly recommended to check if all the archived items are visible in Outlook mailbox after migration.
After the above-mentioned steps have been followed, your GroupWise archive will be successfully migrated into Outlook. From Outlook, a direct data export can easily export all the data to Office/Microsoft 365.
What to do if this doesn’t work?
If the above-mentioned steps don’t work for you, your migration gets interrupted, you find the process too tedious, or it takes a lot of time, there’s an alternative approach for you to perform the migration with ease. Quickly download Stellar Converter for GroupWise Technician and use it to export your GroupWise mailbox to Office/Microsoft 365 directly. The software works on a scan-preview-save methodology to extract data from GroupWise mailboxes and provides the option to directly save the converted data to your Office 365 account.
Conclusion
Manual migrations though free of cost, often prove to be difficult and time-taking. When faced with the need to undertake GroupWise archive mailbox migration, if you have time to spare and some risk-taking capacity, go for the above mentioned manual process. For a safe, efficient, and accurate GroupWise archive to Office 365 migration uses Stellar Converter for GroupWise Technician version of the software.
Read More: Save GroupWise converted mails to Office 365
