Difference between revisions of "Retain Address Book"

Revision as of 16:01, 25 February 2015

Address Book

Here we will discuss the t_abook table in the database, which holds the "address book" info. This might also be a good place to discuss how Retain gets the data via LDAP from Exchange, SOAP via GroupWise, and csv files for O365 via powershell scripts.

SOAP via GroupWise

The Trusted Application Key allows Retain full access to the GroupWise API to ask for the List of users and groups which is handed off via the SOAP protocol.

It is important to make sure that the name and the code of the Trust Application Key match in Retain and in GroupWise. A convenience but would not be considered a security best practice would be to copy the key code into the description of the Key so you can retrieve it later.

LDAP via Exchange

Retain logs into Active Directory with the Impersonation User Account and accesses the homeMDB field.

That directory path allows Retain to retrieve the homeMDBBL field from Active Directory which provides the list of mailboxes in Exchange.

O365 via Powershell

Retain uses the data in the exchangeusers.csv and exchangegroups.csv to allow users to log into Retain the first time. If exchangeusers.csv is blank (as sometimes happens). Once they have logged in Retain uses its internal database of user credentials.

One of the big things about using sync365.ps1 is that you have to set up a recurring task in Task Scheduler so that it is updated regularly (eg Nightly) set to go off before the archive job.

One of the more common failures is that the sync365.ps1 script runs but overwrites the file with a 0 byte file because of some kind of connection failure.

To add robustness to the system the customer should create create a powershell script that will copy the current version of exchangeusers.csv and exchangegroups.csv to a safe place if it is not 0 bytes. Since that is a Microsoft thing, it is not something GWAVA supports.

Automate with Task Scheduler Once you have created the addressbook script you will want to save a backup of those .csv files in case you have a problem later.

To automate it you can use the Task Scheduler Give it a description like: Retain address book synchronization script for Office365 needs to run every night before the archive job so all new users are archived.

Choose: “Runs whether users is logged in or not” If there is an outage you don’t want to have to worry about something like this only to a discover months later that new users had no messages backed up because the script wasn’t running.

Under that Actions tab: Create a New task.

• Set the Action to “Start a program”
• Program/script: powershell
• Add arguments: -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -file "C:\Retain\sync365.ps1" -Verb RunAs
• Start In: (left blank)

Under the Triggers tab: Create a New Trigger.

• Begin the task: On a schedule
• Daily: (set it to run an hour before the archive job is set to begin, but it doesn’t take that long)
• Make sure it doesn’t expire and that it is enabled.

Mailbox Mapping and Merging

This is different from what Migration Tool Kit does.

This is used when merging two email systems. The typical example is an organization migrates from GroupWise to Exchange. To make things easy for the users mailbox merging can be used to make the user's GroupWise and Exchange mailbox look like one within Retain.

Important: This needs to be setup before refreshing the address book of the new system for the first time.

Back to Retain Module Configuration