If you or some of your coworkers have started to use Oracle Connector for Outlook, the information here will help you understand the transition. Depending on how the transition is planned at your organization, you and your colleagues may not all switch to using Oracle Connector for Outlook at the same time. At some stage, it is likely that you will be temporarily coexisting with colleagues who remain on Microsoft Exchange or another system for a period of time. You will still be able to accomplish all your tasks through Microsoft Outlook, but during the period of coexistence, you may need to adjust to the way you use the software to accommodate users waiting to migrate, or external users (external attendees to meetings, identifiable by a full e-mail address or selected from your personal address book, rather than the corporate directory). During this period of coexistence, you will be relying on e-mail messages, and in some cases (depending on your version of Microsoft Outlook), calendar attachments to those e-mail messages.
Now that you have installed and configured Oracle Connector for Outlook, you can enter the finalization part of the transition. Here you will have a chance to import data if it was not automatically moved to the new system during migration. Then you will learn how to collaborate with users who are temporarily still using the old system while they are waiting to migrate to Oracle Connector for Outlook. The last part of the "Finalizing your migration" provides useful information to help you adjust to Oracle Connector for Outlook.
All the data you own follows you to the new system. If, after transitioning to Oracle Connector for Outlook, you do not see your Personal Folders (also known as PST files), you can import your data from the backup copies you made earlier. If you are using the same computer, all this transfer requires you to do is to point to the same PST location you were previously using with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. To do this, import your Contacts and Personal Folders to Oracle Connector for Outlook.
To import your Contacts and Personal Folders to Oracle Connector for Outlook, follow these steps:
Note: You can also choose to keep your Contacts and Personal Folders as a separate PST folder and not import this information to Oracle Connector for Outlook.
This section covers information on the following coexistence topics:
What Functions Are Maintained During Coexistence?
Scheduling Meetings During Coexistence
Inviting External Users to a Meeting
Sending External Users Meeting Information in an E-mail Attachment
Handling Meeting Requests from External Users
What Functions Are Lost During Coexistence?
Encountering Errors When Receiving Invitations from External Users
The following functions are still supported when scheduling between systems:
If you had previously scheduled meetings with colleagues who are still using Microsoft Exchange, you will lose ownership of these meetings because all the data you own has followed you to Oracle Collaboration Suite. However, the meeting information still exists in your calendar because all calendar data was transferred during migration.
If you have made the transition to Oracle Connector for Outlook and are invited to a meeting by a user still on Microsoft Exchange, then that meeting remains on this user's calendar. However, you can transfer a copy of the meeting information to your new system. There will be some data loss when coworkers still using Microsoft Exchange invite you to meetings. Until they migrate too, you are considered an external or foreign user to Microsoft Exchange.
Those who are still Microsoft Exchange users do not have accounts on Oracle Calendar, so they cannot access meetings directly or see your availability. This also affects the ability to respond to meetings (accept/tentative/decline). Some temporary inconsistencies may include: attendees may no longer appear in the meeting entry, links to the reserved conference room have disappeared, and updates to attendees still appearing in the meeting are no longer possible.
Follow these instructions when you are inviting users who are not using Oracle Collaboration Suite yet:
If any users or resources you are inviting to the meeting are not selected from the Oracle - Global Address List or Resources list, they will be considered external attendees. Instead of seeing the meeting in their calendars, these external users will receive an e-mail notifying them of the meeting. They will be identified as e-mail users on the Attendee Availability tab in the meeting screen.
Oracle Connector for Outlook has built-in support for the Internet Calendar convention (iCal or iCalendar). The iCal convention lets Oracle Connector for Outlook users send external invitees an e-mail message containing an attachment representing a new or updated meeting. The external attendees who use other calendar systems that support iCal can paste these attachments directly into their own calendar applications. However, because the meeting being sent is merely a copy of the original, the level of collaboration is limited as compared to meetings where all the users are on the same calendar system.
To set automatic iCal notification for external meeting recipients, follow these steps:
The surest way to receive a meeting invitation from an external user is to have the meeting information sent to you as an e-mail attachment. This produces a read-only copy of the original meeting, but it also creates a format that is a standard iCal representation of the meeting. As the invitee using Outlook with Oracle Collaboration Suite, you will receive the meeting as an attachment and be able to save it locally in Outlook. This read-only copy of the meeting does not permit a direct response (accept, decline or tentative), and indicates you, the invitee, as the Organizer. This is because the meeting is a copy of the original meeting. When you receive the meeting as an attachment, you own the meeting locally.
If you are in contact with the external user who is sending you the meeting invitation, you can tell him to use the following procedure to make sure you receive a standard calendar attachment representing the meeting:
Note: These extra steps are necessary only when Microsoft Exchange and Oracle Collaboration Suite are both being used in the same company, and collaboration through scheduling must be supported between two systems.
The following meeting attributes are not supported when scheduling between systems:
This means that if you are using Oracle Connector for Outlook to create a meeting and invite a user still using Microsoft Exchange, the user on Microsoft Exchange is an external user and cannot send a response. Similarly, if you update any meetings, the copy the external user receives is not modified. However, when you update a meeting, an e-mail notification is sent.
Depending on which version of Microsoft Outlook you and the sender are using, you may experience the following:
In order to avoid missing meetings, and any confusion that may arise from updated meetings that are not updated for users who have not made the transition, Exchange users should try to indicate any changes or updates to meetings by using the Forward as iCalendar option, or by using the Forward option to provide the recipient with an e-mail message (right-click on any meeting to get the Forward option).
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