One migration I did, the customer was using ISA server 2006, the customer did not like ISA and wanted to get rid of it, despite my opposite opinion of ISA as a good and perfect firewall/proxy solution, I helped the customer or at least tried to move him into a MikroTik router that was installed in his site… the amount of rules and configurations done on ISA made that quick transition so slow and time consuming…

So to save both our migration and time, I decided to keep ISA for him now and just allow access to all Google domains for now so the migration can go well…

All I had to do was creating a domain set and add in it:

  • *.google.com
  • *.gmail.com
  • *.gstatic.com
  • *.googleusercontent.com
  • *.googleapis.com

I allowed HTTP, HTTPS traffic coming from internal network to these domains, and every user even the users who did not have internet … Read the rest “Allowing access to Google Apps through ISA/TMG”

I’ve done some migrations recently from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps… While the migration itself went successful, I came across many serious issues that affected the overall satisfaction of the customer…

I tried my best to solve and workaround those issues during the migration process, and it seems everything went well after what I did…

One of the major problems was, the local users were unable to send to the users who got migrated to Google already!, this problem was because of simply because they are still on Exchange server, and the emails they are sending to their colleagues basically never leave Exchange to be routed outside to Google.

One workaround I managed to use was to put the testing domain that Google gives to the Google Apps users to a good use (MAIN_DOMAIN.test-google-a.com)

I have created mail contact item for every user on the Exchange points to … Read the rest “Some points to remember while migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps”