AOL to Exchange – goodbye A.O. Smell
If you are a an avid reader of evotional.com you may have heard that our Lead Pastor just switched from his old, trusty (ha) AOL account to our exchange server. When I shared that fact as a “win” in one of our meetings this week, I followed it up with how Pigs grew wings and flew! =) Anyway, through the whole process I did learn a few things that I though I could share.
First and foremost… AOL stinks. No seriously… I’m not harping on it just to harp on it. The fact that everything is proprietary and basically locked down so exporting it out to any other program is virtually impossible is awful. They definately need to adopt some standards. So here is what I did in order to fulfill the quest to get AOL content to our Exchange server.
First I had to go into AOL and change all of the email that was set as “saved on my computer” to saved on AOL. And of course you couldn’t do it! Horrible UI they have got going there. So I found this handy little app called Transend. It was well worth the $50. It couldn’t do calendar or contacts for AOL 9.0 but it was prefect for email. The program ran for about 5 hours. Thats not the apps fault. That just how many emails there were. Once it was done, every email and folder from the AOL inbox were sitting nicely right inside Outlook. It kept the attachments too.
Next was the task of Contacts. The way I did this was to use a service that most are already probably familiar with called Plaxo. Plaxo will now sync with an AIM address and pull your contacts from that AIM address into Plaxo. Then I was able to install the Outlook Plaxo client and import the contacts into outlook and then drag them over to Exchange. The only thing I wasn’t able to recover on the contacts side with distribution groups that had been setup in AOL. I couldn’t really see any way to yank those out of AOL. Basically they would all have to be recreated by hand.
The final thing was his calendar. Fortunately he kept his calendar on his phone only. So I didn’t have to worry about trying to rescue that from the clutches of AOL’s death grip. =) The next step was to format the computer and reinstall XP Pro. No Vista for this house, we got enough problems as it is now. =)
After getting everything reinstalled properly and back up and running, he was good to go. Now he’s managing his calendar, sharing calendars, checking email the right way and we even got him setup on a Motorola Q which syncs over the air with our exchange server. I think it’s all rocking his world now. =)
Technorati Tags: AOL, Exchange Server, Outlook, Transend, Plaxo, Email Migration
I thought AOL had adopted IMAP. Wouldn’t that have made moving email a lot easier? AOL works great with my BlackBerry (though I don’t use it much).
Tim
11,056 days
Tim…
correct you are. =) That would have definately been the easiest way. However AOL gives you the option of saving your email “to my PC” which if you have done that, it wont appear on IMAP. And it was impossible to bring them back from being hosted on the PC to being hosted on AOL.
Two posts in two days! You’re a blogging fool!
After you moved to Outlook, were you able to retrieve AOL mail with Exchange? I would like to have the server retrieve AOL mail. This would allow our Motorola Q phones to syncronize with exchange only. Otherwise, it appears that I can’t get the AOL mail into the exchange folders without running a client. I need to keep the AOL email address and use it along with a exchange account.
Hey Mark,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I just saw your comment. I am using a service in order to forward all of the AOL mail to the exchange server. The service is through http://forwardamerica1.com/. The site looks kind of Janky but it does the job. There is also a small cost involved.
I think its also pretty dumb that AOL does not have a forward feature built in. I guess that’s there way of keeping you locked into their system. =)
you should have used epreserver from Connected Software. It exports your favorite places and address book from AOL.
http://www.connectedsw.com/Overview/57266