dCal Data Migration Planning Guide
Will you migrate data from an existing group calendaring system?
If your group has an existing group calendaring system, you must decide whether your group needs to move existing data from that system to dCal. If you decide that you need to migrate data, OIT may be able to assist if:
- You need to move a substantial amount of data.
- Your existing system is one for which there exists practical tools to aid in the migration.
If you have only a small amount of data to migrate, or practical migration tools do not exist, you may decide to move data manually.
Migrating data from an existing group calendaring system
If you ask OIT to assist in the migration of data from your existing group calendaring system to dCal:
- First, you must complete the dCal Consultation Request. This will provide OIT with some background information.
- In order to facilitate communication between your group and OIT, you must identify a dCal Coordinator (see Departmental/Group dCal Support Guide).
- Your group's local IT support staff will be responsible for a major part of the data migration, including serving as the department's technical liaison, providing data exports from any existing group scheduling system and assisting with testing. OIT provides consultation, documentation and tools and may perform data imports into dCal where feasible.
In addition, be prepared to discuss the following:
- Resources
- How does your group currently schedule meeting rooms and other resources (for example, a projector)?
- Who manages these resources?
- Prepare a list of known resources.
- You will need to select a resource administrator who will coordinate requests for setup of new resources or changes.
- How much history will be imported? Will some of the history be archived?
- In your current group calendaring system, does your group currently use contacts/address lists or tasks/to dos lists?
To help you think through some more issues related to resources, we recommend visiting our resources support page
Data which cannot be migrated
As part of the consultation, OIT will assist in identifying data that cannot or will not be migrated (e.g. contact lists) and in devising tactics to help you and your users transfer such data.
Technical Requirements
- The account ID in the current calendaring system must be equal to the person's NetID. If not, the account ID must be changed or your group will need to provide a correspondence table of account IDs to NetIDs.
- If the current calendaring system contains an email address field for each person, that field must be populated for each person. Furthermore, the email address in the current calendaring system must be equal to the person's email address in the LDAP enterprise directory. If not, the email address in the current system must be changed to match what is in the LDAP enterprise directory.
- If a person has already self-provisioned, any data in dCal before the migration will still be there after the migration, resulting in a combined calendar that may have duplicate entries or garbage data, depending on whether that person was entering real entries or test data in dCal before the migration.