The Lotus Notes Era
In the early days of our existence,
Binary Tree ventured into the challenging and complex world of
email migration by creating products that facilitated change. In the mid-1990s, we developed and marketed a number of separate tools for migrating mail, calendar, and contacts migrated from a source system to Lotus Notes.
This approach initially satisfied the market need; however, it also proved challenging for customers who had multiple messaging environments in place, such as Outlook Express, MS Mail, and CC:Mail. In late 1998, while migrating a customer with a myriad of different email systems to Lotus Notes, we decided that the only rational solution was to create a comprehensive migration product. The migration challenges presented by our customers paved the way for us to create the Binary Tree Common Migration Toolkit (CMT).
Over the next four years, we continued to advance the capabilities of CMT and the names Binary Tree and CMT became some of the most recognizable names in the world of messaging migration, as we became a key enabler to organizations that were transforming their messaging and collaboration capabilities. Our list of customers was rapidly growing to include the “who’s who” of the corporate world.
Evolving to Facilitate Merger & Acquisition Integrations 
In the early 2000s, we recognized that the migration trend was beginning to expand beyond just migrations to Lotus Notes. Corporate mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, re-branding, and other events created a need for an enterprise-grade migration solution within Lotus Notes. So we developed the
CMT for Domains product so that customers going through a merger, acquisition or divestiture could streamline how they migrated, consolidated, or separated diverse Domino domains. While CMT for Domains focused on
Domino-to-Domino merger integration, our product line would eventually evolve to support
Domino-to-Exchange and
Exchange-to-Exchange merger integrations as well.
The Notes Exodus Era
Also in the early 2000s, another trend was slowly emerging: migrations to Microsoft Exchange. With IBM focusing less on Notes and Domino and diluting the Lotus brand and value, and Microsoft emphasizing Exchange and Outlook more as an enterprise messaging solution, some of our Notes migration customers approached us about a migration tool from Notes and Domino to Outlook and Exchange.
In response to the market demand, we created
CMT for Exchange, an enterprise-scale migration solution that met the needs and the requirements of end users and administrators alike. The combination of fidelity, scalability, and manageability made CMT for Exchange the product of choice for the largest Domino to Exchange migration ever performed, for one the largest global financial firms, which had over 180,000 users worldwide.
As our experience with migrations to Exchange grew, we learned that as enterprises embarked on Domino-to-Exchange migrations, they required extensive interoperability (or “coexistence”) between the two diverse systems so that their end-users would experience a highly functional and seamless transition process. While there were tools available for temporary
coexistence between Domino and Exchange, we aimed our sights on creating an enterprise-class coexistence solution. The result was
CMT for Coexistence. By the mid-2000s, the CMT product suite became a true enterprise messaging migration solution suite. In recognition of that fact, the abbreviation CMT was changed to stand for Complete Migration Technology.
READ MORE >>
by
Mark DeAngelis, Remote Hosted Migration Manager
Are you planning a migration to
Office 365? Are you looking for valuable resources to help you design and execute your
migration plan? I recently came across some very useful information that I thought I’d share …
Microsoft's Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises 
As stated on the
Microsoft Office 365 TechNet website, the
Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises is intended to help you understand the requirements and workflows necessary in introducing Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises to your organization. This guide presents the deployment process for Office 365 in a way that explains both important deployment concepts and detailed deployment procedures. It is intentionally organized into sections that provide specific types of information for specific types of deployment personnel in your organization. Here is a quick overview of what is in this guide:
- Deployment Overview Section: This section is a high-level look at the deployment and organizational requirements to deploy Office 365. It has valuable information for your IT decision makers, program managers, and technical implementation leads.
- Plan and Prepare Sections: These sections describe the particular tasks and activities required to get ready and fully implement your Office 365 deployment. The tasks are generally presented in the order in which you address them during your deployment. Topics discussed in the Plan section that need more detail may recur in the Prepare section with instructions for carrying out a task. The Plan and Prepare sections contain information that will interest specific types of technology experts in your organization.
- Migrate Section: This section describes the tasks for moving your users’ mailboxes to the Office 365 environment so you can begin using Office 365 as part of your production environment.
Access the entire document here.
READ MORE >>
Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
The recent announcement of the strategic partnership between Mimecast and Binary Tree may have caught a few people by surprise. But for those of you that fully understood the value proposition of each company, you saw the integration benefits right away. The synergies between the solutions will help customers transition to an optimized Exchange messaging platform with a reduced risk of user impact for downtime or data loss. Migrating e-mail and calendaring data poses many challenges. Not only can it be very time consuming and costly, the risk of data being lost or becoming corrupted is greatly heightened during this process. Were this to happen to important commercial or sensitive information, the financial and legal repercussions could be significant. Most CIO’s don’t want to gamble with the success of their messaging migration, and that’s why the strategic partnership between Binary Tree and Mimecast makes perfect sense.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. A recent survey of 500 IT decision makers from organizations in different industries and from different geographies found that 77% of companies plan to upgrade their messaging platforms in the next two years. This watershed event is driven by the ubiquitous adoption of Exchange 2010 for on-premises implementations and the great momentum around hosted Exchange solutions like Microsoft Office 365. And during these transition projects customers are looking to optimize their messaging environment at the same time. Common advancements on their wish list include full-featured archiving with automated retention policies and fast search integration, simplified Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam security, and super high-availability. Together, Binary Tree and Mimecast provide a streamlined and risk free solution to help customers transition to their messaging platform of the future.
READ MORE >>
Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
The blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about the lack of a ratings system for specialized software tools on the market, included a specific Latin phrase, “Caveat Emptor”, or “Let the buyer beware”. Well, since I wrote that blog, I have been reminded of just how relevant that saying is in the IT industry.
Over the past three weeks, I have interviewed a handful of different companies that have gone through a cross-forest email migration project in the past couple of years. And believe it or not, they had to move their mailbox data twice.
Yep, you read that right; they were forced to migrate huge amounts of mail and calendar data TWICE.
READ MORE >>
Mobile devices play a key role in most businesses today. In most organizations, 20–25% of users typically access their messaging data from a mobile device. They’re essential for timely interactions with clients and keeping geographically dispersed teams working together efficiently.
Options for Migrating Mobile Devices
When it comes to migrating BlackBerry devices to a new messaging environment, IT administrators can:
- Move each device manually
- Use BlackBerry Transporter (if it’s not a cross-platform migration)
- Use CMT Mobile from Binary Tree for cross-platform or upgrade migrations
Let’s look at what’s involved with each of these migration methods.
READ MORE >>