There’s no getting around the need for Cross-Forest, or Inter-Org,
email migrations. They just happen. And in some cases an IT group has only a few days to plan out the transition. They are brought about by different events such as mergers & acquisitions, company divestitures, or just plain company partnerships when organizations want to combine their email environments onto a single platform. Whatever the reason for your migration project, you will need to address the same issues every time.
The
cross-forest migration process is quite complex and the Binary Tree
E2E Complete product can assist you to simplify and streamline the mailbox migration process. However, to begin with, you will need to synchronize the Active Directory (AD) forests, establish bi-directional data flow between the domains, and prepare the environment for the mailbox migration process.
What options are available? Are there solutions which can ensure the success of the AD transition?
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Posted by Karl Sand, Business Development Manager
As Binary Tree’s Business Development Manager, one of my main responsibilities is to meet with System Integrators (SI’s) to identify what tools we can provide to help them be more efficient and productive on their customer engagements. The folks I have the liveliest discussions with are the Service Delivery Managers and their Technical Architects. What stresses them out the most, you ask? Well it comes down to controlling the risks involved to ensure a successful project and a happy customer. A lot of those risks come from the possibility of human error while managing the project. This is especially true when it comes to an email migration project. So, SI’s feverishly try to implement standard processes and procedures for the manual tasks involved, and hope for the best.
This discussion has come up quite a bit the past year on my travels. A common request among the SI’s that I’ve talked to has emerged. They want a reliable and easy-to-use toolset to help them manage and automate their Exchange 2003 to 2010 migration projects. Unfortunately, there’s no automated mailbox migration tool available from Microsoft, so most delivery teams have used the Microsoft PowerShell scripting language to cobble together a semi-automated approach to manage the migration events. But they still have to manually run the scripts, monitor their progress, troll through logs, and then manually update a migration tracking spreadsheet. And of course they need to do this on nights and weekends so they don't migrate end-users during business hours.
Multiply these manual tasks by the 1,000’s of mailboxes to move, with some of them located in different time zones, and you get a sense of the inherent risks involved in these projects. Want to know just how stressful and time consuming the manual approach can be? Check out this 4-part series from Neil Hobson on MSExchange.org titled, “Moving Mailboxes in Exchange 2010” for a very in-depth explanation on how mailboxes are moved from Exchange 2003 to 2010. For those of you who like to stay at the office late and go in on the weekends, this is quite the page-turner ☺
BUT, there is a light at the end of the Exchange 2010 migration tunnel …
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