Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog Tags

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Thunder Storms, Oh My!

By Tracy Riddle, Senior Account Executive at Binary Tree

People often ask me "How can Binary Tree help ensure that my migration will be successful?" I think this is a great question that I am always happy to answer. And recently, a customer found out first hand the lengths we are committed to their success.

Thursday, August 25, 2011, I received a call from a client asking to understand how our CMT for Exchange solution can help them migrate 50 NSF files to PST’s. They explained to me that their company had recently acquired a small organization and they promised the business that they would have the PSTs available on Monday morning.

Understanding that there was a huge time crunch to meet their deadlines, I set up a conference call with my Solutions Architect, the customer and myself. We began to show them the steps they would need to do to complete this migration. As I listened to the customer ask questions about completing this email migration on their own, I quickly realized that for them to read the manuals to learn our product, set up and configure the solution, and complete the project in less than four days was a very tall order.

So I offered up our Support team. I explained to the client that if they would like, Binary Tree would be happy to take their NSF files and convert them After considering the challenges they were facing, the customer agreed and we set up call for later Thursday afternoon to discuss how they would send us their files.

Binary Tree offered the customer two methods for doing the conversion. The customer could ship us their files on a hard drive or they could upload the files to our ftp site. Since there was such a time crunch involved they asked if they could drive the files to us.

We were about 3 hours from each other and we agreed that we would meet Friday morning to receive the hard drive with the NSF files. Within 24 hours we had the proper NDAs in place and the files were on their way to our support team. The plan was to retrieve the hard drive, use our own migration farm and start the migration on Friday and finish up by Sunday morning. Then we would meet back up with the customer on Monday morning with the hard drive and newly migrated PST files.

Normally this would be a very simple process for us. The next day, Saturday, August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene had other plans in mind and our location for the migration happened to be directly in Irene's path.

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Posted on 9/22/2011 9:30:00 AM | with 0 comments

Using Remote PowerShell to Provision Exchange 2010 Users

By Robert Phillips, Senior Architect

This is a re-post from Rob's personal blog where he publishes valuable information to assist individuals and organizations who are migrating their Lotus Notes email platforms to Microsoft Exchange.

Provisioning Exchange 2010 Users with Remote Powershell in Windows XP/2003

Exchange 2010 provides us with some new PowerShell features in order to run commands remotely to a CAS server. However, there are a few prerequisites you need to know in order to do this. First of all, Windows 2003 or XP, out of the box, does not provide this feature. You'll have to download the "WINRM" update patch that installs Windows PowerShell. Here is the URL for the download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=F002462B-C8F2-417A-92A3-287F5F81407E

Also, you need to enable remote PowerShell on your Exchange 2010 CAS server with the following PS command:

'Enable-PSRemoting'

Then choose "YES" to configure Firewall ports if necessary and then ensure that the 'WINRM' service is running on the CAS Server. There is a command to verify that you have the necessary authority to run the commands. The command is:

'get-user (username) | fl'

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Posted on 4/15/2011 9:00:00 AM | with 0 comments

Minimizing & Simplifying Your Domino Infrastructure Costs

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Before I joined BinaryTree, I worked for a German based chemical company as one of two Domino Administrators responsible for 40 distributed Domino servers and over 3,500 users. Our configuration consisted of five different Domino domains in North America. We agreed - with management’s buy in – to the idea of consolidating these five domains into a single domain. After many long discussions with our parent company and a final agreement to use this new domain as the basis for a single Global Domain (we had 43 domains total), we began building out our infrastructure. Our goal was to centralize all mail into two sets of clustered servers across two AS/400's.

With our infrastructure in place, we began devising a plan to start manually moving users. We developed a well-defined checklist of 35 different key checkpoints that needed to be accomplished in order to achieve our goal. As the objective was to use local field staff to complete this process, we handed the user move and desktop updates over to field services. We had really good people doing this job, but not all field engineers followed our checkpoints list completely, nor did they follow it in the proper sequence every time. With this manual domain migration approach, when a problem arose, we spent 2-3 hours with the field engineer or the end user trying to resolve the problem. It was a very time consuming and highly inefficient process.

There had to be a better way!

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Posted on 2/9/2011 9:15:00 AM | with 0 comments

Introduction to Hosted Migrations and Weekend Express Services

Posted by Richard Dean, Senior Consultant

It is now 2011 and, in only one year, Binary Tree has successfully migrated 15 companies and approximately 50,000 seats globally to BPOS Standard. That’s over 25 Terabytes of migrated content …and we are just getting started. In 2011, we’ll be expanding our services and adding new capabilities. Also, we’re well into perfecting our migration processes for Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Services. As Microsoft's preferred vendor for migration solutions, we’re closely integrated and can provide our customers unparalleled services and options.

What is a Hosted Migration? A hosted migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS), which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise. Quite literally, we can take you from a Lotus Notes and Domino environment to an Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online environment without any special migration hardware, software, or expertise. In summary, this is a larger phased migration project spanning weeks.

What is Weekend Express? A Weekend Express migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS), which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise. Quite literally, we can take you from operating Lotus Notes and Domino on Friday to being on Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online on Monday morning. From on-premises to Software as a Service (SaaS) in one weekend! In summary this is a smaller, big bang migration project spanning a weekend or two.

At a high level, these are the two types of hosted migration services Binary Tree currently offers. Now for some insight into our methodologies …let’s dig in and cover the basics.

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Posted on 1/14/2011 9:30:00 AM | with 0 comments