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What’s New with Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration?

Posted by Richard Dean, Principal Consultant, Professional Services

With the Gold release of Microsoft’s Office 365 coming very soon, Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration Service (RHM) is now offering “Rich Coexistence” and “Velocity Migrations” using our industry leading migration engine for the best data fidelity available, as well as our finest system interoperability solutions to ensure end users experience the smoothest transition to the cloud. Along with the best technology, we offer the most seasoned service consultants and practices for migrating Lotus Notes and Domino messaging and application environments to Microsoft BPOS-Standard Suite.

Combined with our already excellent services, customers can also expect some new features, functionality, and improvements with RHM. The following sections briefly outline some of those new subjects and highlight the benefits of each.

Expanded Coexistence Options

On June 28th, 2011, Microsoft Office 365 will go Gold. Binary Tree will be one of the first service vendors offering “Simple” or “Rich” coexistence solutions along with “Velocity Migration” services to the Exchange platform and the only software provider offering full coexistence interoperability, which now includes free/busy information translation between IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Office 365.

Simple Coexistence: With simple coexistence, all email addressed to your company’s domain will continue to be delivered to your on-premises Exchange server. However, email that is addressed to users that have been moved to Office 365 will be forwarded to their Office 365 mailboxes, allowing them to send and receive email from their Office 365 mailboxes using the same on-premises email address.

Rich Coexistence: Rich coexistence provides a robust management experience with better integration options for your on-premises server. You can also configure rich coexistence to provide a virtually seamless connection between your on-premises and online environments. With rich coexistence, end users can share calendars and free/busy information with their existing corporate Lotus Domino co-workers, regardless of whether their mail account is online or still on-premises.

Rich coexistence requires that at least one published Internet-facing 64-bit Windows server 2008 R2 is running Internet Information Services (IIS), the Web Server Role, and .NET 3.5.1. Typically, port 80 and 443 are required to be open between firewalls for appropriate communication between systems.

For security purposes, an SSL certification is recommended for IIS that’s issued from a valid third-party Trusted Root Certificate Authority to ensure encrypted free/busy traffic between the customer environment and the cloud.

For more information on prerequisites, please download the CMT for Coexistence 3.0.5 Comprehensive Users Guide.

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Posted on 6/23/2011 9:30:00 AM | with 0 comments

Send in the Cloud: Ensuring a Rich User Experience while Migrating to Office 365

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, Chief Technology Officer

To say that I was excited to read last week's announcement of the Microsoft Office 365 General Availability date of June 28, 2011 is an understatement. Even when the service was referred to as “BPOS-S 2010”, all of us here at Binary Tree were looking forward to this date. After all, we've been helping Domino customers migrate to BPOS-S since its inception, and Office 365 presents a dramatically new opportunity. Well, new in some respects, and fairly well established in others. It's this combination of novelty and maturity that I would like to share with the readers of this blog post.

I don't have to tell you (but I will anyway) that Office 365 represents the true Enterprise Cloud offering - the best of breed messaging environment designed from the ground up with full multi-tenant capabilities. But what about an Office 365 migration from legacy environments (both Exchange and others) with Lotus Domino being the most prominent? Has anything been done to improve the migration process? In a word, YES!!! Well,actually it's two words – “rich coexistence”. Sounds cryptic? Allow me to explain …

One of the greatest challenges in providing a seamless migration to BPOS-S for Domino customers was the inability to perform a free/busy lookup between Domino and BPOS-S. While you could send emails and schedule and update meetings, you simply could not see the availability of users on the other system. If it sounds like an insignificant issue to you, that's because you never had to face or listen to a frustrated user trying to schedule an important meeting for 5 or 10 participants without having any visibility to their availability.

You want real anger? Imagine dealing with an Executive Assistant trying to figure out how to schedule a conference call with several VIP's distributed among different offices. If you’re the person responsible for the migration, this type of situation will make you cringe and fear for your job. Well, fear no longer! Rich coexistence with Office 365 addresses this issue. The loop is now closed, the seamless migration is truly possible, and I am proud to say that Binary Tree helped make it happen. Now, when we are deploying our solution for a Domino to Office 365 migration, the coexistence component not only delivers the messaging and calendaring workflow, but it also enables full visibility of the free/busy status for both Domino and Office 365 users, no matter which system you use to initiate a request.

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Posted on 6/9/2011 9:45:00 AM | with 0 comments