Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances
When you go shopping for a new car, kitchen appliance, or a flat-screen TV, it’s likely that you did your research ahead of time. And odds are that you read up on the best brands in
Consumer Reports. Hey, it’s great information, and it’s inexpensive. Their tagline is
“Expert Unbiased Product Ratings & Reviews.” They include all the specs for the products, customer reviews, and provide the details on features and functionality. Don’t ya wish we had that type of ratings report for specialty software tools available on the market?
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By Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E
Until recently, organizations looking to perform an
Exchange migration between different Active Directory (AD) forests really only had two choices of software tools for assisting with the migration. You could write migration scripts using the
Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell) programming method that Microsoft provided, or you could use legacy 3rd party tools from ISVs. Unfortunately, these choices have left a lot to be desired for organizations looking to perform and manage migration projects.
The PowerShell method lacks the ability to effectively schedule the migration processing, and it doesn’t give you the ability to inform your end-users of their personal migration schedule. In essence, you’re dealing with a completely manual method. It doesn’t give you any control over the management aspects to run your migration project unattended. And it requires a higher level of knowledge in order to properly execute the project in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your end-users.
The second traditional choice has been agent-based tools from ISVs that were mostly architected over 10 years ago to handle migrations from Exchange 5.5 to 2000. While these tools were somewhat helpful at the time, they are not well architected to assist with migrating recent versions of Exchange Server. Especially when you think about having to deploy multiple agents on all of the Exchange servers in your environment. That’s where they have to run, or perhaps crawl is the better term, as they are typically 10 times slower than PowerShell and PowerShell-based technology. These agents have a three-step process and work in a serial progression. First, they export the mailbox data to a file on the source Exchange server. And then you wait. And then another agent copies the data file from the source server to the target server and you wait some more. And then finally, another agent imports that mailbox data into a server. The net result is that these transitions are quite tedious and slow in their execution. These tools make for a very long, drawn out project.
So what’s the good news? The good news is that there is a new alternative designed specifically for a new generation of Exchange Servers and it’s dramatically better than the other choices available.
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If your company is planning a
migration to Exchange 2010, or thinking of moving to the
Microsoft Cloud (
Office 365), then stop by Binary Tree’s booth to check out the solution. It provides the fastest
mailbox migration processing available on the market, and now we’re giving it away for free. We have a
special promotion where you can use the E2E Complete software solution for free to run your pilot migration. Based on the outcome of your pilot, you can use the metrics to accurately predict the remainder of your project timeline.
E2E Complete enables you to perform intra-organizational and inter-organizational (cross-forest)
Exchange migrations with no changes to the Active Directory environment. Our solution provides a centralized management console for the entire process so you don’t need to install additional agents on your Exchange servers. End-users benefit, too: they receive informative SMS or email alerts automatically and can access a self-service web portal to reschedule their individual migrations to better fit their schedules.
E2E Complete Key Features:
- Streamlined Migration
- Centralized Management
- Refined End-User Experience
What's New in E2E Complete 2.0?
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Binary Tree would like to welcome Kris Honkola as our guest blogger. Kris is an Engagement Manager for
VMC Consulting. As a global technology consulting company, VMC provides flexible and scalable solutions and services, with best practices, proven methodologies and world-class resources. Visit VMC at both the Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange Connections conferences to find out how we can help you with SharePoint and Exchange solutions.
Working with Binary Tree, the
VMC Consulting services group has designed a new approach to more quickly and efficiently transition customers from their old Exchange environments to the latest
Microsoft Exchange 2010 platform. This new solution offering helps our customers control the cost of the migration, and provides a more effective process to manage the project.
VMC Consulting has been successfully planning, organizing, directing and executing large
Exchange upgrades for several years. We had created best practices for our migration clients, but were continuously seeking improvements that would provide increased value to our customers.
We have a culture of reinventing our best practices every 12 to 18 months. We asked ourselves four key questions:
- How can we make it more cost effective for our customers?
- How can we improve the Exchange mail migration process?
- How can we reduce the technical, people, process, material and cost risks associated with executing enterprise level migrations?
- How can we scale better to do more migration projects simultaneously?
Our best practice SWOT analysis identified that:
- Our people are highly experienced and successful engineers, consultants and architects.
- Our processes are best-of-breed and continuously optimized.
- Our risk, project and communication management excelled.
- Our Clients were pleased with our migrations projects.
- Our automation technology was strong, but not best-of-breed.
The result led us to investigate world class automation and management tools versus our own in house solutions. We performed an exhaustive evaluation of the tools and companies in today’s marketplace.
Posted by Carl Baumann, Worldwide Director of Sales
New Year's Day has always been a very sentimental day for me. As I sit here and write my first blog post for Good Migrations, I can't help but to state the obvious, “time really flies". I stare in awe at how quickly my kids are growing and how fast life progresses. During the year, finding time to reflect is very difficult considering all of the uber-important work meetings and conference calls that I’m involved in on a daily/hourly/secondly basis. When I finally have some down time to reflect on how fast life moves, I can finally take notice of some of the constants in life.
The one constant that really occupied my thoughts today is CHANGE. Change is now my constant in life. In the past, I’d resist change and fight it. I mean, who really likes change? Change is unpredictable, absolute, and full of unknowns. Change is downright scary and devoid of any real answers about what will happen in the future. Life would be so much easier if everything just stayed the same. As I grow older (and hopefully wiser), I’ve come to accept, and even embrace, change. Over the past few years, everything that I have known has, in fact, changed. My personal life and work life, in one form or another, has changed. At this point in my life, change is exciting and full of surprises. I have accepted change, warts and all, and embrace it. Change and I now understand each one another.
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