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.
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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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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.
by Dean Sesko, Systems Architect at Netarx and Microsoft Exchange Certified Master
Binary Tree would like to welcome Dean Sesko as our guest blogger. Dean is a Systems Architect at Netarx where he focuses on designing and implementing large-scale messaging environments using Microsoft messaging technologies. Dean has several certifications from both Microsoft and VMware and has proven work experience with various enterprise customers.
When he’s not working, Dean loves to brew beer and integrate technology into that process. He’s even written his own beer brewing software application to track the what, how, and when of each step in the beer brewing process.
Check out Dean’s blog ExchangeBytes where he discusses Microsoft Exchange and related technologies.
Having performed hundreds of Exchange email migrations over the past 16 years, I can say without a doubt that managing mailbox moves is the biggest headache of the entire migration/upgrade process. I’ve worked with Microsoft Exchange since version 5.0, and I can say that the process is getting better with each version. Technically, moving mailboxes is quite simple - a few simple clicks in the Exchange Management Console or the execution of a crafty Exchange PowerShell command and you are off and running. However, from a business perspective, there was never an easy way to manage the process. It requires loads of manual intervention for monitoring, tracking and troubleshooting. 
Since mailbox migrations reach so far into an organization, touching not only the end users’ mail client, but also business critical mail-enabled applications, tracking and scheduling downtime is crucial to the success of a migration. The process of informing each user when their mailbox will be migrated and handling exceptions to the schedule requires significant effort. The necessary evils of gathering this data and managing user communications helps keep projects on time and on budget. Unfortunately, this also consumes precious resources that could be better spent elsewhere on the project. Further adding to the mailbox move headache is the stress and strain on staff due to these activities typically being done after hours and on weekends. However, in a 24/7-production facility, there are limited time slices when mailboxes can be moved, thus creating an even bigger logistical nightmare causing migration teams to work around the clock.
In the past I’ve used a series of Excel spreadsheets and PowerShell scripts to lessen the time spent managing this process. For example, I would export data into a CSV file from Get-Mailbox, Get-MailboxStatistics, Get-MoveRequest, and Get-MoveRequestStatistics to use as a foundation for my reports. I would take this data and make it look readable to the non-technology inclined individual by adding graphs and tables to try and articulate where in the project we were and how much further we would have to go. This laborious process was usually done repetitively throughout the night as mailboxes were moved. It goes without saying that this process requires strict monitoring of the mailbox moves to avoid unexpected failures in the process. Nothing is worse than setting up a bunch of migrations to run before you go to bed only to wake and find an error happened in the middle of the night and a majority of the mailbox moves were stalled.
Thankfully, I found a cure for my migration headaches ...
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