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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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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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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