So you’re planning or know someone who is planning an email and/or application migration? Do you have questions? Is someone asking questions that you don’t have answers to? Do you want to know what’s really in your environment? Is it time to budget? If any of these questions sound familiar to you, then sit back and let me tell you a little story of my own experience.
Off on the Wrong Foot
Several years ago, I was working as an IT Manager for a mid-size manufacturer that was a long-standing Lotus Notes shop. One day our new CIO - a staunch supporter of the Microsoft platform - called me into his office and asked me a simple question:
“John, how many Notes Applications and Messaging users do we have today and how complex is the environment?
I was completely baffled. No one had ever asked me that question before and I was at a complete loss for an answer. So, in my perplexity and search to find an answer, I grabbed the Lotus Notes Administrator. He smiled at me and said:
“It’s pretty complex, John, and a great deal of the applications are customized. Also, the users own their own applications, so we don’t typically manage them unless we’re asked to. As for the mail, I would say we have a few hundred users, but I’m not really sure how many actual mailboxes we have. Let me run some numbers and get back to you...”.
Three weeks and eight spreadsheets later, the Lotus Notes Administrator finally presented me with what I thought were the answers to the CIO’s questions. After all, we meticulously and manually combed through EVERY server gathering as many details as we could from the administrative console. We even went as far as opening up a few of the applications to find their size and owner.
Reality Check
Triumphantly and with spreadsheets in hand, I walked into the CIO’s office and exclaim, “I finally have the answers you’re looking for!” With a very serious look on his face he said:
“John …why did it take us SO long to get answers to such simple questions? Shouldn’t this information be quick and easy to retrieve? This is the IT Department …it’s critical for us to know how many Notes Applications and Messaging users we have, and have a full understanding the complexity of our environment. In order for us to be successful, we need to have this information updated consistently and readily available. This has me VERY concerned …”.
He was right. Having accurate, trustworthy, and consistent data on the state of our environment was critical to maintain and grow the environment. But, once again, I was unable to answer his questions, and the last thing I wanted to do was show him the spreadsheets because we weren’t 100% confident that they were accurate and complete.
Migration Orders
Shortly after my humbling interaction with the CIO, he called the IT Team into his office and made the following announcement:
“We are migrating off of Lotus Notes. I need you to figure out what it will take to migrate our applications to SharePoint or .NET, and I need you to find a way to migrate Lotus Notes to Exchange. I’ll need a project plan and budget by the end of next week. This is crucial to the company’s overall IT strategy and I’m counting on you to execute.”
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For organizations operating more than one messaging system, especially those as diverse as Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange, seamless messaging and calendaring coexistence between messaging systems is no longer a 'nice to have,' it's a 'must have.' The success of these initiatives is directly correlated to the experience of the end users and very often it's specific to how well the calendars work between users on different email platforms. Users can become quite vocal if meetings disappear from their calendar or they can't schedule a meeting because they can't look up the availability of the other users. As Vadim Gringolts discussed in his blog post last week on coexistence:
" ...users insist on perfect functionality of ALL calendar entries, complete and continuous synchronization of ALL directory entries, instantaneous and accurate free/busy lookup, and uninterrupted workflow of mail-enabled applications with their custom emails, forms, and approval buttons."
Keeping up with new software releases, features, and integrations is a constant challenge for IT Administrators. They need to be able to easily and efficiently perform smooth and seamless transitions from one platform/release/upgrade to another. Tack on the responsibility for establishing and maintaining interoperability between two different messaging systems, whether due to a merger, an acquisition, or a platform migration, and their job can quickly become overwhelming. Even so, it's vital that companies with differing email and calendaring systems are able to harmoniously coexist and that users are able to work without interruption.
So what should the end user experience look like when an organization is coexisting with Domino and Exchange? And what are the planning best practices for administrators to ensure that their hybrid environment is fully interoperable and their users are not disrupted?
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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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