Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog

Thoughts on Case Studies and How They Are Used to Evaluate Migration Solutions

By Rennie Filler, Online Marketing & Social Media Manager

Case studies are powerful tools. They are one of the most effective ways for Binary Tree and our Partners to share our customer migration experiences, as well as our capabilities as we continue to grow as a leading provider of enterprise messaging and application migration software.

From the beginning, case studies have consistently helped us to explain to potential customers why someone selects Binary Tree software to ensure that their migration project is a success. Our case studies also help to provide a platform that allows us to detail the benefits of our software in a real-life situation that potential customers can easily relate to. It’s our goal to make sure that we’re consistently providing our customers with the knowledge and tools they need to fully educate, enable, and empower themselves, their project teams, and their executives – and we’ve found that customer case studies are a key piece in ensuring that we achieve this goal.

Sure, we offer tons of marketing collateral, brochures, videos, and slide decks on our website that detail, demonstrate, and highlight all of our migration software and solutions, but we understand that there’s nothing like hearing what it’s really all about from a peer or someone at a similar organization with a related project.

I can’t remember the last time I purchased something online without meticulously reading almost every customer product review before making my final purchasing decision. By reading the customer reviews, my goal is to understand the buyers’ need, their selection process criteria, and ultimately their experience and overall feeling towards the product once they got it home and used it. It’s important for me to know from a customer’s point-of-view the kind of experience they had from beginning to end before making my final decision. So, just like an online product review, Binary Tree’s goal is to showcase our customer’s point-of-view and their personal experience working with our Partners and using our software.

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

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

Learn How to Have a Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

A Webinar Presented by Microsoft and Binary Tree: Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Join experts from Microsoft and Binary Tree on Monday, June 20, 2011 at 12:00pm (ET) to find out how Lotus Notes customers are migrating to Microsoft Office 365 via a high-speed on-ramp provided by Microsoft’s Premier Deployment (MPD) team and Binary Tree. This webinar will provide a technical overview of Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration approach that provides the most streamlined transition for Lotus Notes customers migrating to Office 365.

A Remote Hosted Migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise to complete your migration successfully. Quite literally, we can transition you from Lotus Notes and Domino to Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online without any special migration hardware, software, or expertise needed.

Here are some of the features of a Remote Hosted Migration:

Remote Hosted Migrations Include Email, Calendar, Contacts and To-Do’s
No Migration Software or Hardware to Buy, Install or Configure
No Expertise on Migration Needed

This webinar will allow you to learn from the experts who run these migration projects and find out how your organization can make the move without implementing any migration hardware or software in your data center. Several topics will be covered during the session including:

Best Practices for Planning
Infrastructure Readiness
Pre-Staging the Migration Data
Pilot to Production Processing

To register for the webinar, click HERE.

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Posted on 6/15/2011 9:00:00 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

Superior Software & Support for Total Project Success

Posted by Pete Caldecourt, Director of Technology Assistance

Over the years, here at Binary Tree, we’ve learned many things. Most importantly, we’ve learned that in order to be successful and grow globally, we need to continue to develop and deliver leading email migration and application migration software products to our partners and customers. The software products that we develop and sell are essential to our growth and evolution as a key player in the migration marketplace. But, our success and growth aren’t just about the products we sell; it’s also about providing our partners and customers with an incomparable and exceptional customer support experience to help ensure that they have positive experiences with our products and their projects are ultimately successful.

With this philosophy in mind and as we continue expanding globally, it became essential for us to expand our Technical Services and Customer Support efforts into what we now call Binary Tree’s Technical Assistance Group, or “TAG Team”. The TAG Team excels greatly at many things, but one thing is most important – ensuring that our partners and customers have the best and most successful migration experiences possible from beginning to end.

So what is TAG? Here are some highlights …

Imagine a group of technical experts assigned specifically to your migration project who will assist you not only after you purchase the migration software, but will also be by your side during the evaluation phase of your project. Binary Tree’s TAG Team is available to ensure that our customers have the product knowledge needed to build business and buying cases internally, and to ultimately make an informed decision.
If requested or needed, the Binary Tree TAG Team provides our customers with pilot environments to help them get familiar with the software and the process, and to also assist with the delivery and execution with full knowledge transfers from beginning to end.

Even when the TAG Team leaves a customer site, they’re still available to provide assistance to ensure that your project is a complete success. With 24x7x365 global customer support, our TAG Team is available and ready to assist you via email, online web form, phone, and through our website chat client. Customers also have premier access to Binary Tree’s Online Knowledge Databases where they’ll find technical and how-to articles for our software.