BinaryTree

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 …

Posted by Walter Monasterio, Microsoft Corporate and Regional SI Alliance Manager

Growth in business is great. It’s an objective that every company strives for day after day, month after month, and year after year. Most people I speak to envision growth in business as a time when sales and marketing are working in great synergy, sales reps can’t keep up with the demand, and products are flying off the shelves. Business growth is a good challenge. Wait a minute …did I say “challenge”?

When a mid-size company needs to scale into new countries, it can be an exciting, but somewhat daunting task. It would be great to have endless cash to put infrastructure in place in each country, but that’s not a luxury often available even to the largest enterprises. In order for Binary Tree to scale into new countries to meet the needs of our customers, we need to grow through partnerships in these geographies. So off we go to meetings, training, and conferences with our suitcases packed, and update our Facebook statuses from airports and hotels. In the time that we spend with customers and partners during our travels, we do our best to assess a new market and identify future opportunities for continued growth. Sometimes the report says we may need to invest with a Binary Tree sales/channel/technical resource in that area. In most cases, however, we identify success by investing in a local partner. Helping them through training and enablement to master our solutions and approach can provide an immediate service offering for customers in that geography. 

In addition to a local presence, we need strategic insights to get rolling in a new area. When trying to expand or break into other countries, our partners are vital to us getting this done quickly and smart.  Whether it’s with a Regional SI or GSI, each organization gives us a peek into how their customers evaluate solutions. There are so many different subtleties in different parts of the world when it comes to how and when business is done that our partners are often the best tour guides. The ecosystem that they work in every day has all the information we need for success in a new market.

Are you attending the Microsoft TechEd North America conference in Atlanta next week (May 16, 2011 - May 19, 2011)? If so, join Binary Tree in booth #1914 for demonstrations and discussions regarding our email migration solutions for migrating to on-premises and online versions of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

Even better, stop by to see demonstrations of E2E Complete, Binary Tree's unique Exchange-to-Exchange migration software product, recently named a 2011 Best of TechEd Awards finalist in the Messaging category. 

E2E Complete currently reduces the risks, time, and costs to perform intra-organizational migrations from legacy versions of Exchange-to-Exchange 2010. In the coming months, E2E Complete will be updated with the following capabilities:

• Inter-Organizational Migrations
• Migrations to Office 365
• Managing Exchange Environments
  
• Active Directory Synchronization and Transition