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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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.