Microsoft Exchange 2010 was first introduced two years ago. While adoption was initially slow, despite Microsoft’s aggressive efforts to spur rapid adoption, it seems that companies are finally starting to see the benefits of the software and ready to migrate to it in a big way.

According to a recent independent survey of some 500 IT decision makers, more than three-quarters of them (77 percent) said they expected to migrate to Exchange 2010 or Office 365 in the next two years. If that happens, that means hundreds of thousands of businesses will be embracing the software in the next 24 months.

There are many reasons why the migration to Exchange 2010 has become a stampede. Two of the top rationales are new features (57 percent), which includes better support for mobile devices, and easier administration (50 percent). Also high on the list of migration motivators were security (49 percent), larger mailboxes (49 percent), improved storage options (48 percent), and improved web access (46 percent), the survey said.

Also, to some extent  companies’ enthusiasm to migrate is being fired by a recognition of the increased role email is playing to business success. Not only does Exchange 2010 offer better handling of email while imposing less of a burden on harried IT personnel, but it can do it at a lower cost.

According to a recent report in The Independent, email is far more effective in converting eyeballs into cash than any other web medium. 25 percent of people who open an email in a sales campaign will be converted into a buyer, the publication reported. That’s far and away higher than conversions from clicking on links (10 percent) and website visitations (2 percent).

As important as email is to a successful business, it can be costly to store and archive, which must be done for compliance as well as business reasons. Companies that have clung to older versions of Exchange are finding that the storage options offered by Exchange 2010—most notably the ability to swap out expensive SAN architecture for low cost SATA drives—can save them barrels of money. For instance, storage and archiving costs for an Exchange 2003 deployment can be 40 percent higher compared to what they cost with Exchange 2010.

There are productivity costs associated with older Exchange deployments too, especially because they don’t have the robust support of Exchange 2010 for the web and mobile platforms, the independent reported.

Another factor contributing to the step-up in Exchange 2010 adoption is its unique position as a bridge to the cloud. As the high-tech research firm Gartner has pointed out in the past,

“Exchange 2010 represents both the beginning of the end of the premises-based email era, and the dawn of the cloud-based email era.”

The strategy adopted by Microsoft for Exchange 2010 could pay off big for the company as it faces a growing number of competitors trying to capture a piece of its Exchange business.

“With several low-cost competitors snapping at its heels,” observed one technology commentator, “Microsoft’s hybrid strategy is a win-win one as it allows the company to protect its customer base in the on-premise model—while simultaneously giving customers the choice to migrate to a new cloud-based model.”

Migration to Exchange 2010 Becoming a Stampede

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Clarke: Defends forced migration.

More than a few administrators have been annoyed by Microsoft’s decision to omit an in-place upgrade when moving to recent versions of Exchange. Exchange General Manager Perry Clarke recently defended the policy in his Ask Perry blog.

Contrary to the opinion of some critics of the practice, in-place upgrades weren’t ignored because the Exchange team is full of lazy programmers, he joked.

As any Windows user knows, Microsoft designs its software for the latest hardware on the market. Sure, you can run it on legacy iron, but it will be a problematic proposition that will eventually force you to buy new hardware in frustration. That logic appears to be behind the forced migration policy for Exchange.

 ”In major releases we tend to make substantial changes to our architecture to take advantage of exponential changes occurring on the hardware front,” Perry wrote on his blog. “Doing this in a backwards compatible way often leads to substantial compromises that leads to a more expensive and less reliable TCO [Total Cost of Ownership].”

The new software can produce significant cost savings for organizations, but only if it’s run on new hardware, he maintained.

“Certainly to fully take advantage of the changes in the release requires rethinking the hardware design,” he wrote. “Over the past couple of releases, doing this properly will reduce costs so substantially that continuing to run the old hardware would be un-economic even through it is fully depreciated.”

In defending forced migration, Perry makes it sound like Microsoft is doing IT managers a favor by coercing them to buy new hardware to accommodate an Exchange upgrade.

“Given the rapidly improving hardware and the fact that the most expensive component (storage) wears out [r]egular hardware refreshes in the order of every 3-4 years are needed,” he wrote. “Doing both a major-version in-place upgrade followed by a migration to new hardware is a model that combines the worst of both approaches.”

“The migration model is well suited to most organizations because it allows you to move your least sensitive mailboxes first, your most sensitive mailboxes ( execs? application mailboxes?) last and have a great coexistence story,” he argued.

In a video accompanying Perry’s blog, he added that changes in the way recent iterations of Exchange treat storage has made it difficult to do in-place upgrades. The first time Microsoft faced that problem was when it went from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. At that time, it was decided to make the software 64-bit only. That essentially shut the door on in-place upgrades.

“That was a tough decison at the time,” he said. “Marketing was really concerned that it would be a big blocker. But when we looked at the hard data, our customers largely were doing migrations.”

“Well more than 80 percent of the people upgrading from 2003 had done a migration approach, and almost all of the rest, had done an in-place upgrade followed by hardware migration,” he added.

To salve the sting of migration to Exchange 2010, Microsoft has incorporated features into the program to minimize disruption to the daily operations of an organization. In previous versions of Exchange, migrations had to take place after normal business hours, Clarke explained. With Exchange 2007, which supported larger mailboxes, it became more and more difficult to restrict migrations to that “after hours” window.

“The single biggest thing that we did to improve this was to enable online moves between versions,” he said. “So between 2007 and 2010 your mailbox moves can actually occur during your migration period 24-by-7 and users will see absolutely no impact,” he contended.

Clarke’s defense of forced migration attracted more than a few gadflies to his blog.

“Excuse me,” commented “Thomas,” “but did you ever hear about virtualization? You know, you can add RAM and processor power dynamically there. No need to move to a new machine.”

Another irrate commenter, ‘Ferdy’, complained, “It is ridiculous that a software vendor gets to decide that their clients need to replace their hardware, no matter how large your technical changes are.”

“Yeah I’m sorry, but that sounds a lot like a desperate defense of the indefensible,” wrote ‘Mark’ of Clarke’s remarks. “We administrators are perfectly capable of analyzing our hardware and it’s capabilities ourselves.  We don’t need Exchange Developers deciding for us whether or not we need to upgrade our hardware with every single major release.”

Microsoft defends Exchange migration policy

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Each year companies allocate budgets for upgrades and new equipment. As part of that budgeting process is the consideration of new servers and sometimes specifically email servers. If you’re one of the companies who have allocated budget for an email server upgrade then you’re also going to have to factor in the costs of migration.

There are many migration options and tools available in the marketplace to help ease the migration from like-to-like email servers and from unlike-to-unlike email servers. This article will discuss the features and considerations to look for when considering which email migration tools to choose.

1. Conversion options should include email systems such as: Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novel GroupWise, Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, AOL, POP, IMAP and others.If your source or target destination email system is not supported by a particular migration tool vendor then it is best to continue your migration tool search until you find your email system on a list of email systems supported by a migration software vendor. You might be tempted to contact an email migration tools vendor to check on any upcoming support but it is best not to be the first customer of a version 1.0 product as bugs are still being worked out of any new release of software particularly the first release.
2. Conversion options should include email data such as: messages and folders, attachments, address books, calendars and tasks.There are many conversion tools available. Some tools are free but most are products which must be purchased. The different formats that are supported include: Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, HTML and many others. Other email address books and scheduling applications provided by well known Internet Service Providers, web browser and operating system vendors are also supported such as from: AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Hotmail, Microsoft Windows and many others.You’ll want to verify with the migration tool vendor that your email address books and scheduling applications are supported as both target and source databases.And if you’re using earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook you’ll be able to export the address books as CSV (comma separated values) text files. Most commercial applications support the ability to import information from external programs. Check with your vendor first to confirm this feature is available for all versions that will be involved in your migration process.
   
3. Complementary tools should also be available to accommodate your migrations. Such tools would also help migrate any moves, adds or changes to directory applications such as Active Directory. If you are managing your users with a directory application then you may need to create or manipulate your user accounts prior to migrating them. Companies that have a high user account turnover rate can also benefit from such a complementary tool.
4. Migration in progress checkpoints is another useful feature to look for in an email migration tool. While the migration is in progress administrators would like to be able to see the status display showing migration information for each email message such as the original sender, recipient, and date of the migrated email message.
5. Folder structures of existing mailboxes need to be preserved. Users have spent much time in organizing their email messages into folder structures that are most meaningful and understandable to them.
6. Another consideration to look for is to check on any limitations or unsupported features that are part of the migration tool package. Knowing the limitations before you start your migration process can help to avoid costly mistakes and any unnecessarily wasted time.Therefore, careful planning of the migration process should incorporate the known limits and unsupported features of a migration tool. Such limits might include: Messages larger than twenty-five megabytes (including attachments) and any messages prevented from being transferred which have been identified as possibly containing viruses.Other limitations might include large folder thresholds such as user accounts which contain more than two-thousand folders or some other numerical limit. In those cases, user accounts may be prohibited from being transferred. Instead, they will be skipped during the migration process so that the scheduled transfer can continue uninterrupted.Examples of other limitations can include folders with certain characters such as folder names with slash characters (“/”). Some migration tools will not perform migration of those folders. Such folder names will require a name change for the transfer to occur.

Finally, before starting a corporate-wide migration it is good practice to migrate a small number of accounts as a test transfer before migration of all users. And, if you have a large user base, consider performing mail migration during after-hours as batch jobs or on the weekends so as to be the least disruptive to email day-to-day operations as possible.

6 Features to Look for in Email Migration Tools

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When you are transitioning from a legacy Exchange version to either Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 you will come to a stage in the project at which you need to plan for the migration of mailboxes to the new servers.

In small to medium size businesses the considerations are fewer than for larger enterprises, but they do share several in common.  Generally speaking you should plan for the following items.

End user interruption – when a mailbox is moved the end user will be disconnected from it.  Older versions of Outlook do not handle this very well, but even newer versions will need the end user to restart the application to connect to their new mailbox.

This means that it is often best to schedule migrations to occur outside of normal business hours.  Evenings and weekends are very common for this.  If a business operates 24 hours a day using rotating shifts then you can schedule migrations to occur so that a given user is moved when they are not rostered on duty.

Transaction Logging – a mailbox migration means that on the target server (the new server) a whole bunch of new data is being written into the databases.  This creates a very large amount of transaction logging, often much larger than what a normal day’s email traffic would generate.

There are a few ways to manage this.  Moving mailboxes in smaller batches keeps logging to a minimum but means migrations will take longer.  Provisioning large amounts of disk space on the logging volume means bigger batches can be migrated, but after the migration is finished it can mean wasted disk space that is not needed for day to day logging levels.

Usually a middle ground between the above two methods is taken.  Less popular methods include running backups at intervals during the migration window to truncate the logs, or using circular logging which keeps logging to a negligible level but can create serious disaster recovery limitations.

Network Speed – the available network speed between the source and target servers will be a factor in how much data can be pushed across in one session.  Target servers are almost certainly going to be gigabit connected, but older source servers might still be 100 megabit.

In other cases where server consolidation is being done, the migrations may be occurring over low bandwidth WAN links of just 1 or 2 megabit.  This will certainly mean smaller batches are used during the migration.

Disk Speed – even with high speed networks the disk speeds on the source and target servers can impact migration speeds.  The source server will be performing a lot of read operations, and the target server a lot of write operations.  If either of them has a disk subsystem or RAID type that is not optimal for those conditions then migrations may be slowed down.

Backup Windows – since mailbox migrations often occur during the evening or weekend this means they are occurring during the normal backup window.  The implications here are that if the backup of the target server is run before the migrations are finished, some mailboxes that are still in the process of being moved are effectively missed from that night’s backup.  This exposes them to higher risk of data loss if the server experiences a problem before the next backup window.

In all of the above cases the risks and impacts should be understood and planned for.  With the right planning and testing each of these issues can be analysed for their actual impact and the resulting risks can then be mitigated with procedural solutions.

Planning Considerations for Exchange Mailbox Migrations

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In any large organization there will come a time when the IT department will have to migrate their existing users to a new mail server. Lots of times this migration is a result of two companies merging their IT operations together. Other times the migration is driven by a company’s decision to standardize on one platform so as to simplify administration and reduce maintenance costs.

The migration can be made less painful for users if careful planning is performed during the initial stages. Many tools exist to convert mail folders from one format to another. For example, there are tools to convert from Outlook/Exchange mailbox and personal folders (.pst files) to the Domino server mailbox or local .nsf files

Or in the case of going from an existing IMAP server to Google Apps there are tools that help domain administrators transfer the contents of users mailboxes without risking the loss of existing mail. Of course having a recent backup is most important to insure against the loss of email. In addition, you want to verify that the migration tool you use will keep and/or display a log of each mail message migrated including the sender, receiver and date of the migrated email message.

Folder structures should also be preserved so that users can stay as productive as possible after email migrations. You don’t want users having to spend their time recreating the email folders they use for staying organized nor having to repopulate their email folders from backup. You want to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Email migration efforts should also include the users’ calendars and contacts which are part of an email environment.

Testing your email migration strategy should also be a part of your migration plan. Testing on several small accounts can be performed to verify that your migration tools will work as needed before a larger migration effort is enacted. If you have a very large number of users then consider performing the migration in batches. That way you can track the success of the migration and if needed go back and correct the procedures or scripts as problems arise.

Your migration process is also a good time to scan for viruses and filter out email that doesn’t meet your company’s policies for appropriate email. It is also a good time to notify your users to reduce the size of their email folders and any unnecessary attachments. Set a limit on the size of the mail messages that will be allowed to be transferred and notify your users of these limits. Setting a limit on the number of folders to be transferred per user is another way to minimize the time needed during migration.

Consider this a fresh start and take advantage of this migration effort for the benefit of your users.

Email Migration Management

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Migrating from one email system to Exchange is not an easy task but with proper planning it can be done.  No matter what system you had used previously, the following are some of the aspects that many have to deal with and make a decision about.  The first is the cost.  IT managers have to ask themselves about what the cost will  be for licensing, hardware, etc.  It is one of the most difficult decisions to make.  Many IT directors believe that implementing a new system will take most of their budget.  Before making such decision, look at your current environment.  Since this is almost like implementing a new email system, this is an opportunity to include an archiving plan in the early stages. Developing an archiving plan considers having key players and departments involved.  With senior management included, get buy in from human resources and legal to provide their procedures for handling legal inquiries for email files and document attachments.

The next step is to develop the email migration plan.  You have to look at your current infrastructure and how Exchange may interact with it.  Multiple considerations come into play to improve or adjust the infrastructure so that the new system functions better and archiving policies work long-term.  Create a pilot project to test and evaluate the new email system, with archiving fire drills included.  Create a plan for production deployment.  Also look at the backup system, security and how the users will adjust to the new system.

Take a look at the network so you can plan to work around your current infrastructure or make adjustments where needed to improve email service delivery.   Minimizing the migration time by cleaning up any disabled mail files, reducing the size of the mail files.  If you have quota sets consider if the current quota works or if you need to change it.  If you do not have it set then consider what a reasonable number is.

Another consideration is training for the IT staff.  As part of the budget you have to consider sending them to a training course to better understand the new system.  If the budget allows also consider adding record management compliance training. If the budget is tight, online training is an alternative.

Another is your backup system.  Does it work with the new system? Do you need to change your backup system? Identify resources for monitoring archives and backups.

Security is another factor that plays into your decision of what to do.  You need to check your current security if you have one.  Make changes where needed.

Involve your email users with ongoing communication. This allows them to better adjust and more easily accept changes to the new email system.  You can help in the transition by giving them some tips for the new email system.  You can purchase or print for free some reference cards.  Before converting give a training class on how to use the system.

These are some factors to consider for making crucial decisions, as part of the email migration plan.  Bottom line, migrating is no easy task but can be done with proper planning.  In the end it helps you and your email users in achieving a smoother transition.

How to plan your migration to Exchange 2007

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