Four Steps Toward Planning a Successful Email Migration How MessageStats Can Help You Understand and Clean Up Your Source Environment to Simplify Your Move Abstract Few email migration projects are as simple as buying new hardware and moving current user accounts and other resources to the new environment. Rather, most email migrations involve complexities such as consolidating servers and ensuring the seamless coexistence of the old and the new environments during some period of time. Careful and thorough planning is crucial to success—and so is choosing the right tools.. Introduction Organizations choose to migrate their email platforms for many reasons: to take advantage of new features of the latest release, such as Exchange 2013; to replace a version that is no longer supported; to consolidate or reduce the number of servers; to replace a legacy messaging system, such as Lotus Notes or GroupWise (especially after a merger or acquisition); or to move from an on-premises solution to a hosted one, such as Microsoft Exchange Online or Google Mail. Whatever the reason, careful planning and preparation are crucial to the success of the migration project. The simplest migration is one where new hardware is purchased, and current accounts, mailboxes, public folders and other objects are moved to the new environment. However, simple migrations are usually recommended only when migrating mail between the most recent versions of the same mail platform, such as from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013, and when the move is confined to a single or centralized location. In most situations, though, migrations are far more complex. If the migration cannot be completed quickly, such as over a weekend, such as MessageStats, can help ensure a successful migration. flow between the source and target environments during the migration (coexistence). You also need to understand the usage of your current environment so that you can plan adequately for your target environment, especially if you plan to consolidate servers. Four Steps toward planning a successful email migration In general, a successful migration strategy will include the following steps: 1. Inventory your current environment 2. Analyze usage 3. Identify unused assets 4. Clean up unused assets Following these steps can help make your migration faster and less stressful, and significantly reduce the risk of unplanned downtime or even migration failure. A comprehensive reporting solution for your messaging and unified communications platform, can help ensure a successful migration and simplifies the process by collecting all the migration reports in a single migration node . MessageStats can help with each of the steps listed 1. List of Migration Reports (Migration Node). 2. MessageStats includes a wide range of inventory reports. 3 Step 1: Inventory your current environment A modern messaging infrastructure can comprise many assets: mail servers, mailboxes, accounts, connectors, mobile devices and shared resources such as public folders and shared or group mailboxes. Different servers may be assigned different roles or functions, and various third-party applications or services may depend on the current messaging infrastructure. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to know exactly what you have before you even begin a migration project. MessageStats inventory reports MessageStats comes with a number of inventory reports that reveal what objects comprise your source messaging infrastructure. Listing all your assets If your source environment is Microsoft Exchange, it is very easy to create an Inventory Summary report that lists all your assets—even across multiple Exchange organizations .This is particularly useful if you are planning a consolidation after a merger or acquisition Drilling down to detailed information To drill down to more detailed information, simply click on a hyperlink in the Inventory Summary report. For instance, clicking on the hyperlink for the number of servers will produce the Inventory—Servers report, 4. If your source environment is Microsoft Exchange, it is very easy to create an Inventory Summary report that lists all your assets—even across multiple Exchange organizations. 3. The Inventory Summary report shows all the assets in your organization. 4. MessageStats enables you to easily drill down to learn more about any particular asset. For example, this report provides detailed information on your servers. 4 Mobile users and devices often require special planning before migration. MessageStats can help you understand your current environment and its growth trends. 5. The Mailbox Delegates report shows who has been delegated access to each mailbox. 6. The BES Growth report shows BlackBerry Enterprise Server user growth per server. Monitoring access to target assets by source accounts If your migration project is scheduled over a period of time, you need to know which accounts in the source environment have access to assets that have already been migrated. These accounts may include mailbox delegates, such as assistants who have access to a supervisor’s mailbox to set calendar items and the like. Understanding your mobile devices and users Mobile users and devices often require special planning before migration. MessageStats can help you understand your current environment and its growth trends. For 7. The ActiveSync Growth report shows ActiveSync user growth per server, users and devices grouped by mail server, mobile platform server, carrier and so on, as well as information on the growth in these areas over time, 7. Understanding your source Lotus Notes environment MessageStats also helps with migrations from Lotus Notes to Exchange by providing a detailed inventory of the source Notes environment prior to the migration. Step 2: Analyze usage Once you know what assets you have in your source environment, the next step is to determine how they are being used. Migrating to a new platform usually entails purchasing new hardware. Understanding the current utilization of your infrastructure (servers, storage, etc.) will help you determine whether you are nearing capacity and should plan for additional hardware, or whether certain assets are currently underutilized and could be consolidated. Understanding current capacity, storage usage and trends MessageStats shows you how the capacity in your organization has changed over time and forecasts future trends, 8. You can also see similar information about storage, 9. Understanding mailbox and mobile device usage and trends MessageStats also reports on the growth in the number of mailboxes, mobile devices and other assets over time so that you can design your new MessageStats shows you how the capacity in your organization has changed over time and forecasts future trends. 9. MessageStats shows how your storage capacity has changed over time and forecasts future trends. 8. The Capacity Summary shows how the capacity in your organization has changed over time and forecasts future trends. With MessageStats, you can also see how much traffic each mail server is sending and receiving. 10. MessageStats reports on mailbox growth over time. 11. The Server Activity Summary report shows how many user and system messages each server has sent and received. environment to support this growth in the future. Assessing current mail server traffic With MessageStats, you can also see how much traffic each mail server is sending and receiving, 11. With this information, you can evaluate whether any lightly used servers could be consolidated and determine the optimal number of servers in your new environment. Which users have the largest mailboxes, and do those mailboxes have quotas set? Which users send and receive the most email, and where are these users located? You can then make special considerations for migrating these power users and design the target infrastructure appropriately to meet their needs. MessageStats will also identify the largest consumers of mail in your current infrastructure. 3: Identify unused assets To minimize migration work and optimize your target environment, you need to identify any assets in your source environment that are currently either totally unused or used only sporadically, and then evaluate whether they are truly required in the new environment. Figure 12. Learn which users have the largest mailboxes and what their quotas are. The Top Senders report shows which users send the largest number or volume of emails. Identify any assets in your source environment that are currently either totally unused or used only sporadically. 14. The Inactive Exchange Mailboxes report list mailboxes that have had no email activity. Finding inactive mailboxes MessageStats comes with several reports ,that identify Exchange and Notes mailboxes that can be considered inactive and could be deleted or archived before the migration. Identifying orphaned mailboxes Another good example of an unused asset is when employees have left the organization but their mail accounts and data have been retained so that managers or colleagues can access them. MessageStats will identify these orphaned assets so you can assess whether they will be required in the new environment or should be deleted before the migration. Finding shared resources that are no longer needed Organizations often create shared resources, such as distribution lists, contacts, group mailboxes and public folders, for a specific purpose like a project or sales campaign, but often fail to delete the resource when it is no longer needed. MessageStats can report on these resources , so you can remove them as appropriate and thereby minimize the amount of data you have to migrate to your new environment. MessageStats will identify orphaned assets so you can assess whether they will be required in the new environment or should be deleted before the migration. The Orphaned Mailboxes report shows all mailboxes that are not connected to user accounts. 10 Identifying invalid or inactive mobile devices Mobile devices are also assets that should be assessed prior to a migration. Depending on the platforms in use, there could be accounts that are invalid (ones that have an account in the mobile platform but no corresponding mailbox for delivery in the messaging platform) or devices that are currently used rarely or inactive that could be redeployed to other users. MessageStats offers several reports that identify these devices. The Empty Public Folders report helps you identify and delete resources that are no longer needed. Mobile devices are also assets that should be assessed prior to a migration. 18. The Invalid BES Users report lists all BES accounts that do not have a corresponding mailbox configured. 19. The Inactive BES Users reports list all BES accounts that have had no mail activity. Step 4: Clean up unused assets The final step is to evaluate your existing assets, especially those that are underutilized, invalid or unused. You can easily add fields to any MessageStats report to help with this task. Assets that will not be required in the new environment can be left in the source environment, backed up and then deleted, or archived with a tool such as Archive Manager from Software. Also consider backing up or archiving old messaging data (mail, calendar items, contacts, posts, etc.) that might not need to be migrated to the new environment. MessageStats can identify mailboxes and public folders that contain data older than a particular date, so you can reduce The final step is to evaluate your existing assets, especially those that are underutilized, invalid or unused. The Inactive ActiveSync Devices report lists all devices that have not been synchronized during a specified period 21. You can easily add fields to any MessageStats report. 12 the amount of data you need to migrate. Conclusion No matter why you are migrating to a new messaging platform, MessageStats will provide you with the information you need to plan a successful and efficient project. With MessageStats, you can easily inventory your current environment, analyze current usage trends and identify unused assets so you can clean up your source environment before the migration begins. The result will be a faster and easier migration and a cleaner target environment. In addition to helping ensure an efficient and successful migration, MessageStats can also help you manage your new messaging environment more effectively. MessageStats is used by thousands of administrators daily to report on 15 million mailboxes. In addition to migrations, MessageStats can help you with: • Compliance, auditing and security— MessageStats provides regulation-specific and internal control reports for managers, administrators, and Legal and HR staff to help ensure regulatory compliance and security. • Performance and availability—Management can ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are met by using MessageStats’ reports on delivery times, resource usage, capacity, storage, quotas, audited mailboxes or domains, distribution lists, public folders, and more. In addition, IT staff can monitor and track server growth, email quotas, message sizes, configuration, and use of mailboxes, public folders, distribution lists and contacts. They can also identify and eliminate unused accounts, mailboxes and servers, and underused stores, devices and storage. • Automation and administration— MessageStats automates reporting to facilitate decision-making and planning and reduces administration time and complexity by enabling you to monitor multiple messaging server platforms from a single console. 22. The PF Content Analysis report helps you identify old data that may not be needed in the new target environment. With MessageStats, you can easily inventory your current environment, analyze current usage trends and identify unused assets so you can clean up your source environment.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:49:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015