Moving from IBM Notes to Microsoft Exchange or Office 365 provides a significant number of benefits for the organization, but the migration project itself looks intimidating and it is not entirely clear where to start the migration. Exchange itself does not include its own tools for full migration or coexistence between Notes and Exchange. In fact, some migration and coexistence tasks are not possible without third-party products. In this article, we'll outline seven key steps to follow in line with best practices and our experience with successful migrations.
A successful migration includes the following steps:
- Preliminary estimates of migration.
- Establish coexistence between Notes and Exchange.
- Planning for optimal migration accuracy.
- Ensuring maximum migration efficiency.
- Run test migration.
- Planning the timing of the migration to minimize the impact on the organization.
- Run the migration and track its progress.
In this article, we will explore how to prepare for the migration and complete it using two solutions from Quest β ΠΈ . Under the cut are some details.
Step 1: Migration Preliminary Assessment
Taking inventory of your current environment
If you decide that Exchange is the right platform for your organization, the only thing left to do is to move there. First, you need to collect information about your current environment, collect inventory information on the data you are going to transfer, determine what can be removed to reduce disk space utilization, calculate the available bandwidth between environments, etc. The preliminary assessment should include the following questions :
- How many Notes domains and Domino servers are there?
- How many mailboxes do you have? How many of them are not being used?
- How much disk space do the primary mail files take up? How many are in the archives? How many in local replicas?
- Where are the archives located?
- How many users use encryption? Encrypted content needs to be transferred?
- How many private folders are there in the environment?
- Which users use document links? How many users have received links from other users and apps?
- How much data are you going to transfer? For example, you want to transfer data only for the last six months.
- Will native archives be migrated to personal Exchange archives or Outlook *.pst files?
- What are the bandwidth limits? How much data can be transferred to
a certain period of time? - How much storage will be required after the migration?
How migration will affect business and operations
The project must be carefully planned to minimize downtime and minimize lost productivity.
For example, it's important to consider delegation between users - if a user migrates but his or her delegate remains on the original platform, how will that affect their day-to-day work? More broadly, you need to consider how the migration project can affect all important business processes and workflows in the company.
It is also important to consider the critical points of interaction within Notes. For example, when working with messages, it is important to analyze applications and take into account the interaction between mail routing and applications to avoid business process disruption during and after migration. Be sure to ask the following questions:
- Which users have delegates, and how can a violation of these relationships affect business processes?
- What applications and business processes are associated with the email environment? Any key integration between the application and the email service, such as the approval process, will be critical in planning the migration.
- What components and important features of the application should be retained?
- How can you use the built-in features of the new platform to achieve the functionality you need?
- Should inactive content be archived for later storage?
- Will any applications need to be rebuilt to work correctly in the new environment?
- How will success be measured?
Before you start migrating, you need to define criteria to measure success. In particular, you need to understand that it is unreasonable to expect 100% data transfer. Not every Notes element type has an equivalent in Exchange (Active Mail being the most egregious example). Therefore, the reality is that not all items in Notes will exist in Exchange after the migration. Attainable and measurable goal - 95% of items migrated for 95 percent of mailboxes. Measuring and documenting results is critical to ensuring the success of a migration, and true results are only possible if success criteria were defined early in the email migration project.
Step 2: Establish Notes and Exchange Coexistence
For most organizations, migration is a process, not an event. Therefore, mailbox migrations and application migrations should follow a schedule that best suits business and operations and is not based on technical requirements.
Development of a coexistence strategy
To add value from migration, a complete coexistence plan should be developed and implemented early in the migration process. The definition of βcoexistenceβ may vary from organization to organization. Some organizations actively use Free/Busy data, others do not use this functionality at all. Some focus on migrating calendar data, while others focus on carefully crafting a full user directory migration. It is important to work with each stakeholder to get a clear picture of what really matters and to help everyone understand the importance of an effective coexistence strategy.
Moving from Notes to Exchange and Office 365 requires planning for both mailbox and application migration at the same time. The current functionality of Notes applications must be supported for all users, regardless of their current email platform. As users who migrated to Exchange and Office 365, they should be able to access and use Notes applications as part of their existing workflows. This capability should continue until Notes applications are migrated to SharePoint or another platform.
In addition to application coexistence, interaction between users on different platforms must be implemented before a migration is initiated. This includes automatic routing and directory updates, Free/Busy statuses and calendars for all users regardless of their current platform.
Finally, you need to take into account the collaboration of not only the email service, but also calendars and shared resources, such as conference rooms. Users should be able to upload meeting scheduling information. This includes both one-time and recurring meetings. Whether appointments were scheduled before the migration or created during the migration, the accuracy of the calendar data must be maintained throughout the project. You need to ensure that users can, for example, change the meeting room for the next recurring meeting or cancel one meeting without causing conflict and confusion in subsequent meetings.
Step 3: Planning for Optimal Migration Accuracy
Planning to migrate from Notes to Exchange or Office 365 requires understanding a number of specific platform differences.
Email addresses
Notes data typically contains proprietary addresses that appear in several places: in message headers, embedded in archives, personal contacts, and distributed lists. As part of the migration process, these proprietary addresses must be upgraded to SMTP addresses for full functionality in an Exchange environment. Many organizations also choose to upgrade their SMTP domain or addressing standard during migration. If this applies to your organization, it's important to understand that some migration solutions automatically update instances of the historical SMTP address on a per-user basis.
Folder structure
In many organizations, users use their own mailboxes and archives, so it's important to preserve this data. The ability for users to view their full folder structure also affects the user experience as a result of the migration. It is important to choose solutions and transients that maintain the integrity of the folder and data structures.
Local replicas and archives
To control storage costs and better manage data growth, many organizations set mailbox quotas. An unintended consequence of this policy is often to increase the number and size of archives. These additional data sources should be evaluated and their migration should be considered during migration planning. You can provide users with a self-service component that will ensure that they migrate only their important data. For Exchange storage optimization, we recommend using another Quest product β , it has, in particular, useful functionality for deduplicating attached files, an analogue of DAOS in Notes.
ACLs and Delegation
Allowed access control lists (ACLs) and delegation are key elements for operating in a Notes environment, and they are also critical to integrity protection. As a result, it is important to accurately convert associated rights and access rights to equivalent rights in Exchange Server and Office 365. Ideally, this should be done automatically, which will speed up the process and eliminate human error. To maintain the effectiveness of protecting an organization's information assets, ACLs and delegation transformation must be performed at the same time as the mail data. Some organizations attempt to assign equivalent rights manually or through scripts after the data migration is complete. However, this approach can negatively impact performance and add security gaps to an organization's data.
Notes own content
The same Active Mail. Another common issue when migrating from IBM Notes comes across a lot of formatted text. Exchange and Office 365 do not support integrated tabbed tables, buttons, saved forms, or other proprietary content in Notes. As a result, you will need to either prepare for the loss of this functionality or invest in a migration solution capable of converting these elements into a format that can be migrated. Let's say right away that Quest solutions do not convert this in any way and can only transfer such letters as attachments so that the user can then open them through the Notes client.
Groups and personal address books
Many organizations make extensive use of public mailing lists for internal and
external communication. In addition, Notes users often find it important to keep business contacts in personal address books. These data sources are critical to business operations and must be efficiently converted during the transition to the Microsoft platform. As a result, it is important to automatically prepare groups for migration to Active Directory and efficiently convert all personal addresses, even those stored at users' workstations.
Interaction with Notes applications
Integration points between applications and the mail service, such as reconciliation processes, are important when planning and scheduling a migration. IBM Notes has tighter integration between email and applications than other platforms. These integrations can include everything from simple doclinks to business processes.
Resources and mail databases
Many organizations use resource booking databases, mail databases, and other shared databases in Notes. As a result, these databases play an important role in the operation of an organization. To ensure business continuity and employee productivity, it is very important to consider the approach and implementation timeline for:
- Creation of resource mailboxes in the target environment;
- Transferring data from the reservation database to Exchange;
- Ensuring that users of both systems can collaborate and use resources in Notes and Exchange.
Step 4: Maximize Migration Efficiency
In addition to ensuring the accuracy of the data, it is also important to ensure that the migration is as efficient as possible, given the requirements of the organization. The effectiveness of migration directly depends not only on direct costs, but also on the degree of impact on the business.
Migration Solution Architecture
One of the most important factors influencing efficiency is the architecture of the migration solution. It is very important to choose a solution with a multi-threaded architecture that allows one migration server to migrate multiple users at the same time. The multi-threaded architecture reduces hardware requirements for migration and increases the speed of migration, dramatically reducing the overall cost of the project. Don't be fooled by migration solutions that claim to be multi-threaded but actually only migrate one user at a time and require adding workstations to migrate more users at once. Depending on the configuration and environment, true multithreading solutions are between 30 and 5000 percent more efficient when migrating data to Exchange and Office 365.
Migration process
Migration involves many steps, and processes must happen at the right time to ensure a smooth transition. To minimize business disruption and maximize the benefits of the migration, all processes must be integrated and controlled by a single application that can complete each step of the migration in a timely manner.
Flexibility and self-service
Some users and departments will need to deviate from the standard migration process. For example, the legal department may have different storage requirements, or managers may need to migrate their entire mailbox and all archives. Therefore, it is important to choose a flexible migration solution that allows the migration team to easily adapt to these requirements. One of the most effective ways to achieve this flexibility is to use self-service for a subset of users. For example, some users may be allowed to transfer additional data from their main mail files or local data to later convert it to a personal archive on the server.
Step 5: Run a test migration
After completing the pre-migration evaluation, refining the coexistence strategy, and defining optimization plans, it is important to validate the strategy through one or more pilot migrations.
The purpose of a pilot migration is to test the procedures developed and to detect problems that may arise after a full migration has begun, giving them the opportunity to resolve them before starting a live migration. As a result, problems during pilot migration are to be expected and even welcomed.
Determining the scope of pilot migration
The pilot migration should be large enough to collect a representative sample of data and answer relevant questions that may be encountered during the combat migration. If you're migrating several thousand mailboxes, sampling should be sufficient. For very large migrations, the percentage may be less.
Choice of data and systems
In the process of pilot migration, it is important to use combat data and combat systems. This is very important for several reasons:
- You need to understand how the combat environment will behave. The synthetically generated environment will not be representative of the combat environment.
- You can get more information about encrypted messages, the frequency of message types that aren't in Exchange, and retention requirements based on data samples.
Setting expectations
The pilot migration process also provides an excellent opportunity to test the success criteria set out for the project and calibrate expectations for the remaining migration. If adjustments are required, they should be documented and accounted for in combat migration.
Step 6: Plan the timing of the migration to minimize the impact on the organization
User grouping
To minimize the impact on users and the organization as a whole, users who work together should be migrated at the same time. The main factors to consider when creating these groups include delegation. Look for a solution that can recommend collections for migration based on information about user associations in the source environment.
Migration timeline
Once the group migration is complete, be sure to schedule the time at which
the impact on these users is minimal. This might mean scheduling a migration window for a specific time of day to avoid migrating during business hours, at the end of the month of the year, or during maintenance windows. For example, sales teams probably don't have to migrate towards the end of the quarter, and accounting and legal departments will likely have time limits on their migration.
Step 7: Run the migration and track its progress
With pilot-validated data transfer approaches, combat migrations should become routine events. There will likely be small adjustments throughout the process to accommodate the needs of certain groups. Careful monitoring will still be needed to ensure that all contingencies are taken into account during the planning and pilot phase. However, the process should become more and more automated. The execution of the combat migration schedule is important to document and communicate progress throughout the organization to provide confirmation that expectations are being met. Monitoring and feedback remain key aspects of a successful migration throughout the process.
Conclusion
We talked about things to consider when migrating the mail service. If you are currently in the process of choosing a migration solution or just thinking about it, it is important to consider all this. We work with Quest migration solutions and are ready to recommend them as the most effective for reducing the number of manual actions and increasing the amount of data transferred as a result of migration.
If you want to learn more about effective approaches to migration, leave a request in on our website or just call, and you can also study additional materials at the links below:
Source: habr.com