Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog

Our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2012!

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:29:09 GMT

As the year comes to a close, Binary Tree would like to share our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2012. The goals of our blog posts are to help educate and empower our customers and partners with the latest and most valuable information to ensure successful email migration projects.

1.) In February, the blog post Don’t Move Your Mailbox Data TWICE!!!, discusses the importance of doing your homework when selecting a specialized software tool to help you with a specific need, such as an email migration project. It might just save you and your users a lot of headaches in the long run, and save you a bunch of money too.

2.) John Alumbaugh wrote a guest blog post for us in June on Ensuring a Successful Migration to Office 365. At the time, John was Director of Consulting Services at CloudStrategies LLC. John has since joined Binary Tree and in this post he discusses lessons learned to ensure a streamlined and successful migration to Microsoft Office 365.

The Complexities of Migrating Exchange to an AD Resource Forest

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:01:39 GMT

Posted by Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E Complete

Customer questions relating to Exchange resource forests are becoming more and more common for our technical team. Organizations want to consolidate their existing Exchange environments to a single Active Directory (AD) forest running Exchange 2010, while leaving their user accounts in their old AD domains.

Merging multiple AD forests into a single forest is a VERY complex undertaking, which requires transitioning workstations, laptops, servers, printers and all applications that interact within that AD environment. So it’s no wonder that customers shy away from that migration project and go with a brand new build-out of an Exchange resource forest to run their messaging environment in a more centralized, consolidated infrastructure.

This may become an even more common method to deploy Exchange 2013 when it is released. However, there are some serious challenges related to linking active user accounts from one AD environment to a separate Exchange AD forest and successfully migrating all the email data intact.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the different steps that MUST be performed to do this manually and describe how our E2E Complete software automates this entire process.

Best Practices for an Email Migration Planning Workshop

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, CTO

Everyone knows that the first step in any activity is the most crucial one. An email migration project is no exception. However, the importance of the proper project initiation is often overlooked. Many times a project kickoff meeting focuses only on the statement of work when it should include a full planning workshop, which involves significantly more than a document review. There are several key considerations that should be addressed during this session and all responsible parties must be in attendance. Binary Tree specializes in email migrations and we often run migration planning workshops with customers that are preparing for their transition to Exchange 2010. In this blog post, I’m going to impart some of our best practices to drive a successful planning workshop for an upcoming mail migration. The main topics covered in this article are:

Understand why the migration is occurring
Define critical goals for the success of the project
Identify project team roles and responsibilities
Plan for end-user change management
Ensure team buy-in on realistic project timeline and milestones
Address the top 3 overlooked critical success factors

Estimating Mail Migration Speeds – Theoretical vs. Practical

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:30:00 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, CTO

Binary Tree specializes in email migrations and it is quite often that we attend planning workshops with customers that are preparing for their transition to Exchange 2010. During these meetings, a very common question that comes up is, “How fast can we migrate to the new environment?” And it may sound tongue-in-cheek but our standard answer to this question is, “You can migrate as fast as you want.”

This usually comes as quite a shock to the project teams. However, as we explain the scalability of migration processing they come to understand that the theoretical limits for migration speeds are really only bound by the available bandwidth on their network and the speed of their servers. The more migration infrastructure (sessions and processing methods) you configure within your environment, the faster the data will get moved.

The true gating factor is the practical limitation of migrating end-users, NOT their mailbox data. Moving mailbox data is easy, moving end-users is hard. The change management aspects of a migration project, which include end-user training, desktop updates/refresh, communications, migration scheduling, help-desk support, among other things, are truly the limiting factors for how fast you can migrate email to a new platform.

But customers always want to know how they can perform an accurate estimation of their data throughput for a migration to see what their theoretical limitations are for the project. There are two important factors that I’ll describe in this post which are key to crystalizing a migration throughput estimate:

Identify and Validate a Single Migration Speed Unit (for each source and target location)
Perform a Migration Test in the Production Environment with Real Mailbox Data

Active Directory Synchronization Made Simple

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Pete Caldecourt, Director of Product Management

There’s no getting around the need for Cross-Forest, or Inter-Org, email migrations. They just happen. And in some cases an IT group has only a few days to plan out the transition. They are brought about by different events such as mergers & acquisitions, company divestitures, or just plain company partnerships when organizations want to combine their email environments onto a single platform. Whatever the reason for your migration project, you will need to address the same issues every time.

The cross-forest migration process is quite complex and the Binary Tree E2E Complete product can assist you to simplify and streamline the mailbox migration process. However, to begin with, you will need to synchronize the Active Directory (AD) forests, establish bi-directional data flow between the domains, and prepare the environment for the mailbox migration process.

What options are available? Are there solutions which can ensure the success of the AD transition?

Speeding Your Migration to Office 365 Using E2E Complete

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Posted by Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E Complete

Many organizations are investigating the cloud as a possible solution offering for some of their on-premises IT services. Cloud environments like Microsoft Office 365 are not just for small businesses. There are very real financial, technical, and logistical reasons why companies of all sizes, particularly the big ones, choose to migrate to a cloud infrastructure. And it turns out that e-mail is the first toe that most organizations decide to dip into the cloud as a business validation case.

What are these companies trying to validate during their first foray into Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud solution? Well, there’s no surprise in this one. They want to know if the cost savings are really there. In a cloud infrastructure model, one of the main points to validate is that it takes less head count to maintain the solution environment because you are essentially ‘outsourcing’ those tasks to Microsoft. The objective is to reduce cost and complexity. And the fact that fewer people are now required to maintain the same level of service, while other IT resources are repositioned to more strategic business needs, means that there should be obvious cost savings. But how long does it take to reposition those folks? During the migration to the cloud is there a way to more quickly realize those cost savings?

Ensuring a Successful Migration to Office 365

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:32:35 GMT

Posted by John Alumbaugh - Director of Consulting Services at CloudStrategies LLC

 John oversees all services related client activities and is responsible for growing CloudStrategies consulting business. In addition to helping clients migrate from legacy infrastructure into modern cloud infrastructure, John is responsible for setting consulting business strategy, and is actively involved in day to day consulting with hybrid coexistence deployments. John is a US Navy Veteran with more than 20 years of IT infrastructure experience and is an all-around propeller head card-carrying gadget geek.

Lessons Learned for a Streamlined and Successful Migration to O365

Since our beginnings as a company, Cloud Strategies has focused solely on the Microsoft online experience, previously BPOS and now Office 365. Over the past few years there are a number of things we have learned that help to ensure a smooth transition to Office 365 and Exchange online. Many customers think that as long as they can move their mailboxes from point A to point B then the process is done. And while that is certainly the high-level goal, to accomplish this successfully it is almost always more complicated behind the scenes.

Speeding and Automating the Migration to Office 365

At Cloud Strategies we specialize in migrations to Office 365 and Exchange online. What we’ve learned through our years of experience is that speed and automation really matter. The faster you can complete the migration, and the more automated the process steps, the more likely you will deliver a successful project with a happy customer. To enable this automation and migration speed we have started using the E2E Complete product from Binary Tree. They are the well-known experts in the mail migration market and we have already standardized on using their Notes to Exchange migration tool. They bring quality products and expertise to the table, and it only makes sense that their professionalism and expertise translates into the Exchange-to-Exchange migration space as well.

Mail migrations from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online can utilize the free mail transfer tool from Microsoft included with Office 365, but the inherent limitations often stop us and customers alike from utilizing the built-in tool. I want to start by saying that “if” your Exchange environment meets the requirements, the free tool can get you where you want to go, but often that’s not the case. The first issue is that the Office 365 migration tool works VERY differently from its BPOS counterpart. The new tool requires a totally manual process. It forces you to import user mapping via a spreadsheet, and if you accidently choose the wrong migration type (staged vs. cutover) undoing that mistake is not straightforward. Plus, you can’t easily schedule migrations of staged groups, and the transfer speed is not consistent, or at least not historically.

The thing I like least about the free tool is that RPC over HTTP must be active in your current Exchange environment for the tool to even connect. I personally don’t like having to spend time fixing the old mail system when we are migrating away of it, so unless RPC over HTTP is in place, I just prefer to save time and skip the free tool.

For the low overhead of adding another Virtual Machine to your hybrid setup, E2E Complete brings scheduling automation, tracking and reporting to your migration project, as well as integrated communications to the end users. As long as I have an Exchange 2010 server in the environment, (which is a hybrid coexistence requirement anyway) then I have all the PowerShell cmdlets that I need to make E2E Complete work to my advantage.

Even though you can schedule the mailbox moves with the coexistence server, the E2E Complete tool scheduler takes a lot of the manual work out of the process and allows much more user friendly batch migrations, making it a faster, easier, and smoother transition from on-premises Exchange to Office 365. Because of the added complexity of the hybrid coexistence environment, Cloud Strategies experience has been that the faster the customer gets out of coexistence, the happier they are with their move to the cloud. Most organizations are working on a razor thin IT staff and IT budget, and adding all the complexity that hybrid coexistence brings can be very frustrating. E2E Complete helps us get customers into the cloud faster so that they can reap the benefits of a simplified IT spend for email. For all future Cloud Strategies migration projects we have standardized on using the E2E Complete tool to help streamline and speed up the migration processing.

Enabling the Evolution of the Enterprise Messaging Market: The History of Binary Tree

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:54:02 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, CTO

The Lotus Notes Era

In the early days of our existence, Binary Tree ventured into the challenging and complex world of email migration by creating products that facilitated change. In the mid-1990s, we developed and marketed a number of separate tools for migrating mail, calendar, and contacts migrated from a source system to Lotus Notes.

This approach initially satisfied the market need; however, it also proved challenging for customers who had multiple messaging environments in place, such as Outlook Express, MS Mail, and CC:Mail. In late 1998, while migrating a customer with a myriad of different email systems to Lotus Notes, we decided that the only rational solution was to create a comprehensive migration product. The migration challenges presented by our customers paved the way for us to create the Binary Tree Common Migration Toolkit (CMT).

Over the next four years, we continued to advance the capabilities of CMT and the names Binary Tree and CMT became some of the most recognizable names in the world of messaging migration, as we became a key enabler to organizations that were transforming their messaging and collaboration capabilities. Our list of customers was rapidly growing to include the “who’s who” of the corporate world.

Evolving to Facilitate Merger & Acquisition Integrations

In the early 2000s, we recognized that the migration trend was beginning to expand beyond just migrations to Lotus Notes. Corporate mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, re-branding, and other events created a need for an enterprise-grade migration solution within Lotus Notes. So we developed the CMT for Domains product so that customers going through a merger, acquisition or divestiture could streamline how they migrated, consolidated, or separated diverse Domino domains. While CMT for Domains focused on Domino-to-Domino merger integration, our product line would eventually evolve to support Domino-to-Exchange and Exchange-to-Exchange merger integrations as well.

The Notes Exodus Era

Also in the early 2000s, another trend was slowly emerging: migrations to Microsoft Exchange. With IBM focusing less on Notes and Domino and diluting the Lotus brand and value, and Microsoft emphasizing Exchange and Outlook more as an enterprise messaging solution, some of our Notes migration customers approached us about a migration tool from Notes and Domino to Outlook and Exchange.

In response to the market demand, we created CMT for Exchange, an enterprise-scale migration solution that met the needs and the requirements of end users and administrators alike. The combination of fidelity, scalability, and manageability made CMT for Exchange the product of choice for the largest Domino to Exchange migration ever performed, for one the largest global financial firms, which had over 180,000 users worldwide.

As our experience with migrations to Exchange grew, we learned that as enterprises embarked on Domino-to-Exchange migrations, they required extensive interoperability (or “coexistence”) between the two diverse systems so that their end-users would experience a highly functional and seamless transition process. While there were tools available for temporary coexistence between Domino and Exchange, we aimed our sights on creating an enterprise-class coexistence solution. The result was CMT for Coexistence. By the mid-2000s, the CMT product suite became a true enterprise messaging migration solution suite. In recognition of that fact, the abbreviation CMT was changed to stand for Complete Migration Technology.

New Resources for Planning a Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT

by Mark DeAngelis, Remote Hosted Migration Manager

Are you planning a migration to Office 365? Are you looking for valuable resources to help you design and execute your migration plan? I recently came across some very useful information that I thought I’d share …

Microsoft's Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises

As stated on the Microsoft Office 365 TechNet website, the Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises is intended to help you understand the requirements and workflows necessary in introducing Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises to your organization. This guide presents the deployment process for Office 365 in a way that explains both important deployment concepts and detailed deployment procedures. It is intentionally organized into sections that provide specific types of information for specific types of deployment personnel in your organization. Here is a quick overview of what is in this guide:

Deployment Overview Section: This section is a high-level look at the deployment and organizational requirements to deploy Office 365. It has valuable information for your IT decision makers, program managers, and technical implementation leads.
Plan and Prepare Sections: These sections describe the particular tasks and activities required to get ready and fully implement your Office 365 deployment. The tasks are generally presented in the order in which you address them during your deployment. Topics discussed in the Plan section that need more detail may recur in the Prepare section with instructions for carrying out a task. The Plan and Prepare sections contain information that will interest specific types of technology experts in your organization.
Migrate Section: This section describes the tasks for moving your users’ mailboxes to the Office 365 environment so you can begin using Office 365 as part of your production environment.

Access the entire document here.

Optimizing Your Messaging Platform with Binary Tree and Mimecast

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances

The recent announcement of the strategic partnership between Mimecast and Binary Tree may have caught a few people by surprise. But for those of you that fully understood the value proposition of each company, you saw the integration benefits right away. The synergies between the solutions will help customers transition to an optimized Exchange messaging platform with a reduced risk of user impact for downtime or data loss. Migrating e-mail and calendaring data poses many challenges. Not only can it be very time consuming and costly, the risk of data being lost or becoming corrupted is greatly heightened during this process. Were this to happen to important commercial or sensitive information, the financial and legal repercussions could be significant. Most CIO’s don’t want to gamble with the success of their messaging migration, and that’s why the strategic partnership between Binary Tree and Mimecast makes perfect sense.

And the timing couldn’t have been better. A recent survey of 500 IT decision makers from organizations in different industries and from different geographies found that 77% of companies plan to upgrade their messaging platforms in the next two years. This watershed event is driven by the ubiquitous adoption of Exchange 2010 for on-premises implementations and the great momentum around hosted Exchange solutions like Microsoft Office 365. And during these transition projects customers are looking to optimize their messaging environment at the same time. Common advancements on their wish list include full-featured archiving with automated retention policies and fast search integration, simplified Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam security, and super high-availability. Together, Binary Tree and Mimecast provide a streamlined and risk free solution to help customers transition to their messaging platform of the future.

Don’t Move Your Mailbox Data TWICE!!!

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:03:33 GMT

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.

Evaluating Choices for Migrating BlackBerry Smartphones

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:45:20 GMT

Posted by Pete Caldecourt, Director of Product Management

Mobile devices play a key role in most businesses today. In most organizations, 20–25% of users typically access their messaging data from a mobile device. They’re essential for timely interactions with clients and keeping geographically dispersed teams working together efficiently.

So when organizations make the move to a new messaging environment—whether it’s Domino to Exchange, Exchange to Domino, or upgrading from an older version of Exchange to Exchange 2010—updating mobile devices to work with the new environment is critical to keeping business processes running smoothly.

Options for Migrating Mobile Devices

When it comes to migrating BlackBerry devices to a new messaging environment, IT administrators can:

Move each device manually
Use BlackBerry Transporter (if it’s not a cross-platform migration)
Use CMT Mobile from Binary Tree for cross-platform or upgrade migrations

Let’s look at what’s involved with each of these migration methods.

Why Not Consumer Reports for Exchange Migration Tools?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:04:35 GMT

Posted by Karl Sand, Director of Channel Alliances

When you go shopping for a new car, kitchen appliance, or a flat-screen TV, it’s likely that you did your research ahead of time. And odds are that you read up on the best brands in Consumer Reports. Hey, it’s great information, and it’s inexpensive. Their tagline is “Expert Unbiased Product Ratings & Reviews.” They include all the specs for the products, customer reviews, and provide the details on features and functionality. Don’t ya wish we had that type of ratings report for specialty software tools available on the market?

Evaluating the Choices for Cross-Forest Exchange Migrations

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:00:00 GMT

By Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E

Until recently, organizations looking to perform an Exchange migration between different Active Directory (AD) forests really only had two choices of software tools for assisting with the migration. You could write migration scripts using the Exchange Management Shell (PowerShell) programming method that Microsoft provided, or you could use legacy 3rd party tools from ISVs. Unfortunately, these choices have left a lot to be desired for organizations looking to perform and manage migration projects.

The PowerShell method lacks the ability to effectively schedule the migration processing, and it doesn’t give you the ability to inform your end-users of their personal migration schedule. In essence, you’re dealing with a completely manual method. It doesn’t give you any control over the management aspects to run your migration project unattended. And it requires a higher level of knowledge in order to properly execute the project in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your end-users.

The second traditional choice has been agent-based tools from ISVs that were mostly architected over 10 years ago to handle migrations from Exchange 5.5 to 2000. While these tools were somewhat helpful at the time, they are not well architected to assist with migrating recent versions of Exchange Server. Especially when you think about having to deploy multiple agents on all of the Exchange servers in your environment. That’s where they have to run, or perhaps crawl is the better term, as they are typically 10 times slower than PowerShell and PowerShell-based technology. These agents have a three-step process and work in a serial progression. First, they export the mailbox data to a file on the source Exchange server. And then you wait. And then another agent copies the data file from the source server to the target server and you wait some more. And then finally, another agent imports that mailbox data into a server. The net result is that these transitions are quite tedious and slow in their execution. These tools make for a very long, drawn out project.

So what’s the good news? The good news is that there is a new alternative designed specifically for a new generation of Exchange Servers and it’s dramatically better than the other choices available.

Smart, Fast, and Simple! Join Binary Tree at Exchange Connections

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Are you attending Exchange Connections in Las Vegas next week (November 1, 2011 - November 3, 2011)? If so, join Binary Tree in booth #227 where we'll be demonstrating our Exchange migration solution, E2E Complete, a Best of TechEd 2011 Award Finalist.

If your company is planning a migration to Exchange 2010, or thinking of moving to the Microsoft Cloud (Office 365), then stop by Binary Tree’s booth to check out the solution. It provides the fastest mailbox migration processing available on the market, and now we’re giving it away for free. We have a special promotion where you can use the E2E Complete software solution for free to run your pilot migration. Based on the outcome of your pilot, you can use the metrics to accurately predict the remainder of your project timeline.

E2E Complete enables you to perform intra-organizational and inter-organizational (cross-forest) Exchange migrations with no changes to the Active Directory environment. Our solution provides a centralized management console for the entire process so you don’t need to install additional agents on your Exchange servers. End-users benefit, too: they receive informative SMS or email alerts automatically and can access a self-service web portal to reschedule their individual migrations to better fit their schedules.

E2E Complete Key Features:

Streamlined Migration
Centralized Management
Refined End-User Experience

What's New in E2E Complete 2.0?

Squeezing a Gallon into a Quart Jar (How we Migrated 8TB into 4TB of Storage)

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:22:00 GMT

by Joel Greenwell, Owner, Pearbrook Management Consultancy and Information Technology & Services Consultant

Binary Tree would like to welcome Joel Greenwell as our guest blogger. Joel is the owner of Pearbrook Management Consultancy in the United Kingdom and is an expert information technology and services consultant. Joel, along with Pearbrook, provides personal consulting services, and will works to help customers discover new business opportunities, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies wherever possible.

Clients always want to maximise the efficiency of their infrastructure, and this is especially true with migration projects to a new Exchange environment.

One particular project that I recently worked on started with a Lotus Domino environment that had 8TB of mail data, and the challenge was to migrate all 3,500 users to an Exchange installation that had only 4TB of storage in total. Before I go any further, the client was also implementing an archive solution on Exchange, so this wasn’t going to be an

impossible exercise, but more of a clever execution of migration techniques and leveraging the capability of advanced features in the Binary Tree migration products.

Knowing what Binary Tree’s software tools are capable of, I came up with the concept of SNAP and DELTA, a two-stage migration methodology that staged a partial migration of data to the new Exchange platform, and then at a later date allowed for the final cutover of the users and their remaining data. The SNAP stage of data migration focused specifically on migrating email content delivered to a users’ mailboxes up to 6 months prior to being switched over to Exchange and Outlook.

The DELTA stage of migration covered all the remaining mail, calendaring, and contact data and was performed when users were actually being switched between email environments.

Microsoft Exchange environments are dependent on log files for their operation, and when migrating large amounts of data, there are plenty of log files being generated. SNAP migrations allowed us to manage the generation of log files, thereby ensuring Exchange was always available during the course of the DELTA migrations.

The SNAP migration also allowed us to assess the performance of the new Exchange environment with live data, not only with the delivery of service to end users, but also impact of tertiary activities such as Indexing, Backup, Archiving, and Anti-Virus scanning of content. Thereby we could address any issues encountered with the Exchange environment and underlying architecture (Virtual Machines, Server Blades, SANs etc) with genuine data with no risk to the business.

The Seven R’s of Holistic SharePoint Migrations

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:00:00 GMT

by John Wethington, Product Manager, Application Transformation Group

When it comes to Application Transformation, nothing gets me more excited than hearing a customer talk about their transition project and providing them with a holistic solution. Next week, Trent Overton and I will be doing just that as we represent Binary Tree at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim. We will be hosting live demonstrations and in-depth discussions of Binary Tree's Application Transformation Framework (ATF).

ATF is a solution that we have been evolving rapidly over the last 2 years. While the software components of ATF have been available separately for a much longer timeframe, after talking with many customers and integration partners, we saw a need to more closely tie them together and to align them to a comprehensive approach for moving applications to SharePoint.

ATF’s metamorphosis really started when we realized the current solutions in the market only addressed a small part of the process of moving applications from a legacy platform to SharePoint. While it’s true some offer some kind of generic discovery tool these tools are simplistic at best and do not provide a comprehensive approach to analysis or rationalization. In fact, most of the current SharePoint migration software “solutions” only focus on migrating content, or worse, they force you to use costly 3rd party components that you will forever be dependent on in your new environment. And while they may do a good job at moving content, that is only one piece of the puzzle.

Customers and integrators were missing the help they needed to…

Accurately and completely inspect all of the legacy applications
Analyze and rationalize the applications so that they can make informed decisions on how to transform each one
Redevelop applications with insight into the legacy design and code
Retire applications and servers as their initiatives progressed to reduce the cost and load of the legacy platform
Tie all of these processes together and be able to manage and control the transformations from initial planning all of the way through to the launch of the new SharePoint applications and the retirement of the legacy platform

So we developed ATF (the Application Transformation Framework). ATF is a comprehensive methodology and solution suite designed to address the true needs of our customers and our integration partners.

The guiding methodology incorporated into ATF contains the “Seven R’s of Application Transformation” which signify the primary processes for holistically transforming legacy applications to SharePoint.

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Thunder Storms, Oh My!

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:30:00 GMT

By Tracy Riddle, Senior Account Executive at Binary Tree

People often ask me "How can Binary Tree help ensure that my migration will be successful?" I think this is a great question that I am always happy to answer. And recently, a customer found out first hand the lengths we are committed to their success.

Thursday, August 25, 2011, I received a call from a client asking to understand how our CMT for Exchange solution can help them migrate 50 NSF files to PST’s. They explained to me that their company had recently acquired a small organization and they promised the business that they would have the PSTs available on Monday morning.

Understanding that there was a huge time crunch to meet their deadlines, I set up a conference call with my Solutions Architect, the customer and myself. We began to show them the steps they would need to do to complete this migration. As I listened to the customer ask questions about completing this email migration on their own, I quickly realized that for them to read the manuals to learn our product, set up and configure the solution, and complete the project in less than four days was a very tall order.

So I offered up our Support team. I explained to the client that if they would like, Binary Tree would be happy to take their NSF files and convert them After considering the challenges they were facing, the customer agreed and we set up call for later Thursday afternoon to discuss how they would send us their files.

Binary Tree offered the customer two methods for doing the conversion. The customer could ship us their files on a hard drive or they could upload the files to our ftp site. Since there was such a time crunch involved they asked if they could drive the files to us.

We were about 3 hours from each other and we agreed that we would meet Friday morning to receive the hard drive with the NSF files. Within 24 hours we had the proper NDAs in place and the files were on their way to our support team. The plan was to retrieve the hard drive, use our own migration farm and start the migration on Friday and finish up by Sunday morning. Then we would meet back up with the customer on Monday morning with the hard drive and newly migrated PST files.

Normally this would be a very simple process for us. The next day, Saturday, August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene had other plans in mind and our location for the migration happened to be directly in Irene's path.

New Approach to Exchange Mailbox Migrations

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

by Kris Honkola, Engagement Manager at VMC Consulting

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.

Fast Track Upgrade to Exchange 2010: Customer Case Study Review

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:30:00 GMT

A Binary Tree Webinar - Fast Track Upgrade to
Exchange 2010: Customer Case Study Review

Join experts from Netarx and Binary Tree on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 from 12pm to 1pm (Eastern Time) to learn how a law firm dramatically streamlined their upgrade to Exchange 2010 with the help of Binary Tree's E2E Complete software. Netarx will discuss the project and compare and contrast how this project differed from similar projects in the past. Specifically, Netarx will compare and contrast:

The manual migration approach of PowerShell scripts, spreadsheets and guesswork that most organizations currently use versus a new automated approach that E2E Complete enables.
The limited scheduling, forecasting and reporting capabilities that Netarx had when they relied on the manual migration approach versus the new capabilities they have by leveraging the automation of E2E Complete.
Managing migration projects remotely and how to scale migration service offerings from a migration command center handling multiple projectssimultaneously.

REGISTER HERE

In the meantime, check out these valuable Exchange 2010 Migration Resources:

Lessons from the Field: The Importance of High-Fidelity Inspections

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

by John Wethington, Senior Product Design Engineer

So you’re planning or know someone who is planning an email and/or application migration? Do you have questions? Is someone asking questions that you don’t have answers to? Do you want to know what’s really in your environment? Is it time to budget? If any of these questions sound familiar to you, then sit back and let me tell you a little story of my own experience.

Off on the Wrong Foot

Several years ago, I was working as an IT Manager for a mid-size manufacturer that was a long-standing Lotus Notes shop. One day our new CIO - a staunch supporter of the Microsoft platform - called me into his office and asked me a simple question:  

“John, how many Notes Applications and Messaging users do we have today and how complex is the environment?

I was completely baffled. No one had ever asked me that question before and I was at a complete loss for an answer. So, in my perplexity and search to find an answer, I grabbed the Lotus Notes Administrator. He smiled at me and said:

“It’s pretty complex, John, and a great deal of the applications are customized. Also, the users own their own applications, so we don’t typically manage them unless we’re asked to. As for the mail, I would say we have a few hundred users, but I’m not really sure how many actual mailboxes we have. Let me run some numbers and get back to you...”.

Three weeks and eight spreadsheets later, the Lotus Notes Administrator finally presented me with what I thought were the answers to the CIO’s questions. After all, we meticulously and manually combed through EVERY server gathering as many details as we could from the administrative console. We even went as far as opening up a few of the applications to find their size and owner.

Reality Check

Triumphantly and with spreadsheets in hand, I walked into the CIO’s office and exclaim, “I finally have the answers you’re looking for!” With a very serious look on his face he said:

“John …why did it take us SO long to get answers to such simple questions? Shouldn’t this information be quick and easy to retrieve? This is the IT Department …it’s critical for us to know how many Notes Applications and Messaging users we have, and have a full understanding the complexity of our environment. In order for us to be successful, we need to have this information updated consistently and readily available. This has me VERY concerned …”.

He was right. Having accurate, trustworthy, and consistent data on the state of our environment was critical to maintain and grow the environment. But, once again, I was unable to answer his questions, and the last thing I wanted to do was show him the spreadsheets because we weren’t 100% confident that they were accurate and complete.

Migration Orders

Shortly after my humbling interaction with the CIO, he called the IT Team into his office and made the following announcement:

“We are migrating off of Lotus Notes. I need you to figure out what it will take to migrate our applications to SharePoint or .NET, and I need you to find a way to migrate Lotus Notes to Exchange. I’ll need a project plan and budget by the end of next week. This is crucial to the company’s overall IT strategy and I’m counting on you to execute.”

The End User is King: Ensuring the Interoperability of Hybrid Messaging Systems

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

For organizations operating more than one messaging system, especially those as diverse as Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange, seamless messaging and calendaring coexistence between messaging systems is no longer a 'nice to have,' it's a 'must have.' The success of these initiatives is directly correlated to the experience of the end users and very often it's specific to how well the calendars work between users on different email platforms. Users can become quite vocal if meetings disappear from their calendar or they can't schedule a meeting because they can't look up the availability of the other users. As Vadim Gringolts discussed in his blog post last week on coexistence:

" ...users insist on perfect functionality of ALL calendar entries, complete and continuous synchronization of ALL directory entries, instantaneous and accurate free/busy lookup, and uninterrupted workflow of mail-enabled applications with their custom emails, forms, and approval buttons."

Keeping up with new software releases, features, and integrations is a constant challenge for IT Administrators. They need to be able to easily and efficiently perform smooth and seamless transitions from one platform/release/upgrade to another. Tack on the responsibility for establishing and maintaining interoperability between two different messaging systems, whether due to a merger, an acquisition, or a platform migration, and their job can quickly become overwhelming. Even so, it's vital that companies with differing email and calendaring systems are able to harmoniously coexist and that users are able to work without interruption.

So what should the end user experience look like when an organization is coexisting with Domino and Exchange? And what are the planning best practices for administrators to ensure that their hybrid environment is fully interoperable and their users are not disrupted?

Getting a Grip on a Unique Domino/Exchange Coexistence Functionality

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

by Vadim Gringolts, CTO

There is no question; the requirements for seamless messaging and calendaring coexistence between Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange have kept pace with technology advancements. It seems that only yesterday users were satisfied with the ability to send simple emails and basic calendar invitations back and forth, and then, all of the sudden, virtually in a blink of an eye, it's all about full transparency. Users insist on perfect functionality of ALL calendar entries, complete and continuous synchronization of ALL directory entries (that's right, don't forget about Groups and Members!), instantaneous and accurate free/busy lookup, and uninterrupted workflow of mail-enabled applications with their custom emails, forms, and approval buttons. The scale of demands can only be matched by the creativity and ingenuity of the product creators with whom I have the privilege to work with everyday.

To experience what our customers live through on a daily basis, Binary Tree runs a mixed Domino/Exchange environment (even better, a hybrid on-premises/Office 365 Exchange environment, but more details about it later). So, we’re certainly familiar with the most annoying limitations of coexistence between these complex and significantly different environments. One limitation that really had us pulling our hair out over the years was being able to add Exchange users to existing Domino repeating meetings. For example, imagine that a standing Domino repeating meeting called “Weekly Sales Pipeline Review“ has existed for a while. A new sales person joins the team, so he or she is added to the meeting - what can be simpler, right? Actually, if the new Sales person is using Exchange for mail and calendaring, it’s not simple at all. It so happens that when you add a participant to an existing repeating meeting in Domino, the new invitee just receives a series of dates instead of a recurrence pattern like "every week on Mondays". Notes can handle these pattern-less invitations, but Outlook cannot - it wants to know the original pattern.  

So, how does one get a grip on such a situation?

Extra-Strength Pain Relief for Exchange Mailbox Migration Headaches

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

by Dean Sesko, Systems Architect at Netarx and Microsoft Exchange Certified Master

Binary Tree would like to welcome Dean Sesko as our guest blogger. Dean is a Systems Architect at Netarx where he focuses on designing and implementing large-scale messaging environments using Microsoft messaging technologies. Dean has several certifications from both Microsoft and VMware and has proven work experience with various enterprise customers.

When he’s not working, Dean loves to brew beer and integrate technology into that process. He’s even written his own beer brewing software application to track the what, how, and when of each step in the beer brewing process.

Check out Dean’s blog ExchangeBytes where he discusses Microsoft Exchange and related technologies.

Having performed hundreds of Exchange email migrations over the past 16 years, I can say without a doubt that managing mailbox moves is the biggest headache of the entire migration/upgrade process. I’ve worked with Microsoft Exchange since version 5.0, and I can say that the process is getting better with each version. Technically, moving mailboxes is quite simple - a few simple clicks in the Exchange Management Console or the execution of a crafty Exchange PowerShell command and you are off and running. However, from a business perspective, there was never an easy way to manage the process. It requires loads of manual intervention for monitoring, tracking and troubleshooting.

Since mailbox migrations reach so far into an organization, touching not only the end users’ mail client, but also business critical mail-enabled applications, tracking and scheduling downtime is crucial to the success of a migration. The process of informing each user when their mailbox will be migrated and handling exceptions to the schedule requires significant effort. The necessary evils of gathering this data and managing user communications helps keep projects on time and on budget. Unfortunately, this also consumes precious resources that could be better spent elsewhere on the project. Further adding to the mailbox move headache is the stress and strain on staff due to these activities typically being done after hours and on weekends. However, in a 24/7-production facility, there are limited time slices when mailboxes can be moved, thus creating an even bigger logistical nightmare causing migration teams to work around the clock.

In the past I’ve used a series of Excel spreadsheets and PowerShell scripts to lessen the time spent managing this process. For example, I would export data into a CSV file from Get-Mailbox, Get-MailboxStatistics, Get-MoveRequest, and Get-MoveRequestStatistics to use as a foundation for my reports. I would take this data and make it look readable to the non-technology inclined individual by adding graphs and tables to try and articulate where in the project we were and how much further we would have to go. This laborious process was usually done repetitively throughout the night as mailboxes were moved. It goes without saying that this process requires strict monitoring of the mailbox moves to avoid unexpected failures in the process. Nothing is worse than setting up a bunch of migrations to run before you go to bed only to wake and find an error happened in the middle of the night and a majority of the mailbox moves were stalled.

Thankfully, I found a cure for my migration headaches ...

Renaming a Domino Server Using Domino Consolidator

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Today's blog post was originally posted on June 21, 2011 on Perry Hiltz's wildly popular blog, Domino Diversions. As most of you may know, Perry is a Solutions Architect at Binary Tree and a long-time IBM Domino solutions expert. Today, Perry is heavily involved in the success of Binary Tree's pre-sales, technical, and support teams, and focuses primarily on educating and supporting customers during their Microsoft Exchange migrations.

The thought of renaming a Domino Server is a daunting task at best. There are innumerable considerations to address when undertaking this task. There is the server security, groups, connection documents, mail-in-databases, access control lists, and not to mention the user desktop icons. As I continue to work with various organizations, the thought of Domino server virtual clustering has proven to be a way to simplify some of these processes.

The concept entails an Enterprise version of Domino. The administrator will still need to register a new server in the Address book. This will be the new name of the server. Then the next step is to create a cluster with the old server name, then the new server name. Once the cluster directory and cluster replicator tasks are initiated, the cluster directory database will contain cluster information for only the old server.

The next step involves the creation of agents to scan all ACL’s to add the new server entry. Beware of roles, the agents will likely not associate the new server listing with any roles the old server had. Then connection documents to and from the old server need to be copied, and modified to use the new server name. Similarly group membership of the old server will require the new server to be added. Next will be to copy and paste, then modify all of the mail-in-database names. This will need to reflect the new server name. Once all of these aspects are in place, then the server’s Notes.ini can be modified to use the new server ID file for serverid= and keyidfile= to use the new server ID file.

High Availability and Load Balancing Techniques Using CMT for Coexistence

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:30:00 GMT

by Robert Martin, Lead Principal Consultant

Introduction

Given the complexity of integrating Microsoft Exchange and IBM Domino environments in a cohesive coexistence solution, it’s not surprising that one thing Messaging Engineers struggle with is providing for Highly Available and Load Balanced designs in their coexistence infrastructure.

In the following post, I will describe the various techniques for providing both High Availability and Load Balancing in a coexistence design utilizing the Binary Tree CMT for Coexistence toolset. I’ll discuss the major components of coexistence and how each component can be configured to provide the necessary level of availability and throughput required by the customer. The major components are:

Mail/Calendar Routing
Free/Busy Connectivity
Directory Synchronization
Application Remediation

In some instances, providing for one need (such as load balancing) will naturally follow through with the other (high availability). In other instances, this will not be the case, and each need will have to be configured and will operate independently of the other.

Load Balancing and Fault Tolerance of Mail and Calendar Message Routing

This post will discuss setting up a load-balanced solution within a single Domino Domain. I will discuss leveraging it for multiple Domino Domains in a future post. Because CMT for Coexistence utilizes native transport protocols for both IBM Domino and Microsoft Exchange, the techniques for providing load balancing differ significantly depending on the direction of message flow. The following describes how to configure load balancing in each direction:

Domino to Exchange Message Load Balancing

In most coexistence scenarios, message traffic requirements and the duration that coexistence must be maintained does not warrant the use of more than one CMT for Coexistence Domino server acting as the messaging coexistence gateway. Other scenarios may require the deployment of more than one CMT for Coexistence Domino server to serve a Domino Domain.

An example of one such instance may be when the Domino environment is geographically separated by slow or saturated WAN links. If the corresponding Exchange servers are deployed to mirror the Domino environment, it may not make sense for a message from one site to traverse a slow WAN link in order to cross the coexistence gateway, only to have to traverse the same WAN link to be relayed to the intended recipient. This is extremely inefficient and a large amount of traffic can quickly overwhelm the link. Optimally, the message traffic should be relayed to a coexistence server within the same site as illustrated below.

Another scenario may be that the high volume of mail traffic necessitates the deployment of multiple Messaging Coexistence servers. Although a properly sized and configured Domino Coexistence server can easily process and relay more than 20,000 messages per hour, extremely large organizations can quickly reach this level of messaging traffic once they’ve migrated a large number of their users to Microsoft Exchange. In this scenario, a single Domino Coexistence gateway is not enough to handle the amount of mail traffic generated. Message traffic from mail servers in the environment needs to be balanced across multiple coexistence servers as illustrated below:

Both scenarios involve deploying multiple Coexistence servers within the Domino Domain and then directing a subset of mail servers to specifically use one of them and not the other.

Because CMT for Coexistence requires that Notes routing (NRPC) be used between Domino mail and coexistence servers, deploying multiple coexistence servers requires creating multiple Foreign Domain documents. Since there is no field within a Foreign Domain document to restrict its use to a particular mail server, and because the Mail Server field within that document does not support Domino Cluster or Server Group names, we must limit which Foreign Domain document is replicated to any given mail server.

Limiting the replication of a Foreign Domain document is accomplished by setting the '$Readers' field within the document to allow only specific servers to have read access to it. There are three (3) other standard readers fields on the Foreign Domain document that may allow a user or server to read the document. They are the:

DocumentAccess
LocalAdmin
ListOwner

The DocumentAccess field is set to [NetModifier] by default. The LocalAdmin and ListOwner fields correspond to the Owner and Administrators fields on the Administration tab. Because all servers within a Domino Domain are members of the LocalDomainServers group by default, and that group is assigned the [NetModifier] role, it is necessary to change the DocumentAccess field to some other value to keep it from replicating to all servers in the Domain. Unfortunately, there is no direct way to edit this field, as it is not included on the Foreign Domain document form. A simple action agent can be written to adjust this field to another value, such as a distribution hub server.

The following steps describe how to deploy two (2) different Foreign Domain documents within a Domino Domain in support of the mail flow shown in the illustration above:

Celebrating Binary Tree Partner Achievements in 2011

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:30:00 GMT

It’s that time again! Time to recognize, honor, and celebrate Binary Tree’s global and regional systems integrators for their remarkable work and impact in the Microsoft Exchange migration and Microsoft SharePoint migration marketplace using Binary Tree solutions.

This is the second year in a row for the annual Binary Tree Partner of the Year Awards. The 2011 awards winners were recognized at a Binary Tree reception last night during the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011) in Los Angeles.

Below is the list of the 2011 award winners:

2011 Partner of the Year Award Winner - Global Systems Integrator in North America

2011 Partner of the Year Award Winner - Global Systems Integrator in EMEA

Sogeti

2011 Partner of the Year Award Winner - Global Systems Integrator in Asia Pacific

2011 Partner of the Year Award Winners - Regional Systems Integrators in North America

Join Binary Tree at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011)

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Are you attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011) in Los Angeles next week (July 11, 2011 - July 14, 2011)? If so, join Binary Tree in booth #934. We’ll be demonstrating and discussing our award-winning software including our E2E Complete partner solution that streamlines the management and scheduling of migrations to Exchange 2010, as well as our line of CMT software solutions for migrating email and applications from Lotus Notes to Exchange Online and Office 365.

Need some other reasons to visit Binary Tree at WPC 2011? Read here:

We’ll be presenting our Application Transformation Framework (ATF) solution in the Microsoft Business Productivity Theater for Office 365 on Wednesday, July 13th from 4:30 to 4:50pm.
Binary Tree was selected as one of ten preferred Microsoft Partners to sponsor the main Microsoft Office 365 Partner Launch Session on Tuesday, July 12th.

Thoughts on Case Studies and How They Are Used to Evaluate Migration Solutions

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:30:00 GMT

By Rennie Filler, Online Marketing & Social Media Manager

Case studies are powerful tools. They are one of the most effective ways for Binary Tree and our Partners to share our customer migration experiences, as well as our capabilities as we continue to grow as a leading provider of enterprise messaging and application migration software.

From the beginning, case studies have consistently helped us to explain to potential customers why someone selects Binary Tree software to ensure that their migration project is a success. Our case studies also help to provide a platform that allows us to detail the benefits of our software in a real-life situation that potential customers can easily relate to. It’s our goal to make sure that we’re consistently providing our customers with the knowledge and tools they need to fully educate, enable, and empower themselves, their project teams, and their executives – and we’ve found that customer case studies are a key piece in ensuring that we achieve this goal.

Sure, we offer tons of marketing collateral, brochures, videos, and slide decks on our website that detail, demonstrate, and highlight all of our migration software and solutions, but we understand that there’s nothing like hearing what it’s really all about from a peer or someone at a similar organization with a related project.

I can’t remember the last time I purchased something online without meticulously reading almost every customer product review before making my final purchasing decision. By reading the customer reviews, my goal is to understand the buyers’ need, their selection process criteria, and ultimately their experience and overall feeling towards the product once they got it home and used it. It’s important for me to know from a customer’s point-of-view the kind of experience they had from beginning to end before making my final decision. So, just like an online product review, Binary Tree’s goal is to showcase our customer’s point-of-view and their personal experience working with our Partners and using our software.

What’s New with Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration?

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Posted by Richard Dean, Principal Consultant, Professional Services

With the Gold release of Microsoft’s Office 365 coming very soon, Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration Service (RHM) is now offering “Rich Coexistence” and “Velocity Migrations” using our industry leading migration engine for the best data fidelity available, as well as our finest system interoperability solutions to ensure end users experience the smoothest transition to the cloud. Along with the best technology, we offer the most seasoned service consultants and practices for migrating Lotus Notes and Domino messaging and application environments to Microsoft BPOS-Standard Suite.

Combined with our already excellent services, customers can also expect some new features, functionality, and improvements with RHM. The following sections briefly outline some of those new subjects and highlight the benefits of each.

Expanded Coexistence Options

On June 28th, 2011, Microsoft Office 365 will go Gold. Binary Tree will be one of the first service vendors offering “Simple” or “Rich” coexistence solutions along with “Velocity Migration” services to the Exchange platform and the only software provider offering full coexistence interoperability, which now includes free/busy information translation between IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Office 365.

Simple Coexistence: With simple coexistence, all email addressed to your company’s domain will continue to be delivered to your on-premises Exchange server. However, email that is addressed to users that have been moved to Office 365 will be forwarded to their Office 365 mailboxes, allowing them to send and receive email from their Office 365 mailboxes using the same on-premises email address.

Rich Coexistence: Rich coexistence provides a robust management experience with better integration options for your on-premises server. You can also configure rich coexistence to provide a virtually seamless connection between your on-premises and online environments. With rich coexistence, end users can share calendars and free/busy information with their existing corporate Lotus Domino co-workers, regardless of whether their mail account is online or still on-premises.

Rich coexistence requires that at least one published Internet-facing 64-bit Windows server 2008 R2 is running Internet Information Services (IIS), the Web Server Role, and .NET 3.5.1. Typically, port 80 and 443 are required to be open between firewalls for appropriate communication between systems.

For security purposes, an SSL certification is recommended for IIS that’s issued from a valid third-party Trusted Root Certificate Authority to ensure encrypted free/busy traffic between the customer environment and the cloud.

For more information on prerequisites, please download the CMT for Coexistence 3.0.5 Comprehensive Users Guide.

Learn How to Have a Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:00:00 GMT

A Webinar Presented by Microsoft and Binary Tree: Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Join experts from Microsoft and Binary Tree on Monday, June 20, 2011 at 12:00pm (ET) to find out how Lotus Notes customers are migrating to Microsoft Office 365 via a high-speed on-ramp provided by Microsoft’s Premier Deployment (MPD) team and Binary Tree. This webinar will provide a technical overview of Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration approach that provides the most streamlined transition for Lotus Notes customers migrating to Office 365.

A Remote Hosted Migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise to complete your migration successfully. Quite literally, we can transition you from Lotus Notes and Domino to Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online without any special migration hardware, software, or expertise needed.

Here are some of the features of a Remote Hosted Migration:

Remote Hosted Migrations Include Email, Calendar, Contacts and To-Do’s
No Migration Software or Hardware to Buy, Install or Configure
No Expertise on Migration Needed

This webinar will allow you to learn from the experts who run these migration projects and find out how your organization can make the move without implementing any migration hardware or software in your data center. Several topics will be covered during the session including:

Best Practices for Planning
Infrastructure Readiness
Pre-Staging the Migration Data
Pilot to Production Processing

To register for the webinar, click HERE.

Send in the Cloud: Ensuring a Rich User Experience while Migrating to Office 365

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:45:00 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, Chief Technology Officer

To say that I was excited to read last week's announcement of the Microsoft Office 365 General Availability date of June 28, 2011 is an understatement. Even when the service was referred to as “BPOS-S 2010”, all of us here at Binary Tree were looking forward to this date. After all, we've been helping Domino customers migrate to BPOS-S since its inception, and Office 365 presents a dramatically new opportunity. Well, new in some respects, and fairly well established in others. It's this combination of novelty and maturity that I would like to share with the readers of this blog post.

I don't have to tell you (but I will anyway) that Office 365 represents the true Enterprise Cloud offering - the best of breed messaging environment designed from the ground up with full multi-tenant capabilities. But what about an Office 365 migration from legacy environments (both Exchange and others) with Lotus Domino being the most prominent? Has anything been done to improve the migration process? In a word, YES!!! Well,actually it's two words – “rich coexistence”. Sounds cryptic? Allow me to explain …

One of the greatest challenges in providing a seamless migration to BPOS-S for Domino customers was the inability to perform a free/busy lookup between Domino and BPOS-S. While you could send emails and schedule and update meetings, you simply could not see the availability of users on the other system. If it sounds like an insignificant issue to you, that's because you never had to face or listen to a frustrated user trying to schedule an important meeting for 5 or 10 participants without having any visibility to their availability.

You want real anger? Imagine dealing with an Executive Assistant trying to figure out how to schedule a conference call with several VIP's distributed among different offices. If you’re the person responsible for the migration, this type of situation will make you cringe and fear for your job. Well, fear no longer! Rich coexistence with Office 365 addresses this issue. The loop is now closed, the seamless migration is truly possible, and I am proud to say that Binary Tree helped make it happen. Now, when we are deploying our solution for a Domino to Office 365 migration, the coexistence component not only delivers the messaging and calendaring workflow, but it also enables full visibility of the free/busy status for both Domino and Office 365 users, no matter which system you use to initiate a request.

Superior Software & Support for Total Project Success

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Posted by Pete Caldecourt, Director of Technology Assistance

Over the years, here at Binary Tree, we’ve learned many things. Most importantly, we’ve learned that in order to be successful and grow globally, we need to continue to develop and deliver leading email migration and application migration software products to our partners and customers. The software products that we develop and sell are essential to our growth and evolution as a key player in the migration marketplace. But, our success and growth aren’t just about the products we sell; it’s also about providing our partners and customers with an incomparable and exceptional customer support experience to help ensure that they have positive experiences with our products and their projects are ultimately successful.

With this philosophy in mind and as we continue expanding globally, it became essential for us to expand our Technical Services and Customer Support efforts into what we now call Binary Tree’s Technical Assistance Group, or “TAG Team”. The TAG Team excels greatly at many things, but one thing is most important – ensuring that our partners and customers have the best and most successful migration experiences possible from beginning to end.

So what is TAG? Here are some highlights …

Imagine a group of technical experts assigned specifically to your migration project who will assist you not only after you purchase the migration software, but will also be by your side during the evaluation phase of your project. Binary Tree’s TAG Team is available to ensure that our customers have the product knowledge needed to build business and buying cases internally, and to ultimately make an informed decision.
If requested or needed, the Binary Tree TAG Team provides our customers with pilot environments to help them get familiar with the software and the process, and to also assist with the delivery and execution with full knowledge transfers from beginning to end.

Even when the TAG Team leaves a customer site, they’re still available to provide assistance to ensure that your project is a complete success. With 24x7x365 global customer support, our TAG Team is available and ready to assist you via email, online web form, phone, and through our website chat client. Customers also have premier access to Binary Tree’s Online Knowledge Databases where they’ll find technical and how-to articles for our software.

Exchange 2010 Migrations Made Easy for Binary Tree Partners

Thu, 26 May 2011 14:00:00 GMT

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 …

Going Global with Partners – A Great Challenge

Thu, 19 May 2011 14:00:00 GMT

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.

Join Binary Tree at TechEd North America 2011

Thu, 12 May 2011 13:00:00 GMT

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

For your FREE E2E Complete trial evaluation copy, contact sales@binarytree.com.

Also, we'll be introducing special promotional pricing for E2E Complete at TechEd. From now through June 30, 2011, E2E Complete will be only $4 per mailbox migrated/upgraded! Stop by our booth for more details.

Exchange Migrations for Domino Administrators

Thu, 05 May 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

As a Domino Administrator for over 13 years now, I bleed yellow through and through. Since working with Domino since release 4.1, I've seen the product mature and expand into a vast array of capabilities. During that time, however, the number of people working in Domino Administration seems to be fading. I often wonder, "where are all of these people today and what has happened to them?" In order to answer my question, I started to look into what the market is doing. I've watched a Beacon Award winning LAEC Center close business, I've watched good friends and colleagues phased out of jobs, and I've watched as job opportunities dwindle and customers of old moving their Domino messaging to Microsoft Exchange.

With an increasing number of organizations making the move away from Domino to Microsoft, what options are available for displaced Domino Administrators? It's quite obvious that with the increasing move from Domino to Microsoft, existing Domino Administrators need to get themselves up to speed on Microsoft Exchange. I'm personally in the process of starting to investigate Exchange mail retraining. Having worked both as a Developer and Administrator under Domino since 1993, I see that this particular portfolio asset is an abating opportunity. Working in the realm of messaging migrations, I get to see a lot of what corporations are doing in terms of messaging platform utilization, and, today, I see the majority migrating to Exchange.

So what can Domino Administrators do? There are a number of steps that can be taken. Here are my suggestions:

Water Cooler "Cloud Chat" with Walter Monasterio

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:00:00 GMT

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

In my day to day, I have a lot of conversations/debates around cloud application platforms and the services they offer for different workloads. The conversation topics are usually around application features, security, development, interoperability, and management. In terms of business productivity, Google is mentioned, Salesforce.com for CRM, and perhaps Google or Amazon for cloud application development. It seems to me that the mix and match of on-premises and cloud solutions, compounded with multiple cloud services, somewhat dilutes the value proposition that these solutions offer. Among the value propositions, presented are simplicity, ease of use, cost savings, and end user satisfaction. As far as I can see, Microsoft is the only provider that can deliver on these value propositions in a mixed application and location environment.

If I were an enterprise looking to move to the cloud to try and “do more with less” (yes …I said it), I would start my ROI/TCO homework by taking a look at what we have, examining my on-premises and cloud options, the cost to get there, and evaluate my in-house and partner IT skills. Then, I would like to see an example of my end state infrastructure (POC?) working together so I understand what my end users and subsequently, help desk, could expect. In a non-Microsoft scenario that would seem to involve negotiating with multiple vendors to get the individual products up and running, identifying and deploying viable and supported interoperability solutions, or find a partner to do this on your behalf. I suspect partners would find this equally as challenging and costly.

Microsoft tries to simplify this challenge by offering Exchange on-premises and Exchange online for email; SharePoint on-premises and online for Collaboration, Portals, Development, ECM, Search, Wiki’s, and Blogs; Dynamics for CRM online; and Azure for hosted infrastructure, application development, and management. In addition to the applications themselves, they offer an array of resources, events, and partners that will let you come in and experience your future state.

Benefits of a Streamlined Migration to Exchange 2010

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:00:00 GMT

A Binary Tree Webinar: Benefits of a Streamlined Migration to Exchange 2010

Over the years, Microsoft Exchange Server has become a more capable and complex product. If your organization still uses Exchange Server 2003, the jump to Exchange 2010 will be a significant undertaking. For organizations that are preparing to upgrade from Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, Binary Tree E2E Complete can help reduce the stress and costs associated with the migration.

Join Binary Tree's Val Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, on Wednesday, April 26, 2011 as he compares and contrasts manual migration methods versus the streamlined methods enabled by Binary Tree’s E2E Complete software when migrating from Exchange Server 2003/2007 to Exchange Server 2010 within the same Active Directory (AD) forest.

Attendees will learn how to realize the benefits of a streamlined migration:

How to reduce the time and cost to migrate
How to reduce the risk of email downtime for end-users
How a shortened migration enables cost savings by retiring the legacy infrastructure sooner

Using Remote PowerShell to Provision Exchange 2010 Users

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:00:00 GMT

By Robert Phillips, Senior Architect

This is a re-post from Rob's personal blog where he publishes valuable information to assist individuals and organizations who are migrating their Lotus Notes email platforms to Microsoft Exchange.

Provisioning Exchange 2010 Users with Remote Powershell in Windows XP/2003

Exchange 2010 provides us with some new PowerShell features in order to run commands remotely to a CAS server. However, there are a few prerequisites you need to know in order to do this. First of all, Windows 2003 or XP, out of the box, does not provide this feature. You'll have to download the "WINRM" update patch that installs Windows PowerShell. Here is the URL for the download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=F002462B-C8F2-417A-92A3-287F5F81407E

Also, you need to enable remote PowerShell on your Exchange 2010 CAS server with the following PS command:

'Enable-PSRemoting'

Then choose "YES" to configure Firewall ports if necessary and then ensure that the 'WINRM' service is running on the CAS Server. There is a command to verify that you have the necessary authority to run the commands. The command is:

'get-user (username) | fl'

Building a Partner Channel for Growth

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Posted by Walter Monasterio
Microsoft Corporate & Regional SI Alliance Manager

A partner channel business model is a great way for technology companies to expand their addressable market. More inroads to customers will mean more business opportunities, plain and simple. In return, the partners are allowed to re-package and re-sell the solution for profit or receive a fee for distribution. So there it is in a nutshell, Partner Channel 101.

As a channel manager at Binary Tree, there's one question I always hear; “what is it that helps build a good partnership?" The obvious answer, of course, is shared customer leads and mutual business opportunities, but I don’t think that's the complete story. In my humble opinion, the customers will vote with their budgets for the most effective partnerships. It's our job to meet a customer’s business needs. If we can bring more “full-featured” solutions to the table through a partnership that leverages the unique value of each organization, then it’s a win-win-win.

When customers come to Binary Tree looking for help to re-platform their messaging system to Exchange, or to migrate their legacy business applications to SharePoint, it is a huge, potentially career altering decision. It usually involves large budgets, some tolerance for risk, and the real willingness to look for business value beyond “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it”. At Binary Tree, we’re successful when we work with our partners to minimize the perceived risk in taking the journey to the Microsoft platform.

Takeaways from Exchange Connections

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Posted by Valentin Vasquez , Senior Solutions Architect, E2E

Greetings from sunny Florida! This week I'm attending the seasonal DevConnections show in Orlando. This is a great event as it brings together Microsoft infrastructure focused technologists all under one roof and offers sessions ranging from SilverLight programing to SQL tuning. And of course, no event would be complete without a healthy dose of discussions focused on Microsoft Exchange.

I’ve been in the software industry for 10 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that you can never talk to enough people or get too much feedback. For all of the phone calls (oh so very many) and customer visits, there's nothing really comparable to the interactions you experience at a conference. You’ve got 30 seconds to find a technology fit, gauge interest, scan a badge, and schedule a product demonstration.

And when you find a match, the results can be awesome. I’ve been working on Binary Tree’s Exchange migration tool, E2E Complete, from the very beginning, and I can deliver a concise sound bite with nary a thought. So even though I dread the long hours of a conference, I am well suited to work these events. So when you get people staring at your booth and they say, “So what do you guys do?”, I can hit them lickity split.

Streamlining Exchange Migrations

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Meet Nigel, an IT veteran with a very important message about what it takes to successfully upgrade your Microsoft Exchange environment. For those of you planning to make the double-jump from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and take advantage of its excellent scalability and new features, it's important to think about the upgrade as a two phased project.  

First, you'll build out the new infrastructure - new servers, disc space, etc. Secondly, you'll have to move the users, and their stuff, from the old Exchange 2003 servers to the new Exchange 2010 environment - all while the users' email is off-line.

So how do you migrate the users' mailboxes successfully?

Webinar on 3/23/11 - Pain Points of Exchange Migrations

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:00:00 GMT

The jump from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010 is a significant undertaking. Between the requirement for the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 and the inability to perform an in-place upgrade from Exchange 2003 and earlier versions, you need to treat the move to Exchange 2010 as a migration project.

Join Binary Tree on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 12pm (ET) for a free, one-hour webinar sponsored by Windows IT Pro and hosted by Exchage MVP, Michael B. Smith and Binary Tree's Senior Solutions Architect, Valentin Vasquez. The webinar titled, Pain Points of Exchange Migrations will discuss the manual migration methods available, using the Exchange Management Console and PowerShell, for migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 within the same Active Directory (AD) forest. This webinar will also discuss some ways to avoid the pain and streamline the process.

*If you’re interested but can’t attend the live event, register today and watch it on-demand on Windows IT Pro when available.

Microsoft Partner Mini Series with Binary Tree's Henry Bestritsky

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:00:00 GMT

In this Microsoft Partner Mini Series video starring Binary Tree's Co-CEO, Henry Bestritsky, Henry discusses Binary Tree's tremendous success as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner as we continue migrating customers from the Lotus Notes and Domino messaging and application systems to the Microsoft Exchange email and SharePoint application platforms.

Like Henry states in the video, the Microsoft Partner Network empowers our success as we upgrade legacy Exchange users to the Microsoft Cloud. Also, Binary Tree's vast background with Lotus Notes gives us a great advantage when migrating Notes users to Exchange.

Since 1993, Binary Tree has migrated over 20,000,000 seats to the Microsoft platform worldwide. Today, with our E2E Complete product, we're able to easily and efficiently upgrade Exchange 2003 users to Exchange 2010 in order to provide our customers with the tools that they need to develop a collaborative environment for their users.

Binary Tree continues to take advantage of new Microsoft Exchange business opportunities while partnering with some of the largest GSIs in the world and continues to grow rapidly by migrating customers to the Microsoft platform.

Click HERE to watch the video.

Binary Tree's Dedication to Partner and Customer Support

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:06:05 GMT

by Traci Blowers, Director of Alliances

There’s just something about the power of the underdog. Since childhood, I always liked being “different”, and related to the unknown little guy up against the crowd favorite. Whether it was hearing my favorite childhood Bible story of how Goliath the Giant was brought down by David’s slingshot, or watching the US Hockey Team prevail during the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Olympics, the ability of the little guy to come out on top has always mesmerized me. Looking back, the thing that thrilled and captivated me was how an underdog - up against seemingly invincible opponents - just might somehow manage to blend knowledge, skill, and even luck, to win.

Underdogs have to be flexible and nimble – and they can never give up. I always bet on the underdog.

It should come as no surprise that I’ve relished the market position of underdog while building the Binary Tree Partner Channel. From where I sit, it’s been a fantastic ride watching Binary Tree go toe-to-toe against Goliath-like competitors, and find abundant opportunities, not only in project success, but in partnership within the Microsoft Partner Channel. One of the best things about my job as Director of Alliances is the opportunity to change people’s minds about what value Binary Tree can bring to a project, a practice, or a market. I spend all day, everyday, helping our partners worldwide leverage the power of Binary Tree’s people, processes, and technologies to address complex challenges.

Enabling Two Organizations to Collaborate as One After a Merger

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:00:56 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, CTO

For almost 20 years, I've had the opportunity to participate in numerous messaging projects accompanying corporate mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. Most of these projects had one theme in common - messaging integration was a component of the merger that was not given a great deal of consideration or time to plan and execute. More often than not, a seamless transition was simply assumed, and I don't have to tell you what happens when you assume. :-)

The fact is that corporate email and email-based applications are often overlooked during the planning of a post-merger IT integration or separation initiative. There are many factors that ultimately determine the level of success of an integration of corporate email environments. Some are quite common to all and some are very specific to each organization. Yet there are a couple of key aspects of these projects that are more visible and critically evaluated in rendering the verdict on the success or failure of the email integration.

Binary Tree Co-CEO Steven Pivnik Talks to NJTC

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:00:00 GMT

The NJ Technology Council (NJTC) recently interviewed Binary Tree's Co-CEO, Steven Pivnik for their Corner Office Executive profile news feature. The interview provides great insight into everything from what Steven's currently reading to what drives and motivates him to spearhead one of the leading email and application migration companies in the world. To read the entire interview and to find out what's next for Binary Tree, click below:

Steven Pivnik - NJTC Corner Office Interview

Minimizing & Simplifying Your Domino Infrastructure Costs

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:15:00 GMT

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Before I joined BinaryTree, I worked for a German based chemical company as one of two Domino Administrators responsible for 40 distributed Domino servers and over 3,500 users. Our configuration consisted of five different Domino domains in North America. We agreed - with management’s buy in – to the idea of consolidating these five domains into a single domain. After many long discussions with our parent company and a final agreement to use this new domain as the basis for a single Global Domain (we had 43 domains total), we began building out our infrastructure. Our goal was to centralize all mail into two sets of clustered servers across two AS/400's.

With our infrastructure in place, we began devising a plan to start manually moving users. We developed a well-defined checklist of 35 different key checkpoints that needed to be accomplished in order to achieve our goal. As the objective was to use local field staff to complete this process, we handed the user move and desktop updates over to field services. We had really good people doing this job, but not all field engineers followed our checkpoints list completely, nor did they follow it in the proper sequence every time. With this manual domain migration approach, when a problem arose, we spent 2-3 hours with the field engineer or the end user trying to resolve the problem. It was a very time consuming and highly inefficient process.

There had to be a better way!

Empowering Customers With Support Solutions

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:20:41 GMT

Posted by Scott Russo, Customer Support Consultant

What is the goal of customer service? To provide customers with answers to their questions, right? That’s true, however, when it comes to providing GREAT customer service, not only is it about answering questions, but it’s about empowering and enabling the customer with solutions.

It was 10 years ago today (Wednesday). I was at Lotusphere 2001, and finished my sessions, certifications, and sushi with a good friend. I was in Downtown Disney at the Disney Store; my mission was to find a costume for my daughter to wear for her princess birthday party. For anyone that’s been there, you know the store is huge, and very busy. I was a lost, stressed out dad, and didn't have a clue where to go. I know many of you can relate to my situation. Shopping is not a fun, social event, so this was not going to be an easy task. I needed answers and I needed help. I was ready to shoot a signal flare.

A store employee was walking by in a hurry and I asked her if she could direct me to find a Jasmine costume. The employee (let’s call her “Minnie”) was nice enough to stop and answer my question, but what she did next surprised me. She must have noticed the look of confusion on my face. Minnie said, "follow me," and we proceeded to walk to the costume section.

Join Binary Tree at Lotusphere 2011!

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:00:00 GMT

It’s that time of year again when Binary Tree sends it best and brightest down to the Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL for a fun-filled and highly interactive week at Lotusphere 2011. Visit Binary Tree at pedestals #223 and #224 to see demonstrations of the best Lotus and Domino transition software and solutions.

Our Lotus solutions include products to help you:

Architecting an On-premises Exchange 2010 Organization (Part 1)

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Posted by Jason Pope, Senior Messaging Consultant

So you decided to migrate to Exchange 2010 On-Premises. As with any project, the planning phase is critical in order to successfully execute your migration project. In this blog post, I'm going to discuss some of the areas within your Active Directory Forest that you need to be aware of when migrating to an On-Premises Exchange 2010 Organization, and how the overall directory services topology comes into play during your migration.

Sizing matters in every aspect of your Exchange environment and, like I’ve said in the past, Microsoft Exchange is truly a mix of Active Directory and message routing. A solid Active Directory will surely increase the success of your migration project. Unlike Domino, Exchange relies heavily on Active Directory. So, it’s important to understand what your Active Directory is used for before starting your migration. Determining what’s currently working and how well it’s working may save you time later when deciding what you may need to modify in order to maintain the service levels your end users or customers are accustom to on a daily basis.

So, let’s dig into Active Directory by taking a look at the logical partitions of Active Directory:

Thriving, Not Just Surviving, in a Virtual World

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:17:07 GMT

By Robert Phillips, Senior Architect

Binary Tree, by today’s standards, is a “virtual” company. Sure, we have a corporate headquarters in Newark, NJ, but not many employees consider it their “office”. Our brainpower is spread around the world and is definitely one reason we’re so successful. We can pull quality talent from every city in America (actually …across the globe) all the while working together as a tight-knit company. So, how do we do this and stay competitive? Well, it takes every available means of communication from mobile phones, audio conference lines, instant messaging, screen sharing applications, and employees that you can trust. It works for Binary Tree and it’s also very effective as far as keeping overhead at a minimum and doing our part to help the environment. Most importantly, however, it’s helped us to better understand how to train and communicate with our partners more efficiently while enabling and empowering them.

Early this past spring, I was asked to evaluate and improve Binary Tree’s Training and Enablement Program. My first thought was, “how do we mentor and train our own consultants?” I had a good idea as to why our training and enablement program wasn’t successful in the past, but I wanted to hear it first hand from our partners and employees. So, I conducted a few weeks of online interviews and received my validation. Our training, while very encompassing and superior, was not getting enough interest from the people it was created for – the Binary Tree Partner Community. “Why was that?”, I wondered. The problem, it seemed, is summarized in a few simple statements from our partners:

Introduction to Hosted Migrations and Weekend Express Services

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:30:00 GMT

Posted by Richard Dean, Senior Consultant

It is now 2011 and, in only one year, Binary Tree has successfully migrated 15 companies and approximately 50,000 seats globally to BPOS Standard. That’s over 25 Terabytes of migrated content …and we are just getting started. In 2011, we’ll be expanding our services and adding new capabilities. Also, we’re well into perfecting our migration processes for Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Services. As Microsoft's preferred vendor for migration solutions, we’re closely integrated and can provide our customers unparalleled services and options.

What is a Hosted Migration? A hosted migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS), which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise. Quite literally, we can take you from a Lotus Notes and Domino environment to an Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online environment without any special migration hardware, software, or expertise. In summary, this is a larger phased migration project spanning weeks.

What is Weekend Express? A Weekend Express migration is a remotely hosted Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS), which means you don’t need special migration software, hardware, or expertise. Quite literally, we can take you from operating Lotus Notes and Domino on Friday to being on Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Online on Monday morning. From on-premises to Software as a Service (SaaS) in one weekend! In summary this is a smaller, big bang migration project spanning a weekend or two.

At a high level, these are the two types of hosted migration services Binary Tree currently offers. Now for some insight into our methodologies …let’s dig in and cover the basics.

Cloud Migrations: On-premises vs. Hosted Comparison

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:30:00 GMT

Posted by Vadim Gringolts, Chief Technology Officer

I've been involved with various mail migrations for a period of almost 15 years. Without exception, migration projects of the past included 2 major tasks:

Build a migration infrastructure
Create a migration team

Both tasks represented a significant amount of effort and cost, and their completion was the key to a successful migration project. That was then ...has anything changed now? Well, the answer depends on whether you are migrating to an on-premises messaging environment, to a hosted messaging environment, or migrating to the “the Cloud”.

If you are migrating to an on-premises email platform, the only real choices for you are "to build" or "to buy" the migration framework. "Build" means to allocate hardware, install software, assign and train personnel, and to execute the project. "Buy" means to acquire a physical or a virtual migration appliance operated by a specialized third-party. Which choice is better, simpler, or less expensive may be a topic for a separate posting; this one will focus on choices for the migration to the Cloud or, more specifically, the Microsoft Cloud, formerly known as BPOS and recently renamed as Office 365 (which is how I’ll be referencing it in this blog post).

New Year, New Approach

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:38:21 GMT

Posted by Carl Baumann, Worldwide Director of Sales

New Year's Day has always been a very sentimental day for me. As I sit here and write my first blog post for Good Migrations, I can't help but to state the obvious, “time really flies". I stare in awe at how quickly my kids are growing and how fast life progresses. During the year, finding time to reflect is very difficult considering all of the uber-important work meetings and conference calls that I’m involved in on a daily/hourly/secondly basis. When I finally have some down time to reflect on how fast life moves, I can finally take notice of some of the constants in life.

The one constant that really occupied my thoughts today is CHANGE. Change is now my constant in life. In the past, I’d resist change and fight it. I mean, who really likes change? Change is unpredictable, absolute, and full of unknowns. Change is downright scary and devoid of any real answers about what will happen in the future. Life would be so much easier if everything just stayed the same. As I grow older (and hopefully wiser), I’ve come to accept, and even embrace, change. Over the past few years, everything that I have known has, in fact, changed. My personal life and work life, in one form or another, has changed. At this point in my life, change is exciting and full of surprises. I have accepted change, warts and all, and embrace it. Change and I now understand each one another.

Happy Holidays from Binary Tree!

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 14:00:00 GMT

As 2010 comes to a close, the entire Binary Tree team would like to wish our readers, customers, and partners the happiest of holidays and best wishes for a very Happy New Year.

Binary Tree is very excited about what’s to come in 2011 and we’re eager to share new product news, announcements, and plans with our readers. Also, we look forward to your participation in our blog and encourage you to get involved and let your voice be heard by writing blog post comments, rating posts, and making suggestions for future blog posts.

Again, happy holidays from everyone here at Binary Tree. We look forward to partnering with you in 2011 to help ensure that your email and application migrations are a success.

Top 10 Things to Consider in 2011 Before Your E2E Migration

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Posted by Valentin Vasquez, Senior Solutions Architect, E2E

As we enter 2011, many of you are considering a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. If you read Karl Sand’s Good Migrations blog post on Friday, you already know that the leap from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 will be quite an undertaking. Why? Because the process of upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 is more of a migration project rather than an upgrade.

With that said, below you’ll find a list of the top ten key factors that you should take into consideration as you embark on your Exchange 2010 migration/upgrade:

Streamlined Migration to Exchange 2010

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:54:03 GMT

Posted by Karl Sand, Global Microsoft Relationship Manager

When it comes to deploying and customizing their technologies, Microsoft has never wanted to grow a large services organization internally. Instead they have fostered a global business partner ecosystem that they rely on to help customers utilize the Microsoft platform to meet business needs. Many opportunities abound for smart business partners to deliver solutions and services that help customers accelerate the use of Microsoft technologies. Transitioning customers to the latest version of Microsoft Exchange is just such an opportunity where Binary Tree has focused in the past seven years.

A Message From Binary Tree’s Co-CEO, Steven Pivnik

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:13:08 GMT

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

Posted by Steven Pivnik, Co-CEO

Welcome to Binary Tree’s new blog. As Binary Tree’s Co-CEO and one of its founding members, this is an especially exciting moment for me. I’m proud to be the first person to post on Binary Tree’s new blog, Good Migrations. We want this blog to serve as another important way for Binary Tree to maintain open discussions and dialogue with our customers, partners, and anyone else who shares an active interest in email and application migration and business continuity solutions.

Binary Tree was established in 1993, primarily as an IT Services company specializing in custom application development. Our forte at the time was Microsoft FoxPro and integration work with legacy systems. The first large account that we landed was American Express. Amex was a large Lotus Notes shop and we soon started doing integration and development work between the two and other backend systems. We truly embraced the Notes platform and its capabilities and over the next two years, built up our name and image in the Lotus community.

Welcome to Binary Tree's Blog!

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:10:31 GMT

Welcome to Good Migrations

Binary Tree welcomes you to the launch of Good Migrations, Binary Tree's new and much anticipated blog. Join us as we share everything and anything related to email and application migration and coexistence methodologies, best practices, and solutions.

As the leading provider of cross-platform email migration and coexistence software, we've helped over 5,000 customers around the world to migrate more than 20,000,000 users. We're eager to share our experiences, best practices, and migration methodologies and provide our readers with top "how-to's" and "tips-and-tricks" in order to enable your migration and coexistence projects in the most successful direction.

We look forward to a creating a very collaborative and synergetic blog. Your comments and feedback are greatly encouraged and always welcomed. Please comment on this post with any and all suggestions for blog posts and "Good Migrations" to you!

Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog

Our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2012!

The Complexities of Migrating Exchange to an AD Resource Forest

Best Practices for an Email Migration Planning Workshop

Estimating Mail Migration Speeds – Theoretical vs. Practical

Active Directory Synchronization Made Simple

Speeding Your Migration to Office 365 Using E2E Complete

Ensuring a Successful Migration to Office 365

Enabling the Evolution of the Enterprise Messaging Market: The History of Binary Tree

New Resources for Planning a Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Optimizing Your Messaging Platform with Binary Tree and Mimecast

Don’t Move Your Mailbox Data TWICE!!!

Evaluating Choices for Migrating BlackBerry Smartphones

Options for Migrating Mobile Devices

Why Not Consumer Reports for Exchange Migration Tools?

Evaluating the Choices for Cross-Forest Exchange Migrations

Smart, Fast, and Simple! Join Binary Tree at Exchange Connections

Squeezing a Gallon into a Quart Jar (How we Migrated 8TB into 4TB of Storage)

The Seven R’s of Holistic SharePoint Migrations

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Thunder Storms, Oh My!

New Approach to Exchange Mailbox Migrations

Fast Track Upgrade to Exchange 2010: Customer Case Study Review

A Binary Tree Webinar - Fast Track Upgrade to Exchange 2010: Customer Case Study Review

Lessons from the Field: The Importance of High-Fidelity Inspections

The End User is King: Ensuring the Interoperability of Hybrid Messaging Systems

Getting a Grip on a Unique Domino/Exchange Coexistence Functionality

Extra-Strength Pain Relief for Exchange Mailbox Migration Headaches

Renaming a Domino Server Using Domino Consolidator

High Availability and Load Balancing Techniques Using CMT for Coexistence

Celebrating Binary Tree Partner Achievements in 2011

Join Binary Tree at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2011)

Thoughts on Case Studies and How They Are Used to Evaluate Migration Solutions

What’s New with Binary Tree’s Remote Hosted Migration?

Learn How to Have a Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

A Webinar Presented by Microsoft and Binary Tree: Fast-Track Migration to Microsoft Office 365

Send in the Cloud: Ensuring a Rich User Experience while Migrating to Office 365

Superior Software & Support for Total Project Success

Exchange 2010 Migrations Made Easy for Binary Tree Partners

Going Global with Partners – A Great Challenge

Join Binary Tree at TechEd North America 2011

Exchange Migrations for Domino Administrators

Water Cooler "Cloud Chat" with Walter Monasterio

Benefits of a Streamlined Migration to Exchange 2010

Using Remote PowerShell to Provision Exchange 2010 Users

Building a Partner Channel for Growth

Takeaways from Exchange Connections

Streamlining Exchange Migrations

Webinar on 3/23/11 - Pain Points of Exchange Migrations

Microsoft Partner Mini Series with Binary Tree's Henry Bestritsky

Binary Tree's Dedication to Partner and Customer Support

Enabling Two Organizations to Collaborate as One After a Merger

Binary Tree Co-CEO Steven Pivnik Talks to NJTC

Minimizing & Simplifying Your Domino Infrastructure Costs

Empowering Customers With Support Solutions

Join Binary Tree at Lotusphere 2011!

Architecting an On-premises Exchange 2010 Organization (Part 1)

Thriving, Not Just Surviving, in a Virtual World

Introduction to Hosted Migrations and Weekend Express Services

Cloud Migrations: On-premises vs. Hosted Comparison

New Year, New Approach

Happy Holidays from Binary Tree!

Top 10 Things to Consider in 2011 Before Your E2E Migration

Streamlined Migration to Exchange 2010

A Message From Binary Tree’s Co-CEO, Steven Pivnik

Welcome to Binary Tree's Blog!

A Binary Tree Webinar - Fast Track Upgrade to
Exchange 2010: Customer Case Study Review