Products and Functionality - Manageability Part 1

In my role at Binary Tree I get to work very closely with our solutions, and come across some great features that I would like to share. The first product in the list I would like to spend time on is Exchange Pro.

What I will do is highlight some of the key features I have found and will follow up in additional blogs, which will cover different areas of the product.

This blog will focus on the manageability of performing migrations. I can see other topics for example End User Functionality but that's for another article.

What I see from this solution is a great way to manage, automate and perform your migration, so you can concentrate on your end users and get them enabled on the new investment you have made with the latest version of Exchange on-premises, or Office365.

I feel customers have enough to worry about when performing a migration so let this solution take care of the migration for you.

So, what do I see once I have installed and configured the solution, which remember if pre requisites are all in place does not take long at all.

I double click the icon on the desktop:

Then the Administration Interface pops up:

Now what I would like to do is delve into some of the features we see here and how they will benefit us when performing migrations.

Now remember for this blog we will focus on aspects of "Manageability". There is a lot included with this solution so I want to break this down into more consumable chunks.

From looking at the Administration console what do we see? What I noticed during the install is we needed to have SQL in place which can be Server, or Express version, this tells me that everything we are looking at for my users is stored in SQL this means that I have super fast access to the data, and from looking at some of the columns in the interface I can also filter what I am seeing.

So to me this means I can quickly, and efficiently get the list of users I want to work with – Cool!

So first let’s narrow the scope of users I am working with to just the Sales Engineers:

Then I select ok:

Now that was easy. What we will now do is put them in a "Migration Group" called "Wave 2".

First I select the users and select "Properties":

Then you select "Migration Group" and add the name, in this case "Wave 2". You can also set the Priority for the migration group as well and select "OK":

Now if we clear the "Group filter", under the "Advanced Filter" option we will then be able to see all of our users again and we will see something like this:

Where we see all of our users, however if we look in the "Migration Group" column we will see that I have users associated with "Wave 1" and Wave 2".

Now I see this as a good way of managing batches of users that you want to migrate. This is something you can do ahead of time during the planning, and scheduling phase of your migration project, and when it comes to migration day you can easily select these users for migration.

But hang on, we can take this a few steps further here where we can select the users by "Migration Group", and then we can schedule their migration for a later time.

First I will filter based on "Migration Group" so I can focus on the users in "Wave 1":

First I select the users, and right click and select "Add selection to queue":

Then I see the upcoming screen where I can schedule these user migrations for a later date, and time. But we also have other options available based on my needs, first lets see the screen and then discuss some of the options after:

We can set a "Bad item limit" – What should we set this to?

Well if we looked at a previous blog, which was posted this, can help with determining what we can set here - https://pcaldecourt.wixsite.com/mysite/single-post/2018/10/22/How-Many-Bad-Items-in-a-Mailbox

Then we see "Large item limit" – However, if we have used an analysis solution like Mail Attender for Exchange as an example we could highlight and capture the items and help us remove the items from mailboxes we would then not be too concerned with this option. Otherwise we can have the solution skip x amount of items before stopping for that specific user.

We can set a priority for the migrations, and then here is where we schedule these migrations ahead of time.

If required we can also use the "Suspend when ready to complete" functionality, which basically lets us, pre migrate up to 95% of the users mailbox to the target and then we can do that final cutover at a specific time. This is a popular feature when performing migrations to Office 365​. We can then select the Databases we want to be used to create the mailboxes. We can have it auto select specific database types and also round robin mailbox databases.

Selecting these options here can really help us automate the process of selecting, and scheduling users for migration. Just think about if we can do a lot of this work ahead of time.

Now on top of this we have made this functionality available through command line functionality called "E2E Job Importer". This allows you to import a CSV schedule file of mailbox migration jobs from a command line. A CSV file can also be used to update existing mailbox migration job values, and we can also cancel migration jobs using this method as well.

Here is an example:

Open a command prompt:

Run C:\Program Files\Binary Tree\E2E\bin>BinaryTree.E2E.JobImporter /s [CSV schedule file].

As you can see from this view of the solution where it can provide great value to a migration project offering you a lot of manageability, and flexibility of controlling your migration project.

Like I say there is a lot of other items to worry, and be concerned about and this goes a long way of helping you manage your project.

I will be continuing this blog series so keep an eye out for more on this topic.​