Test Environment

Test Environment…..​

Here is another great topic for us to discuss, and that is of the importance of having a test lab in place. This is an area which can easily be overlooked, and I have seen this many times. But is so important to any migration project being a success, however if companies have not been involved in migration projects before why would they know, or need to know this? This is where we the experts, or trusted advisors who have done this many times need to let our customer’s know of the importance of having a lab. How many times have we seen this not being the case? This is another topic which needs to be brought up early so the correct expectations can be set.

What should be in the lab…?

The best test environment would be a complete mirror image of what you have in the production environment however; this is not always practical, or feasible for a customer to have in place. So let us take a closer look into what we should have available in the test environment. So, starting with the basics let’s have a source environment in place, for example an Exchange 2013 server with some test users, now let’s add some data to those accounts, some workstations Outlook profiles, PST files (If you allow them in your environment). You really want to try to cover the items what are important to your company. Then have a target environment in place be it Exchange 2016 on premises, or a test tenant for Office 365. This environment can now be used for the basis of your testing; from what the new environment will look like to how you are going, to get your user’s there. This environment will give you a chance to test the different migration, and coexistence solutions available and see what best suits your needs. Once you have chosen the appropriate solution you will then start to build out your migration plan for what steps needs to take place and allow you to run through the migration process from start to finish.

Importance of the lab!

So what is the importance of the test environment, well we did just allude to this in the previous section… This is where you can start to build out your migration plan with running through the complete migration process. This is the appropriate time to discover that you have some steps in the wrong place, and add some additional steps, which have been overlooked. This again goes back to our blog post on migration planning and is another key step in your migration project. This is where we will test the software, processes and procedures we have developed for our project and once signed off we then move to production.

Now you always have an environment to test in to make sure things are working as expected before going to production.

Successful Migration

As in my previous posts what we are attempting to do is arm our customers, and partners which additional knowledge to ensure that we all have successful migrations. Having a test environment in place is something, which will help mitigate risk and bring success to your migration project.