Products and Functionality Manageability Part 2

As promised here is the next blog in this series based on Exchange Pro and where the topic is “Manageability”. As mentioned 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..

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.

First let’s recap some highlights from the previous blog where we covered the following topics:

SQL – Making the solution very fast for searching, and filtering the specific users we wanted to focus on.

Filtering – We were able to filter users based on group attributes, and then add the users to migration groups which we called waves.

While we went through the process of adding users to the queue we were given the following items we set:

Bad Item Limit

Large Item Limit

Suspend When Ready

Then we spent a few minutes covering the flexibility of being able to control the migrations from the command line using the power of the “E2E Job Importer”

Now let’s go back to the Administration Interface and take a look at what we see here?

I think the next area for us to focus on would be the “Mailboxes Migration Queue”, where previously we worked in the “Mailboxes to Migrate” view. Hmm I think I know how we will continue the blog posts by going across the menu options at the top of the Administration Interface:

So, fist of all how do we get users to show up in the “Mailboxes Migration Queue” view?

Well if we remember from the Part 1 blog, we would select our users that we wanted to focus on by searching using various options available and then select all | Right mouse click and then select “Add selection to queue”. Once we have added users to the “Mailboxes Migration Queue” view we will see something that looks similar top the following:

What we will do now is take a deeper look into what we can do from this view and see how it can help us manage our migrations.

First up when I submitted some users that are scheduled out I forgot to add them to a migration wave, however no worries I can set that from here. If I select the users and right mouse click I will see the following:

From here I select “Properties” and then I have the following options:

If I already have a “Migration Group” in place I can select it here from the drop down or I can add an additional “Migration Group” name as I have done in this case:

Then select “OK” or add other selections, which are available.

As before we have all of the same search capabilities to locate the users we are focused on.

We can also select users who are “Active or History”, meaning if they are scheduled to migrate, currently in progress or that have completed:

Now when we schedule users to be migrated they will receive an email, which looks like the following:

This can be customized to suit your needs with HTML, Rich Text etc.… The email can also be selected to go to the Administrator as well to keep a record of these items.

You and end users will continue to get messages through the migration process of when your migration starts, completes and if you receive any errors, for example:

Being an Administrator you have the ability to customize the end user notices from the following location:

And then select “Add Template”:

As you can see many options available.

Now back to the Administration Interface, and the “Mailboxes Migration Queue” view. From here I have added functionality where if I have someone scheduled out for migration and the user needs to be migrated now we have the option to “Migrate now”:

You will also see from this list that we have other useful options available to us.

Now the solution does provide high-level reporting from in the solution, however for full details of what is happening you would use the “Event Viewer”. This is where we provide details of the specific commands we are executing, so you are easily able to copy the items from here and run them directly from a PowerShell window to see if you are seeing the same results. This makes for an easy way to troubleshoot items you may run across when doing a migration.

Here are some examples:

Information:

Warning:

Error:

While we are going a bit off track and looking at end user notifications, and the level of reporting available I think this is beneficial to know as these are very useful aspects of the solution which assist with the manageability of a migration project.

Please look out for the next blog in this topic of “Manageability” with Exchange Pro.