SCOM and Quest management Xtenstions

Last week I was in Maidenhead at the Quest office for a training. The instructor then told us about the several Quest tools to do a migration to BPOS! As we all know, the cloud is hot... So in this blog more about BPOS and migrating to it.

Why are companies migrating to the cloud?

• Managing e-mail, IM and collaboration services on premises is costly and complex
• Companies are faced with diminishing IT budget and headcount
• Reduce day-to-day administrative costs
• Need a quick migration/ deployment
• Allows organizations to focus on their business, not on IT

Microsoft Online Services is the set of enterprise-class software, hosted by Microsoft and sold with partners and delivered via subscription services.

The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is the family of Microsoft Online Services that includes Exchange Online, Office Sharepoint Online, Office Communications Online, Exchange Hosted Services and Office Live Meeting.

Exchange Hosted Services, Office Live Meeting and the dedicated versions (starting at about 10,000 seats) of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Communications Online are available to customers worldwide. Exchange Hosted Services are attached services that include filtering, archiving, encryption and continuity.

BPOS is built on the pillars of streamlined communication, simplified managemnt and business class security and reliability. The key features are:

• Anywhere access - desktop, mobile and Web
• Integrated user experience across workloads
• Team collaboration and conferencing
• Real-time communication
• Always up-to-date technology
• Lower rollout and run rate cost
• Improved agility and resource uitilization
• Active Directory synchronization
• Periodic assesments and continuous intrusion monitoring and detection
• 99,9% scheduled uptime with financially backed SLA
• Business continuity and disaster recovery

From the IT administration perspective, the service will be managed from a single administration portal. Administrators will have a single place to go to view operational statistics, provision new users and track any support issues.

 Well that al sounds cool! but how can you migrate your current services to BPOS? Quest made some tools that will help you with the following:

• Migrate from Notes and Groupwise to Exchange Online Standard
• Migrate from Notes, SharePoint 2003/2007, File Shares and Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint Online Dedicated
• Migrate from Lotus Sametime to Office Communications Online

Let's have a closer look to the Notes migrator. The migration from Notes to Exchange Online isn't much different at a high level from migrating to Exchange. The Domino Server is your source environment and Exchange Online is your target environment. Besides these two you also need a clean on-premise Active Directory in place.

The migration process starts just like an on-premise migration and that's with a pre-migration assesment. Microsoft standard offering hosts a soft limit of 10,000 users, so pre-migration assessments will be very helpful in order to discovery unused or orphaned mailboxes that do not need to be migrated to the cloud.

After the pre-migration assesment is complete, it's time to start the migration. The Notes Migrator for Exchange merges the Notes objects out and creates a user object for them in the clean on-prem Active Directory. These objects are not activated and do not need to be mailbox enabled. If there are certain objects that you don't want in the hosted Exchange Environement, then you can remove them from the on-prem AD before synching with the online AD. Then you provision any groups onto the objects in the on-prem AD.

Next, you use the Microsoft Directory Synchronization tool to synchronize the on-prem and online AD. Ther are reasons for setting up the on-prem Active Directory. First, native tools are unable to directly migrate Domino directory data to the cloud. In addition even if a Notes customer has an existing AD, the native tool syncs up ALL!!! user objects in AD to the hosted Exchange environment, whether they are used or unused. So it's a best practice to set up a new, clean on-prem AD environment where you have control over what objects you want and can provision up. This again is especially important if you are migrating to a standard service where is a soft 10,000 user limit. Current there is no way to systematically enabale account in Microsoft Online services using the Notes Migrator for Exhange. So Quest provide steps for users to be manually enabled.

After that the Notes Migrator for Exchange directly migrates e-mail and calendar data from Notes to Exchange Online.

 Because hosted service is still in its infancy, there are still some limitations with the migration process:

• As I mentioned earlier, there is no automatic mailbox enabling. So there are a few steps users mus take to enable their accounts
• Various co-existence options are not possible due to persmissions allowed by Microsoft. Transporter does not work in the Cloud at this point, so there is no Free/ Busy and GAL integration. It's also not possible to set forwarding rules....