Most recently updated in October 2012, the Migration Manager 8.9 for Exchange from Quest, now a part of Dell, “allows administrators to migrate user mailboxes, public folders and other Exchange data from one Exchange organization to another in a way that is transparent to end users and does not impact user productivity.”

The Good, The Bad and the Challenging

The product overview for this tool is a most instructive read, covering everything from the building of your business case to justifying your next Exchange migration, to scenarios that would drive the need for many migrations, this overview helps you begin to sort out how an Exchange migration would benefit your organization.

To maintain balance and present the reason that many administrators and technologists consider messaging platform migrations to amongst their most difficult, Quest presents the key challenges faced when making these transitions. These include the large-scale usually found when dealing with an Exchange Message Store, the need to avoid user disruption when making changes and the difficulties encountered when doing so, the high visibility of these projects with everyone so dependent upon their email, and the difficulties in establishing and maintaining co-existence with related communications systems.

Migration Manager Features & Benefits

Quest attributes the success of Migration Manager to experience gained developing their innovative ZeroIMPACT domain and Exchange migrations. Some of the features and benefits listed in the overview include:

• Efficient, distributed architecture for large-scale projects
• Centralized control
• The most comprehensive Outlook profile migration
• Synchronization for full Exchange coexistence

Migration Process Overview

The Migration Manager 8.9 for Exchange product overview presents a suggested process that in and of itself is useful in gaining a greater understanding of how best to effect an Exchange migration.  Steps described in the process include:

1. Directory synchronization
2. Public folder synchronization (optional)
3. Calendar and free/busy synchronization
4. Mailbox synchronization
5. Mailbox switch
6. Outlook profile update
7. Source organization decommissioning

This is an excellent overview of a key product that should be considered for any Exchange migration. Click here for the overview.  Click here for more product information.