Migration Expert Zone

In our never-ending quest for new and better tools to expedite Exchange migration, we came across a press release announcing Binary Tree’s release of E2E Complete 3.0. One interesting new benefit was that it supported migration from “legacy” Exchange to whichever version of Exchange you prefer, Exchange 2010 or the Exchange Online component of Office 365.

If you think about it, there really has never been a time when you had a choice.  You were either migrating from the previous version of Exchange to the new one, or you weren’t.  In rare cases, perhaps you were migrating to another e-mail platform.

Now you have platform choices, and also choices regarding what you migrate where.  Public Folders, for example, will probably need to be migrated somewhere else, because they have become “optional” in Exchange 2010, and Microsoft is clearly directing users toward SharePoint for sharing data and collaboration.  In fact, Redmond states categorically that if all of your clients are using Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, there’s absolutely no need to use public folders.

Depending upon the nature of your business, you may be concerned about eDiscovery and archiving, in which case you’ll need to make decisions about what gets migrated to the cloud if you go that way.  Companies that are downsizing need to determine where they will archive e-mail in the accounts of departed employees, too.

E2E Complete from Binary Tree uses Powershell, which the company claims can enable data migrations up to 10 times faster than legacy tools. Powershell also helps Outlook users that use cached mode, so they don’t have to keep local copies of their data offline to rebuild their local OST files.

Binary Tree says its product also automates the communications, management, and reporting processes--including end-user notifications--from a Web-based scheduling and monitoring console.  It also provides self-service capability so users themselves can decide what data gets migrated.

A Gold partner in the Microsoft Partner Network, Binary Tree was a finalist in the 2010 Partner of the Year competition for Lotus Notes Migration.  With almost two decades of experience in the migration software market, the company claims to have migrated more than 25 million users for over 6,000 customer companies worldwide, and now over 1.2 million to the Microsoft cloud. 

Sound off in our comments section about your Exchange plans!