Work from Home’s Impact on Calendaring/Email and IT’s budget

A consulting company with 100 employees was running a legacy version of Exchange using a VPN to their work from home users.  Their VPN expense average cost was $200/mo/user.  They tested the “free” Microsoft migration tools.  Moving email would take a month.  They considered migrating PSTs in bulk, but the bulk upload turn-around was ten days.  Losing ten days was unacceptable. HYBRID deployment?  Too complicated and arduous for them to even get through the manual.

Free was not an acceptable solution.

What did Sumatra do? 

• We completed the cut-over from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 during a twelve-hour outage window.  
• For email, we used imapsync to migrate about 500GB of email. Two weeks before cut-over, we synchronized email between the legacy and Office 365 and then managed a continuous sync to keep their email up-to-date. This reduced server loads, and ensured all email migrated during the cut-over window.   
• For Calendars, tasks, contacts, we used a Sumatra’s eCalReader to migrate calendars, contacts, and tasks.  All was accomplished during the Friday-night cut-over.

The bottom line:  Sumatra migrated 100 users in eight hours -- with little involvement from IT.  The customer said Sumatra saved them $100,000/year in expense.

The uncertainty around Covid changed the Sumatra’s customers support their end users. It was a nightmare when IT reconfigured everything so end users could work from home (WFH).  For non Office365 customers, costs included VPN connections at $50-$200/month/user.  Their CFOs realized a Microsoft Office365 license ($12.50-$20.00/month) would save thousands!

There are five themes that run through the inquiries we’ve received and what we've l;earned from our customers in the last few months. 

1. Cost: The VPN expense is killing IT budgets.  CFOs want to migrate to Office 365 ASAP.
2. WFH Timeframe: Customers expect employees will WFH for the next six to 12 months.  
3. Legacy servers and VPN are an expensive way to support WFH.  They both have to go.
4. Microsoft Office 365’s “Free” migration tools take weeks to complete.  They leave current email/calendar data behind!  
5. Third party solutions are expensive and don’t move calendars!!

What are customers asking for? Everyone who calls us for help wants:

• Migration done over a weekend not a month;
• Migrate ALL CURRENT DATA.  And not just email.  Calendars, contacts, and tasks from legacy(*) on-premises Exchange 2Kxx calendaring and collaboration solutions to Office 365.   
• The migration cut-over outage limited to overnight or at most during a weekend.:

* Legacy products are pretty much anything except Microsoft Office 365 at this point.  Google calendar is a dark horse, but our experience is anyone who's already gone for Google doesn't want to actually pay to move out.

The other thing we've learned is that imapsync is excellent at the sort of last minute touch-up work that invariably needs to get done: synchronizing a few folders or mailboxes.

 

DIY calendar process to Migrate @MSFTExchange to #Office365 -- here is the application

The situation: you want to move from Exchange on-premises to the cloud aka Office 365.

You were shocked to discover Microsoft does not have a simple migration solution outside of email.  And the email solution is not even as flexible as imapsync.  All the current third-party tools treat calendaring as an afterthought to email leaving half your calendaring data behind (recurring patterns, guest lists, guest responses).

The result is that post-migration your users see what looks to be their same Outlook/OWA mailbox only to discover that their calendar meetings are broken.

We solved that problem.

Inexpensive solution to better calendar data migration
So we created a calendaring / task / contacts migration process for Exchange on-premises to Office 365  that is an improvement over existing methods in that it gives you more information about guests in meetings (it's an improvement over everyone else if we give you ANY information about guests).

On-premises a meeting looks like this:
                   

Migrated to another Exchange server it will look like this in Outlook with our "flat" option:
                   

Note that we can map user names and resource names and preserve information about attendees outside the domain.

And you can download and try it here with documentation here.  The trial version will insert your appointments for a month into the future.  We're licensing it for $299 for one domain for two weeks.  Based on our MDaemon migrations, we've seen under 1000 user migrations easily accomplished in that time.  If you need more time, ask us.

If you manage your own migration you can get your data in for very low cost with imapsync handling email and our tools handling calendars, contacts, and tasks.

For those of you who want fully-functional calendars post-migration, we offer:
Full-state calendar migration for enterprises with full-state sync.

Contact us for additional details on full-state (though the documentation above is a great place to start).

Exchange Cumulative Update 8 - Automatic Profile Re-direct

Folks, especially those doing a DIY migration from on-premises Exchange to Office 365, you should look at CU 8.
The automatic profile redirect we'll need to look at but it sounds like it will be a really big help.

Oh yeah, and modern Calendar and Contacts Public Folders are now accessible in OWA.

Added March 24, 2015:  profile redirect is not the big help we thought unless your main worry is Smart Phones.  See: Exchange ActiveSync on-boarding to Office 365

DIY O365 Migration from Exchange - First Pass

Rarely do we get such an outpouring of "gimme gimme gimme."

So since we're really good at turning out stuff quickly, we've got a first pass at our DIY Guide to Migrating from Exchange to Office 365.  

We have focused on the heavy lifting of migrating email (via imapsync), and calendars, contacts, and tasks (via our tech).

Remember: It's BETA, folks.  You have comments, want additions, think you have something to add, we're really happy to take feedback.  

The other issues: like user provisioning, delegate access, swapping MX records, we've not gone into detail at all since those are pretty well documented on line.  If you need details on how to accomplish this, let us know.

Remember, you'll need to license imapsync.

If you need the calendar, contact, and task migration, drop us a line.

We'll have a simple flat version of our calendar migration software up in a couple of days.

It's simple to run, but unlike everybody else it will tell you who was in your meetings like this:

DIY @imapsync to Migrate Email #Exchange to #Office365 -- We'll add a calendaring process

Your direct costs should never exceed 100 Euros (or $110 at the current exchange rate) for an email migration into Office 365 (From Exchange or any other IMAP server).

imapsync is more than capable of handling your Email migration. Buy the software and support.   

Cards on the table here: we do not get any money from imapsync, but we've found it to be a quality product with a great guy behind it and a good support community.  Add to that it's inexpensive nature and liberal software license and you really cannot go wrong.

You will need to make sure you have permissions on the Office 365 side if you wan to do multiple mailboxes without individual passwords. See our earlier posting on using imapsync to migrate email into Exchange. 

You can also handle migration problems with the wealth of Exchange information in their FAQ:

Pay special attention to the case of read receipts.   Going into Office 365 can re-generate read receipts.  So during your testing if that turns out to be a problem:

imapsync...   --disarmreadreceipts

Other very useful FAQ solutions include what to do when encountering individual attachments over the default limit set by Exchange (10 Mb) and Office 365 (25 Mb), as well as line length issues.

We're working on a DIY document to take you through your own migration.  Frankly, we get lots of questions that could be handled by such a guide.  And we're tired of Microsoft black boxes and over-priced third party offerings.

We'll offer a "flat" calendar migration in an imapsync-like model just so folks can get their migration done if they don't mind a simple calendar migration.  Contacts and tasks are included in this of course.

The goal here is to get your software costs for a migration to Office 365 to under US$1000 with you supplying your own elbow grease.

In rough numbers email, calendars, tasks, and contacts should be about 95% of the data you need to move.