BPOS Migration Airlift coming to Europe

Our roadshow with Microsoft Online continues in Europe. We'll be in London and Amsterdam presenting at the upcoming BPOS Migration Airlift.

City	Date
London, England	March 9, 2010 - March 11, 2010	Attend this location
Schiphol, Netherlands	March 16, 2010 - March 18, 2010	Attend this location

If you're interested in meeting with us when we're in town, let us know.

MigrationWiz performed the largest Gmail migration in Europe to Microsoft Exchange

Last year, MigrationWiz was the product of choice when Vinci PLC, annual revenue of $1.69 billion, moved from Gmail to Microsoft Exchange. This was the largest Gmail compete in Europe for Microsoft so far and we were on the front lines to make it so.

VINCI PLC was pleased with its choice of BitTitan for this project. “We felt they were an extremely willing partner who collaborated with us to do something that is not easy,” says Parfitt. “They worked with us to develop a migration tool that pushed the boundaries as much as possible, while still keeping our strict deadline in mind. They faced a lot of technical challenges, but the transition went smoothly. There aren’t any other tools out there on the market, so it was quite an achievement.”

Read the entire case study.

Determining what the optimal maximum simultaneous migrations should be

Specifying the maximum simultaneous is going to dictate how much bandwidth we are going to use from the source and destination server. Each mailbox will travel at the rate of the slowest network. i.e. If the source has a smaller pipe than the destination, we will max out at the source speed and vice versa.

You don’t want to specify more mailboxes than your network can handle or else some items will error out because connections will get timed out when a network gets saturated too much. It’s like travelling on the freeway during rush hour. You’re only going to slow everyone else down and some people will come to a complete stop.

I recommend setting the maximum simultaneous migrations to about 10 mailboxes per Mbps. So if you had a 10Mbps network connection, I would recommend setting it to around 100. It’s really hard to tell. Depending on the service provider, you may be travelling down the Autobahn in some cases and down a dirt road in others.

If you have network monitoring software that can give you real-time stats on the transmission rate, you can then bump that number up or down.

Don't worry about how many mailboxes we can migrate at any given time, we support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous mailboxes at any given second.

Exchange administrative access to all mailboxes not working

Are you are using an administrative account that has access to all Exchange mailboxes but it's not working?

The first thing to do is test the permissions.

1. Access OWA at https://mail.domain.com/exchange/user@domain.com where user@domain.com is the email address of the mailbox you are testing.
2. Provide your administrative credentials

If you can’t login, we can’t login.

Make sure the account is not a part of the Enterprise Administrators, Domain Administrators or any other system administrator group. By default, Exchange is configured to deny these users access to mailboxes.

Gmail to Exchange/BPOS migration of Gmail Labels

Gmail has a concept of Labels. These Labels help to categorize and group emails together.

When you migrate to Exchange/BPOS using MigrationWiz, we convert your Labels to folders. So each Label is created as a folder in your mailbox, preserving the hierarchy if specified (by using a / to separate names in Labels).

In Gmail, the effect of labeling an item keeps one "copy." Because we are migrating the data to multiple folders, we create a copy in each folder. The effect is that you will use more storage space in the Exchange/BPOS mailbox you are migrating to. Also note that your migrations may take longer since there is essentially "more data" to create.

Handling errors during migration

When you see an error in the logs, it was caused by either the source or destination server.

The error messages that you see are either low level errors that are generated (like connection timeout, or host not reachable) or higher level errors (like system error, cannot be fetched). Usually the higher level errors are the cryptic ones. These are messages returned to us directly from the source or destination server.

When you see an error, you can click on them and see what the error means. We try to provide remedies on errors once we determine the exact cause. If we have not yet determined the exact cause, we suggest resolutions to similar errors that we have encountered.

There are 2 ways to handle errors: 1) do nothing and move on or 2) retry those items again.

In some cases, you may want to do nothing because a retry will result in the same problem. For example, we have encountered systems where we cannot export the item because it’s corrupt. No matter how many times you try, the source server will not give it to us and will error out. You don’t want to retry these because it’s pointless and just causes delays in your migrations (because we retry the message 3 times by default losing 15 minutes).

In other cases, the errors may have been caused by network upgrades, service updates to the server, or some other error that was caused by human intervention. In these cases, retrying will pick up those items that we missed. In order to accomplish this, you will need to:

1. Stop the migration if it’s currently happening
2. Select the advanced option do not resume from last migration from the connector (if you want to apply to all mailboxes) or directly on the mailbox.

3. Submit the mailbox for migration

Note that this setting only takes effect on submission of a migration. Changing this setting while a mailbox is being migrated will not apply.

Maximum simultaneous migrations setting on mailbox connector

The maximum simultaneous migrations setting on a mailbox connector allows you to specify how many mailboxes you want to migrate at the same time. The more simultaneous migrations, the more bandwidth we will use as we will have more parallel transactions happening.

If you want to migrate your entire company at the same time, make sure this value is equal to or greater than the number of mailboxes you are migrating.

If you specify this number to be less than the number of mailboxes you are currently migrating, we will only migrate this many mailboxes at the same time. When a migration completes and frees up a slot, we will fill it with the next mailbox. Mailboxes are filled on a FIFO model. FIFO stands for First In, First Out. So the first migration queued will be the first one submitted and the last migration queued will be the last migration submitted.

Note that increasing this number of the connector will immediately increase the number of simultaneous migrations. Decreasing this number will not terminate any existing migrations. We will just not add anymore new migrations until we fall below the setting.

MigrationWiz is the only migration service that allows you to migrate hundreds of thousands of mailboxes simultaneously right now without speaking to a single person! This just shows you how scalable our service is.