MigrationWiz

Migrating Large Items to Exchange / BPOS

2010-08-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Migrating large attachments to Exchange can be tricky. Using MigrationWiz, should large items fail to migrate, you should receive the following error: "The remote server returned an error: (507) Insufficient Storage". Often, you will notice that the threshold is around 13 MBs. The reason for this is that this is the default used by some versions of Exchange Server.

To adjust size limits, adjust IIS settings as follows:
1. Remote into the Exchange server
2. Open explorer and navigate to ...\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\exchweb\ews
3. Open the web.config in a text editor like notepad
4. Change the following XML tag:
         • FROM       httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”13280”
         • TO:            httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”2097151” (set your own limit, in KBs)
5. Restart the server (ex: "iisreset")

To adjust size limits, adjust Exchange settings as follows:
1. Review http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124345(EXCHG.80).aspx
2. Adjust limits using command Set-TransportConfig
3. Adjust limits using command Set-ReceiveConnector
4. Adjust limits using command Set-SendConnector

Most versions of Exchange Server implement two APIs: EWS (Exchange Web Services) and WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning). WebDAV support HTTP chunking, making it possible to push large attachments (up to the maximum specified by IIS settings). However, EWS does not support chunking, and is subject to Exchange limits (which can be quite low by default). In addition, Exchange 2010 only supports EWS, while Exchange 2003 only supports WebDAV.

Whenever possible, MigrationWiz will use both APIs to give each item multiple chances to go through. That's right: if an item fails to go through, we'll dynamically switch from one API to the other so that you don't have to make configuration changes. However, if the limits for both APIs are too low, then it becomes necessary to change settings. Be assured however that your migration will continue past large items after logging an error. Also note that you can always retry failed items once your mailbox migration completes.

10 Signs You're Using the Wrong Migration Solution

2010-07-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

If you are considering using a mailbox migration solution, here are 10 signs you are using the wrong one:

Installing the application takes over 15 minutes
The application requires Outlook to be installed locally
The application requires opening firewall ports
The application is 32-bit only (even though your OS is 64 bit)
All the data must be local (ex: Exchange server, PST files, etc.)
It's "free" but you can only migrate one mailbox at a time
All migrations stop if you close the application (or your machine reboots)
Trivial mistakes (ex: email address typo) result in cryptic errors
The install folder contains repackaged binaries from obscure third-party companies
Advanced settings are not migrated (ex: recurring appointments exceptions, contact photos, reminder options, etc.)

Don't you think it make sense to use a cloud-based solution to move your data to the cloud? With MigrationWiz, you don't have to install anything. But we'll still use hundreds of computers to migrate your data as quickly as possible!

Blogging About Exchange or BPOS? Get Paid!

2010-08-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

Here is an excerpt from an email we received today: "The migration seemed impossible without your help. I will write a step-by-step migration guide on how to use your services on our blog.".

We're grateful for the publicity, but how about getting paid for blogging about us? When ad networks pay pennies per click, our affiliate program offers a 10% commission on each sale. This roughly translates into 1$ per mailbox migration purchased. Keep in mind that virtually no organization purchases a single mailbox migration (most of our orders are in the hundreds).

Here is how it works from your perspective:

You sign up for a MigrationWiz account
You enroll as a partner and receive an affiliate URL (ex: http://migrationwiz.com/u=myId)
You use the affiliate URL to link to our website (use text links, or ask us for images)

Here is how it works when a visitor comes to your blog:

The visitor clicks on an affiliate link
We set a cookie on the visitor's browser
The visitor makes a purchase and you become the default referral

Note that we use permanent cookies and also store your affiliate ID when a visitor signs up for a MigrationWiz account. This means that you should be listed as the default referral even if a purchase is made several weeks later.

If you blog about us, we're grateful. But what better way to say "thank you" than by sending you a check?

Unlocking Your Gmail Account

2010-08-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

If your Gmail / GAPE account is locked (ex: MigrationWiz reports an error such as "[ALERT] Web login required"), here is how you can unlock it:

Login to: https://www.google.com/a/(your domain)/UnlockCaptcha
Enter your user name (not email address), password, and solve the CAPTCHA

IMAP access should be restored. Log in to MigrationWiz and resume your migration if it didn't automatically recover. Please note that we take several precautions to avoid triggering this condition. For example, we avoid downloading too much content too quickly because we know from experience that it can cause Gmail to lock the account. To do this, we use a dedicated network component which throttles network requests and avoids jittery data transfers.

Repairing Migration Errors

2010-08-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

As a MigrationWiz user, you decide how many errors a migration can encounter before it is marked as failed. Simply specify the error limit in advanced connector settings (the default value is 100 errors). This means that a migration can succeed overall, but also report that some errors were encountered.

For example, suppose that while migrating a large mailbox the destination server was down for an hour. While your migration may have succeeded overall, you'll probably see something like this in migration error logs:

What this tells you is that some items failed to migrate due to connectivity issues. However, MigrationWiz makes it easy to retry failed items. This option is always free, but can be used only for migrations which completed successfully with errors.

Handling migration errors:
In our experience, most mailbox migrations complete without any error. However, consider a mailbox with 100K items. Even with a low failure rate of 0.01%, you're looking at approximatively 10 errors. It is therefore reasonable to expect some errors when migrating large mailboxes. The key question is: how does MigrationWiz handle errors?

Error handling is an essential part of what we do. To handle errors gracefully, we employ different techniques such as exponential backoff retries, repairing corrupt email content, quarantining failed items, classifying errors as retriable vs. non-retriable, etc. In most cases, each mailbox item is given several chances to migrate. However, after all attempts have been exhausted, the migration process moves past the failed item, until the migration completes or too many errors are encountered.

Common migration errors:
The most common types of migration errors are caused by server outages and invalid credentials. Excluding those obvious ones, here are some interesting ones:

- "Some messages could not be FETCHed". This error occurs when migrating corrupt emails from Gmail. We believe this error mostly affects emails received in Gmail before it started supporting IMAP, causing its storage engine to lose header information. Also, keep in mind that Gmail uses commodity computing and provides no guarantees in terms of data integrity or protection against data loss,

- "Failed to create items under folder X: ErrorMimeContentInvalid". This error occurs when trying to migrate corrupt e-mail content to Exchange. Exchange Server examines all inbound emails and rejects those whose content does not adhere to specifications. In some cases, we are able to automatically detect and fix corrupt MIME content, but not always.

- "The remote server returned an error: (507) Insufficient Storage". This error occurs when a mailbox item is larger than what Exchange configuration parameters allow. In most cases, this error can be fixed simply by increasing Exchange limits and retrying migration errors. However, if your Exchange server is hosted by a third-party provider, such limits may be outside your control.

5 Things We Deal With So That You Don't Have To

2010-07-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a hosting provider who needs to onboard customers onto your platform, or a consulting company who needs to migrate users to a new e-mail system, you need a migration solution that is fast, easy and robust. If you've considered implementing your own migration suite, here are five reasons you should use MigrationWiz instead.

1) Converting email content:
You may have heard of the infamous TNEF format ("winmail.dat"). The short story is that Exchange and Outlook encode emails using a proprietary binary encoding format so that additional properties can be transmitted. If you're considering migrating emails to your own non-Exchange system, you'll need to decode and convert TNEF content. Not only will you need to parse TNEF data, you will also need to take care of things such as converting compressed RTF to HTML, assembling MIME body parts, etc.

2) Migrating calendars and contacts:
Exchange calendars or contacts have hundreds of properties, most of which should be migrated to ensure full fidelity. For example, migrating a property called "CleanGlobalObjectId" (with a tag of 6ED8DA90-450B-101B-98DA-00AA003F1305 / 0x0023) is required to ensure correlation of meeting responses to corresponding appointments. We spent years fine-tuning the list of properties to migrate, and it's an ugly business. Similarly, Gmail appointment and contact properties must be mapped to Exchange properties, recurring appointments can have exceptions, etc.

3) Connecting to multiple systems:
To implement a migration solution that is complete, you'll need the ability to connect to a variety of systems such as Gmail, Yahoo mail, Exchange, IMAP, POP, etc. Each protocol has its one idiosyncrasies which must be taken care of. Want to migrate from Gmail? Better make sure you don't retrieve emails too quickly or the account will be locked down. Want to migrate from Yahoo mail? Better send a secret IMAP command or you won't be able to authenticate. Want to migrate from Exchange? Better select the right API depending on the version.

4) Making it scale:
To offer a performant migration solution, you'll need to optimize for each protocol. For example, to efficiently read email from IMAP, you should probably use the fetch commands to batch-retrieve emails. And to write emails to IMAP, you should probably pipeline commands or use special IMAP extensions such as MULTIAPPEND. To handle large-scale migrations, you might need to distribute workload acrosss hundreds of machines. Our data center is specifically designed to handle this type of scenario: is yours?

5) Integrating it:
After spending months (years!) implementing a robust migration solution, you'll need to integrate it with your systems. This will definitely require a good API. Not only should this API be very secure, it should also be powerful enough to support complex tasks such as monitoring migration ("find all migrations that failed in the last 4 hours"), providing statistics ("report the rate at which data is being migrated"), or retrying errors without creating duplicates.

Unless your migration needs are very specific, implementing your own migration solution can prove a costly endeavor. As a provider of cloud-based migration solutions, we've had a unique opportunity to battle-test and constantly improve our system. Whether you want to use our web interface or migration SOAP API, it can all be yours without you having to install anything!

Folder Exclusions

2010-07-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

MigrationWiz allows very rich folder exclusions using the regular expressions syntax. I know that a lot of people are not familiar with this syntax, so I'm going to try and break it down to some simple examples.

Folder Normalization

The first thing is to understand how we normalize the folder names in which the regular expressions applied to.

Case Sensitivity - Folder names are compared in a case insensitive fashion
Folder Separator - Regardless of the messaging system, we separate all folder paths with a forward slash (/) for the purpose of exclusion comparison. i.e. Inbox/SubFolder
Preceding Separator - Do not specify any preceding separator when referencing the folder. i.e. Do not specify /Inbox/SubFolder but rather Inbox/SubFolder
Trailing Separator - Do not specify any trailing separator when referencing the folder. i.e. Do not specify Inbox/SubFolder/ but rather Inbox/SubFolder

Examples

Here are some example folder filters that you can start with:

Filter	Description
^All Mail$	Do not migrate the "All Mail" folder from Gmail. Note that sub-folders of All Mail are still migrated.
^Inbox/	Do not migrate any sub-folders under the Inbox
(^Inbox$\|^Inbox/)	Do not migrate the Inbox or any sub-folder of Inbox
(^Folder1$\|^Folder2$\|^Folder3/)	Do not migrate Folder1, Folder2 and any sub-folder of Folder3. Note that sub-folders of Folder1 and Folder2 are still migrated.

More About Coexistence and Migration

2010-07-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

We already blogged about coexistence and migration. But because we received so many questions about how coexistence might actually work, we thought we'd clarify in a new post.

Suppose that your users have email addresses such as user@company.com, but should be migrated to BPOS or hosted Exchange. You may want to move users one group at a time. Because you're paying for a new email system, you also want migrated users to be able to fully utilize their new mailbox as quickly as possible. In other terms you want coexistence: for the time being, some users will use their old mailbox, while others should be able to use their new mailbox.

Here is the procedure which we found works best (here BPOS is just taken as an example):

In BPOS, create a primary (user@company.com) and secondary (user@mso.company.com) email address
In your original email system, leave the MX record untouched
In your original email system, forward emails from the primary (user@company.com) to the secondary (user@mso.company.com)
In BPOS, users can login as user@company.com and continue to send/receive emails without any disruption.

Of course, there are a few limitations you should be aware of:

Free/busy information may not be synchronized across email systems
Mailbox delegate access may stop working between email systems
Email delivery may be delayed because of email forwarding
Etc.

While this solution is not perfect, we found that it usually works very well. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions: we'd be more than happy to help.

HostingCon 2010 Takeaways

2010-07-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

We're back from HostingCon 2010 in Austin, TX, and while our main objective for this year's conference was to find new ways to lower our data center's operational costs, it was also a unique opportunity to meet with hosting providers, including some specializing in email hosting / security / archiving (ex: FuseMail, MessageSolutions, AtMail, etc.).

As a provider of hosted services, you compete aggressively on price and features. One way you increase your customer base is to make onboarding as easy as possible - and that usually starts with migrating existing email content. While in some cases establishing an SSH session to tarball and move email content might work, things get hairy when dealing with more complex systems such as Exchange or Gmail.

As a provider of cloud-based mailbox migration services with the ability to connect to almost any internet-reachable email system and a migration SOAP API, we definitely see some synergy in terms of making your onboarding a lot easier. See you at HostingCon 2011!

How Fast is Fast?

2010-07-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

One question our customers frequently ask is: how much time will my migration take to complete?

We were recently contacted by a customer with 400 GBs of email data to migrate to BPOS, but only a T1 line. With a T1 line, the maximum amount of data which can be transfered out is 1.544 Mb/sec, or 694 MB/hour. This also assumes full duplex and does not even account for protocol overhead. While we offer lightning-speed migration, transfering this quantity of data amounts to 30 days - regardless of migration technology (unless it involves sending a hard drive by mail). Fortunately, our customer was able to connect their email system to a faster network and complete their migration in less than 48 hours.

How fast is MigrationWiz? It really all depends on your connection speed. But as you can see from the stats below, it can go pretty fast. In this case, we migrated emails from an IMAP server with an export speed exceeding 3 GB/hour, to a BPOS Exchange server with an import speed exceeding 950 MB/hour. It wasn't our fastest migration, but it is still quite fast. If you are left wondering what "active" and "passive" mean below, it does deserve some explanations. The active duration represents the time spent actively importing/exporting mailbox data, while the passive duration represents the time waiting for the import or export to catch up. In this case, the IMAP server was able to export data much faster than BPOS could import it, so the source passive duration was 37 minutes. Had BPOS been able to sustain a 3GB/hour per mailbox import rate, it would have been 0.

Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery

2010-07-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

As the leader in complete cloud based migration solutions, it's interesting to see other migration solutions saying they are a "cloud based migration solution."

MigrationWiz is a fully automated migration solution. Every aspect of our product is self-service, and completely hands off. This means that we never manually handle any of your data, configuration, credentials, or anything else that you may need to do to configure, store or pass through our servers. Furthermore, we take it to the next level with certifications by 3rd party security firms and compliances with certain regulations in order to process your transactions. Finally, we implement automated security policies in addition to letting you control every aspect of configurations you provide to our service using our secure interface 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

So what are others doing? They are basically taking their legacy products, deploying them on cloud instances manually, like Amazon, and calling it a cloud based product. Did I mention that they manage all aspects of the system, including handling of your sensitive information like credentials and configuration? How well protected are these systems really from the outside or their own employees since manual access is required for configuration changes?

Don’t be fooled by marketing gimmicks. There is a reason why companies of all sizes, from sole proprietors to Fortune 500 companies in over 50 countries trust us as their premiere migration solution to and from the cloud each day. Whether you are doing a BPOS migration, Exchange migration, or any migration to or from the cloud, MigrationWiz is the prefered choice by organizations worldwide.

Beware of PST Imports

2010-07-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me how many recommendations are put out by people (including consultants) to do a PST import into a new mailbox in order to migrate data. Not only that, but these recommendations are either put out because of the lack of knowledge by the person recommending this method or without disclosing the problems associated with it. Here’s what they don’t tell you …

If you do a PST import of data regardless of what protocol you used to download it in the first place, you basically end up with messages that are unrepliable. Yes, that’s right, all of your messages are unrepliable regardless of whether the messages were downloaded via POP, IMAP, Exchange or any other protocol with Outlook. The reason is that Outlook stores the addresses as entry IDs which is what you are replying to.

When you import the message, it will look like it resolves properly to the recipient (looks like everything is good even when you view properties of the recipient). But once you hit that reply button and press send, your message will bounce back and ultimately will never get delivered. The only way around this is to remove all recipients from the address fields and re-enter all of them back manually.

Think twice next time someone tells you to do a PST import.

New Mailbox Migration Offerings

2010-07-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

We're excited to inform you of our latest product updates and the many new features we've added to our zero-deployment, easy to use self-service migration service!

Earn Cash Back

We're excited to announce the launch of our new Affiliate Program. Earn 10% of each customer purchase you refer to us. Our compensation philosophy is simple: reward Partners for their contributions to our business in unit volume and in growth. MigrationWiz is a fast growing business and we want our Partners to grow with us. Learn more.

Faster Migrations

Everyone claims to have the fastest migrations. Bottom line is that MigrationWiz has and will continue to set the standard in the area of speed. We've exceeded over one terabyte of data per hour for a single customer. Our patent-pending technology was built from the grounds up and is optimized to move hundreds of thousands of simultaneous mailboxes through the internet at any given time. MigrationWiz has broken all boundaries by moving over a hundred terabytes in under 48 hours.

Updated Interface

You spoke, we've listened. We've updated our interface, added availability in over 50 languages and introduced a new Premium license for migrations requiring multiple passes. MigrationWiz has always been a service with low startup costs. In fact, you can sign up, configure and submit migrations in a matter of minutes with no prior experience.

Private Labeling

Private label MigrationWiz for your own organization. We now offer a SOAP API that you can integrate with to provide migration. Our exclusive Developer Program is open to select partners who are interested in rebranding our world class service. Contact us for more information.

World Partner Conference 2010

For the second year in a row, we've been invited to showcase our product in the Microsoft Online Services booth at the World Partner Conference. If you're going to be in Washington D.C. next week, stop by our kiosk. We'll be giving away thousands of dollars worth of free migrations to thank our partners for their continued support.

Thank You for a Great WPC 2010

2010-07-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

As the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) unfolds, we'd like the opportunity to say a big thank you to all of you who dropped by our booth in the Microsoft pavillion.

This WPC conference has allowed us to close new deals, establish new partnerships, but also for many of you to put a face to the name. As a leading provider of cloud-based fast mailbox migration, we truly appreciate your feedback and look forward to stronger partnerships. We also hope this year's WPC has brought continued success and new opportunities to your business!

Why You Should Use a SaaS Migration Solution

2010-07-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Our mailbox migration solution (MigrationWiz) is a cloud-based migration service. Our customers do not need to deploy any expensive hardware or software to perform large-scale migrations. But the SaaS approach also gives us several other advantages over conventional migration solutions. If you're moving to the cloud, don't you think it makes sense to use a cloud-based migration solution?

SaaS = More reliable every day
Each migration comes with a new set of data, connected systems, and sometimes challenges. Over the years, we've seen more unexpected and sometinmes bizarre problems than we'd like (ex: corrupt appointments, inexistent time zones, KOI8-R encoded email addresses) . But because we directly manage the server farm performing migrations, we've been able to observe, investigate, and fix every problem we've encountered along the way. It is this constant improvement cycle which makes our system one of the most battle-tested migration solution available on the market. In addition, we frequently patch our systems to enable new capabilities.

SaaS = Faster support turnaround
One thing the SaaS approach allows us to do is better respond to customer issues. Each time a migration runs into trouble, our support team is automatically notified. Sometimes, we fix problems without you (the customer) noticing we even did. And each time we have to investigate a problem, we're already setup to connect to your source and destination systems. As a result, we resolve most support issues much faster than possible using conventional migration software.

SaaS = Unmatched performance and scalability
To implement our SaaS migration solution, we use a global data center which utilizes some of the fastest internet backbones available globally. To perform some migrations, we use several hundreds of computers, which is not feasible using conventional migration solutions requiring you to install software on each machine. Our SaaS model and patent-pending technology allows us to provide you with virtually unlimited computing resources and blazing-fast network connectivity.

SaaS = Remote monitoring and management
Unlike with desktop migration solutions, any user can point a browser to our website and access real-time information about migrations. This means that you, riding the bus with an IPhone, can remotely manage and monitor your migrations. We'll also send you email notifications, so you know what is happening any time, anywhere.

So far, our system has migrated hundreds of terabytes of email data. With each migration, we've learned something new and used it to improve our system. So if you are looking for a reliable migration solution with great support to back it up, look no further!

A word on coexistence after migration

2010-07-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

Migrating any organization to a new email system is something IT administrators know they MUST get right. Because email migration impacts such a critical component of any business, failure to deliver on a migration can result in a true IT administration nightmare, sometimes even loss of revenue. In most cases, a piecemeal approach to migration makes sense, but what kind of issues should one expect from coexistence?

Email Forwarding for Coexistence
One basic building block of coexistence after migration is email forwarding. Most email systems - from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps - support email forwarding. In most cases, administrators cannot rely on users to setup email forwarding, so an administrative option is a must. If you're lucky, there will be a UI option allowing you to configure email forwarding for a set of users. If not, you may need to script against a user provisioning API.

Limitations of Email Forwarding
Although email forwarding can provide some level of coexistence, there are certain limitations you should be aware of:

Email forwarding will not keep calendar or contact items in sync
Email forwarding will not propagate delete, move, or copy actions
Email forwarding will not synchronize free/busy calendar information
Email forwarding may not allow delegate access to continue working
Email forwarding settings may conflict with Sender ID security settings
Email forwarding requires configuration work as previously discussed

The Mailbox Synchronization Solution
Clearly, email forwarding alone cannot provide full coexistence. One option is to use coexistence, but also rely on some type of mailbox synchronization to keep contacts, free/busy information, etc. in sync. However, this approach brings a whole new set of issues:

Synchronization must constantly detect changes and is therefore resource-intensive
Synchronization must deal with complex issues such as change conflict resolution
Synchronization means replication delays which can be quite confusing to users
Synchronization may not handle all changes (ex: changes to folder permissions)
Synchronization may not be able to properly merge changes

The Delta Migration Solution
Fortunately, alternative solutions do exist. The delta migration approach consists in migrating most mailbox content early on, for example a week or two in advance. This allows users to take a look at their new mailbox and make sure all is well. When ready to switch, administrators can perform a quick delta migration to update destination mailboxes with new content. Because the bulk of the data has already been migrated (ex: all mail for the last 3 years), the delta migration usually completes very quickly. Our new Premium license is specifically designed for this scenario. Not only do Premium licenses allow multiple migration passes, each license can migrate up to 50 Gigabytes of content.

In conclusion, our experience migrating mailboxes for customers in over 50 countries tells us that often the delta migration approach us best at mitigating risk - but of course we also recognize that each situation is unique!

MigrationWiz migrates 100,000 Exchange mailboxes in under 48 hours

2010-07-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

Sammamish, WA (PRWEB) June 29, 2010 -- BitTitan, Inc., a Microsoft Exchange partner, announced that it completed a scalability test during which 100,000 Exchange mailboxes were migrated in under 48 hours. The experiment was conducted to validate patent-pending technology designed to migrate large enterprises in record time. During the migration, over 100 terabytes of data were transferred between email systems. To ensure completion in less than 48 hours, several hundred computers in multiple geographic locations were used.

To handle large-scale migrations, MigrationWiz relies on battle-tested code, patent-pending technology, but also a deep expertise in messaging systems. "Our team is composed of former Microsoft employees with extensive experience in enterprise development and services. In fact, we've implemented several features of Microsoft Exchange Server," says Geeman Yip, BitTitan's CEO. "Most migration products move one item at a time: we move them by batches of hundred, and we do it in a way that is massively parallel." says Dominic Pouzin, BitTitan's CTO.

Unlike conventional migration solutions which require local computing resources and software licenses, MigrationWiz uses a purely cloud-based approach. As a result, administrators can schedule migrations without deploying any software or hardware, and access real-time statistics using a simple web browser. Because of its cloud-based SaaS approach, MigrationWiz eliminates all software, database, and operating system licensing fees required by conventional migration solutions.

Most migration products move one item at a time: we move them by batches of hundreds, and we do it in a way that is massively parallel.

While scalability becomes critically important for large-scale migrations, MigrationWiz addresses two frequent issues: data fidelity and data security. By specializing in migrating content to the Microsoft Exchange platform (including Microsoft Exchange Online, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite - BPOS), the company is able to migrate content with full fidelity. For example, advanced settings such as email reminders, appointment time zones, or contact attachments are fully preserved during migration. To ensure data security, MigrationWiz acts as a simple pass-through agent running on SAS 70 Type II compliant data centers. Other security features allow administrators to purge all information after a configurable period, authorize users to provide mailbox credentials via a secure portal, etc.

About BitTitan, Inc.

BitTitan is a privately-held software company, headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, delivering innovative software as a service (SaaS) solutions to consumers and businesses worldwide. BitTitan’s flag ship product, MigrationWiz, is a 100% cloud-based mailbox migration solution. Visit MigrationWiz.com for more information and a free trial.

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See official release on PRWEB

How we migrate mailbox data faster

2010-04-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

When your job consists in migrating terabytes of emails over a short period of time, you need to do it fast. This is especially true for some of our customers whose migrations must complete over a week end, or whose email system license is about to expire. A speedy migration can make the whole difference between a smooth transition and a painful one. And things are certainly less painful when you don't have to install anything to get things going!

Making it scale
We've seen some of our migrations run at speed in excess of 1.5 Gig/hour/mailbox. So what makes MigrationWiz fast? First, we migrate items in bulk. We sometimes create 100 items using a single web request. This means less time spent in back-and-forth communications. Second, we distribute migration worload across hundreds of computers using patent-pending technology. This means migrations can progress in parallel with unmatched scalability.

Fine-tuning it
We also did a lot of fine-tuning to achieve this type of speed. For example, we noticed that a significant amount of computing power was spent decrypting SSL data until we found a way to optimize decryption routines. We also use a fair amount of compression and caching to speed things up. After migrating hundreds of terabytes, we've certainly learned a thing or two about migrating data faster!

How we lower your migration TCO between systems

2010-04-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

There is a reason why companies in over 50+ countries use MigrationWiz for their transition to or from the cloud. We talk about lowering your total cost of ownership a lot compared to other tools (both free and paid). No matter what tool/service you use to do your migration, there will be a cost associated to it whether you know it or not. This includes free tools.

Software Licensing

I think that evaluating software licensing fees for the migration tool itself are easy. There are really two things that tool providers charge for: 1) per mailbox license and 2) per server license. Some tools charge for both.

Don’t forget about your software dependency licenses that you’ll need when running these tools. This may include Windows, SQL, Office and any other “requirements” that are imposed.

MigrationWiz charges on a per mailbox basis and offers discounts for larger migrations, academic and government institutions. We have the most transparent pricing model available. You don’t need to dig through tons of pages or contact us to get the real pricing. We also require no software for you to install, including any software requirements.

Hardware Costs

Depending on how fast you want your migration done, you will have to deploy many servers in your environment to accomplish this. The reason why you want to do this is to maximize your network throughput so that your migration is as fast as possible and completes soon rather than later.

Because it’s costly to scale your migrations out with on-premise tools, they will tell you that “it doesn’t matter” or “we haven’t seen any difference.” If you get that in their sales pitch, they don’t do a lot of large scale moves to and from the cloud. This might have worked in an on-premise model when you have GigE connections, but when you move data through the internet, you have no control over the quality of the line. Moving data to or from the cloud will cut speeds down significantly period.

MigrationWiz requires no hardware deployments. You don’t need to worry about how many servers it will require to do your migration. We will take care of that for you under the covers. Here’s a chart of how many servers you need to deploy based on the number of mailboxes you want to migrate at the same time:

Simultaneous Mailboxes	# Servers To Deploy
Simultaneous Mailboxes	MigrationWiz	Others
100	0	4 - 100
1,000	0	32 - 1000
10,000	0	313 - 10,000
100,000	0	3,125 - 100,000

Time is Money

Whether you realize it or not, time is money. The longer you spend, the more you are distracted from the bigger picture and other problems to solve. Moving data is like moving houses. It might be something fun the first time but it gets old quick and repetitive.

How much time did you spend learning how to use the tool, deploy server hardware, monitoring, etc? Most tools, the training alone requires several days if not weeks to learn and play with it.

With MigrationWiz, you can sign-up, configure and submit your first migration in minutes with no prior experience. Yes I said minutes. Best of all, you don’t have to speak to a single individual to do any of this or listen to our sales pitch.

Quicker Migrations

Most tools are too costly to achieve full network utilization because of the amount of hardware you need to deploy (which then means more support costs). You are usually bottlenecked by worker throughput. Because of this, you are extending your migration timeline out. By having a longer migration, you now need to spend resources maintaining two systems; in addition you are not able to realize your savings by using the cloud. The whole reason you are moving to the cloud is to save money.

MigrationWiz can shorten your migration period allowing you to realize your cloud decision quicker. In most cases, this alone will offset the cost of using our product.

Google Gmail "Account exceeded bandwidth limits" errors

2010-04-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

When migrating from Google Apps/Gmail, you may encounter the error "Account exceeded bandwidth limits."

This is caused if you attempt to retrieve data too fast from your Gmail account. Normally, you would not encounter this problem migrating your mailbox with MigrationWiz as we have mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening. You may encounter this error if you are migrating your mailbox away from Google while having an email client downloading lots of data at the same time.

Once you get this error, Google basically penalizes you by locking remote data access to your mailbox for 24 hours. Yes, this means that you will have to resubmit your migration in 24 hours to continue from where we left off and there is nothing we or you can do about it and applies to both free and paid accounts. Resubmit your migration 24 hours after the first occurance of this error message in the error log for the mailbox.

NOTE: Don't bother trying to perform a CAPTCHA as it will not unlock your account. The only thing you can do is wait.

Free Trial Migration In Minutes

2010-04-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

For people interested in our service or want to know more, I highly recommend performing a free trial migration for yourself. There is no prior migration experience needed or any other complex training that you may be used to by other tools. In fact, our product is so simple, you don't even need documentation! You can sign up, configure and submit your migration in minutes!

Try a free trial migration for yourself and be the judge.

Happy Birthday MigrationWiz!

2010-04-20T16:21:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to thank everyone for their continued support and use of MigrationWiz. We always strive for the highest quality service and support for our customers and it shows based on our worldwide adoption. We have moved hundreds of terabytes of data through our data centers in more than 50 different countries from companies that employ a single individual to worldwide organizations with thousands of employees.

Google Apps/Gmail to Exchange 2010 migrations

2010-04-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

Did you know that we can migrate from Google Apps/Gmail to Exchange 2010? When you configure your connector, select the destination server of "Exchange Server 2007"

You're probably wondering why it doesn't say "Exchange Server 2007/2010." The reason is because we currently only support POP, IMAP and Google to Exchange 2010. We don't currently support migration of Exchange to Exchange 2010 yet. This is something that should be available publically in the coming weeks.

Performance improvements when migrating Google Gmail to Exchange

2010-04-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

When you migrate from a hosted environment to another hosted environment, MigrationWiz is the most optimal solution because we, ourselves, are a hosted solution. This is very benefitial for you because you won't be bottlenecked by bandwidth as you would be when you run your own tool on-premise (even though most likely you will be bottlenecked by worker throughout and not reach maximum bandwidth utilization).

We've made some serious investments recently with regards to performance when migrating from Google Apps/Gmail to Exchange and BPOS. What does this mean to you? Easy, this means that an average mailbox of 1GB will now be migrated in a few hours. In fact, we've achieved well over 1.5GB/hour migrations to our own servers per mailbox.

Note that your total throughput will be how many mailboxes you migrate at the same time. For example, if I migrated 100 mailboxes, we would be moving over 150GB/hour to our own servers. How's that for speed?

Google Gmail "Web Login Required" or "Invalid Credentials" errors

2010-04-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

When migrating or accessing Google Gmail, you may encounter one of the following errors even though your user name and password are correct: 1) Web Login Required or 2) Invalid Credentials.

Like the big black box Google is, they don't comment on security related problems/features that they implement. In addition, the error codes/messages that they present are not always decipherable. When searching the internet for these errors, you will only read about user experiences and what people have tried.

Because of the large amount of mailboxes that we migrate from Google Apps/Gmail to Microsoft Exchange, we are very familiar with these errors. You will encounter these messages upon authentication if your account "looks" to be compromised. Google detects this based on IP address access to your account and other mechanisms that they won't divulge to the public. With our now "always connected" world, it's very easy to "look" compromised because we are connecting from multiple devices all the time, whether it's your desktop, mobile, kiosk, friend’s house, etc. IP addresses can be mapped back to physical locations but there is a chance that there is a false positive.

If you encounter these error messages, you can unlock your account for access by performing a CAPTCHA with Google.

If you are accessing a regular account (your email address ends in @gmail.com), you can unlock your account by following the instructions at https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

If you are accessing a premiere/enterprise account (your email address ends in your own custom domain), you can unlock your account by following the instructions at https://www.google.com/a/domain.com/UnlockCaptcha where domain.com is your own domain.