All posts tagged Microsoft

By on December 27, 2011

Future-proofing your Microsoft Exchange Upgrade & Migration Strategy

Back to the Future time machineThe future… if we actually had an endless supply of dilithium crystals or flux capacitors, gadgets like floating skateboards and Tricoders might be more common. But sadly they’re not; so the only real prediction I can make for the future (that’s relevant to this blog post anyway) is that Microsoft are planning to release a new version of their Exchange Server software every three years. We should be seeing the next version towards the end of next year, currently being called Exchange 15.

Like Christmas, it feels like new versions of core server software come round far too quickly, especially such valuable services like Microsoft Exchange. We’ve previously mentioned the lengthy procurement cycles that keep such services a constant version behind before, which generated some good feedback and discussion; many Exchange admins told me those delays adversely impact their own deployment plans, which is intensely frustrating for them and often forces their migration project into the red.

So, rather than roll out the ubiquitous predictions for 2012; I’m going to suggest that in the absence of 1.21 Gigawatts you can take a stab at future-proofing your Exchange environment now, so you’re not left thinking in future -

“I’m migrating again. Surely not? Didn’t I just finish the last upgrade?”

However the last migration or upgrade you performed was probably a little easier; the requirements were different then, and there was dramatically less data than today. The move from Exchange 2003 to 2007 was mostly about the new 64 bit hardware required, but the move to Exchange 2010 is often about the volume of data instead.

As your users make merry with the disk space allocated to the Exchange Stores, their mailboxes have grown and grown, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to move several Terabytes of data to the new Exchange platform; but, more importantly wondering when you might have to do this again. The short-term nature of IT and the constant cycle of upgrades and migrations means you may have to answer those question sooner than you expected.

One simple solution that future-proofs your migration and upgrade strategy is to deal with the data now by augmenting your on-premise Exchange with a Cloud based email management solution. Using this Cloud based email management solution is simple; the elastic and scalable nature of the Cloud lets you ‘dump’ your oversize email stores into a secure, scalable, flexible and resilient solution that will grow with you, but at the same time allow the users to have direct access to that email data through Outlook as though it was still on Exchange.

Now here’s the part of plan we don’t talk about very much, but one that provides a great degree of flexibility. When the next migration or upgrade comes around, or if you want to move from one platform to another, having already dealt with the data means your core email service i.e. Exchange, can be anywhere or anything. Upgrade, downgrade, move to Office 365 and back again, migrate some users or all users, the choice is yours; Augmenting Exchange with the cloud means you’re not tied to any one solution or version, both today and next year when it’s time to upgrade again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mimecast, North America.

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By on July 7, 2011

Guest Post: BPOS to Office 365 Migration- Managing Without Mimecast (or not)

This is a Guest Post from a prolific blogger- Andy Kemp who has recently moved from a long standing customer of Mimecast and moved to a Microsoft Gold Partner UniTech, one that doesn’t have Mimecast in place but excited about what the toolset could do for them. One of the recent things he’s been tasked to do is their Migration from BPOS to Office365 both internally and for a number of serviced clients, and it’s interesting to see what life without Mimecast is like…

I have used Mimecast in the past for several reasons, email archiving, antivirus and malware protection, business continuity and compliance. These are all great reasons for using it but one other is for email migration. In the past when I have done system upgrades it has been pretty painless and stress free, moving from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 for example.  However I think that now it is a completely different ball game as the Cloud is involved.  Moving to the Cloud is again relatively painless (just a different approach), at least from a technical point of view; politically it can be very stressful.  But moving from Cloud to Cloud for me at the moment is proving a bit of a headache.

I’m in the process of moving from BPOS to Office 365, and you would think that this would be a pretty straightforward migration moving from one Microsoft Online Service to another.  Is it straight forward? No! As a Microsoft Gold Partner and one of Microsoft’s Cloud Partners we were an early adopter of Office 365 closed beta and I was getting to like it more and more the more I used it throughout the testing.  However, when it came to domain migration I started to like it less.

The main issue for me migrating from BPOS to Office 365 is migrating your domains from one to the other. It can take anything up to 48hrs for the domain to be removed from BPOS and FOPE (Forefront Online Protection for Exchange) and only then can you add the domain in to Office 365. Then if something had gone amiss and you needed to remove the domain from Office 365 (like I had to) you would have to wait for anything up to 24hrs. It turned out my problem was that the domain had not been fully deleted from FOPE on the BPOS side.

All this time means that your email might well be unavailable (more than likely to be honest) and could have serious knock on affects to your business as email is now treated as one of the most common ways in which we communicate with our customers.

The main drive for using Mimecast in my previous place of employment was to ensure that email was accessible at all times, even when the in house exchange servers were unavailable. This could also mean when you are migrating from one service platform to another, and I would say that the same principle could be applied to a hosted email service.

Through using Mimecast you could very easily remove the headaches from your migration from one service to another as the continuity that Mimecast offers would provide you with email delivery during the process of the migration. You’ll effectively be using Mimecast as a pivot I guess for the transition.

My migration from BPOS to Office 365 has been in process for four days now.   Fortunately it is a non-critical domain I am testing with, but if this was a live email domain that I relied on for business my customers would be receiving NDRs for every email that is sent in to me.  This could well be avoided by having Mimecast in the equation as email would be delivered through Mimecast to your email service, regardless of it being on premise or hosted.

Moving email platforms is something that you do not want to do or need to do on a regular basis but if you do need to migrate your email then you will find that having something like Mimecast will make the migration even simpler and reduce your down time to a bare minimum if any.

Even if you are doing a simple email migration/upgrade you’re at risk.  Sure you will have a full backup of your server to revert back to if the migration/upgrade were to go pear-shaped –  if you did have to do a restore how long would that take you? An hour? A day? A week? I previously worked for a law firm and lawyers like to hold on to their emails; I had mail stores in the excess of 150GB, mailboxes of 15GB and over! The restoration of the email data would take about a full day (in the excess of 400GB Email data) but once the stores were restored I would then have to do an offline defrag on each mailstore db which could take anything up to 8 hrs per mail store meaning email would be down for a week. With Mimecast you could work on your exchange servers for that week and still be able to send and receive email, even by using outlook on the user’s desktop.

How long could your business survive with email down time? I guess in all honesty not very long.

I eventually got the domain working fully in Office 365 after a few calls to Microsoft and a few days of waiting! Email was being delivered to the right domain in the right service, finally!

It was a good learning curve (which is why we did it with a test domain) so when it comes to moving the live production email domain we know exactly what to do and what to expect. I am hoping that the production migration goes a bit more smoothly now! Mimecast will not take every risk out of email migration, but it will certainly give you a great level of continuity if you did face any problems when it comes to email migration.

 

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By on June 21, 2011

Demazter’s Migration Tip #1 – Source Server Health

Fifth in our series of Guest posts by Exchange specialists is Glen Knight, aka Demazter. Glen is tackling a tough topic- preparing your environment for a migration- essential for keeping the migration free from additional Costs, Risks and potential Downtime.

Glen Knight is the founder of Demazter IT Services, a UK based IT consulting company which specialises in installation, support and maintenance of secure environments based on VMWare and Microsoft technologies. He has been working in the industry for the past 14 years providing support, installation and consulting services for all sizes of businesses working with all versions of Windows, Microsoft Exchange and Small Business Server, including large scale Active Directory design and maintenance.

Glen also has a blog: http://demazter.wordpress.com and very active in one of the leading technical community sites - Experts-Exchange.

Welcome to my series of short tips on migrations. Whilst based on Microsoft migrations the same principles can be applied to any type of migration.

My first tip is around source server preparation.

No migration is an easy migration, there is always potential for something to go wrong. All we can do is try to minimize this risk.

The biggest risk comes from the system we already have in place, the integrity of this system is paramount in ensuring a successful migration.

Making sure your source system is healthy and configured correctly will go a long way to ensuring you have a smooth migration.

Use analyzers and health check tools that are available from the vendor. Microsoft, for example, have a number of best practice analyzer tools. These can be used to identify any problems the system may have and provide advice on how to resolve them. Some of the ones I use regularly are listed below:

In a Microsoft migration I will use tools like DCDIAG, NETDIAG, REPLMON and REPADMIN to check for errors, even if it’s a single server. You would be surprised how easy it is to misconfigure a single server. Further details on the usage of these tools can be found here:

Make sure the source system is up-to-date. All updates, service packs etc need to be applied. This may seem like a waste of time on a system that you are soon to be migrating out of your network but really it isn’t. New products from the same vendor normally rely on the source system being up-to-date. I have been known to spend hours installing service packs and updates on a source server.

It’s worth spending the time getting this part of the migration perfect. There are no timescales in play here you can take your time, once you start migrating there are pressures at play that will make the slightest hiccup seem like your whole world is imploding. I would consider this part of the migration process the most important, and therefore if you are not comfortable with this process, hire someone who is. Buying in consulting services to make sure the server is healthy can save you a lot of money.

Watch out for tip Migration Tip #2 – The Practice Run in the next day or two.

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By on April 18, 2011

Complexity fears holding back Exchange 2010 upgrade?

In the last blog post of my Microsoft Exchange mini-series I suggested the idea that the complexity that surrounds a core Microsoft Exchange server might be what is causing some trepidation when it comes to upgrades.

By complexity; I mean the tangle of technology that has grown up around the Exchange server – all of those point solutions that have been added over the years to solve individual problems. All of the extra email management servers, the blinking lights, content filters, archives, disk arrays, AV/AS boxes, email encryption applications and other bells and/or whistles that are needed to keep the Exchange server up, running and efficient.

I understand that my post might have caused some alarm: In fact one IT manager emailed me to say he had never really considered all of those other solutions as a collective complex problem. He told me that each point solution was managed by different members of his team, and even other departments in some cases (like legal and professional standards for example), and that everyone just got on with the job.

Is there a collective noun for email management applications and tools? If there isn’t I’d like to suggest a a few; a “Hectic” or perhaps a “Chaos”, or maybe a “Delicate”? Answers on a post card please – the best suggestion wins a Mimecast complexity monster t-shirt.

This complexity we’re talking about is a bit of an old money solution isn’t it? I often ask CIOs what they would do if they were setting up a greenfield site; would they replicate what they’ve got or would they do it differently? They usually say something along the lines of; if only I knew then what I know now, when referring back to the problems they’ve had to patch up over the years. Of course with hindsight we wouldn’t re-create the past.

The complexity problem is one that affects many businesses.  Very few IT departments can really say they have designed out all their complexity. Upgrading central pieces of infrastructure, like Microsoft Exchange is undoubtedly an ominous task when you’re surrounded by stacks of supporting applications. Perhaps as you consider a Microsoft Exchange upgrade, hopefully to Exchange 2010, you’ll take a look at all those point solutions in your network; the vast array of blinking lights on that complex email management infrastructure and you’ll think that there must be a better way of doing this.

Maybe you’ll take this as the best opportunity you’ve got to ‘toss out the tin,’ get rid of those point solutions in an effort to iron out the complexity that has been handed down from generation to generation. The complexity problem isn’t one that is going to go away on it’s own, in fact the more patching, upgrading, installing and problem solving that goes on – the worse it will get and the larger that sprawl will become.

Now is the time to take a step back and look at what’s ‘become’ – then really & honestly decide what you can do to remove that complexity. What have you got to lose, apart from those pretty blinking lights – the blue ones were my favorite.

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Mimecast, North America.

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By on April 11, 2011

Exchange 2003: What’s taking you so long, upgrade already!

In some ways, I’m quite surprised to hear IT managers and CIOs tell me they’re still running Exchange 2003.  But perhaps I shouldn’t be.  After all, more than a third of the Exchange customer base is flying this old bird.

Exchange 2000 and 2003 were big steps up from Exchange 5.5.  For most the upgrade meant new hardware, OS licenses and OS server version. Around that time I was involved in many infrastructure projects and noticed a definite buzz around the IT departments, like an excitement to be getting Exchange upgraded at last.

The leap from Exchange 2003, to Exchange 2007 or even 2010 is similarly exciting; but I’m also seeing a degree of caution this time too. Maybe it’s because the addition of 64bit hardware means another infrastructure upgrade, or maybe it’s something else?

I’m talking to CIOs almost daily, and the large percentage that have active Exchange migration projects generally say the same thing. The story usually goes like this:

Years ago when I had our first Microsoft Mail server and a windows 95 network – NT if I was lucky – everything was simple, relatively speaking. The mail server was attached to a modem which used to dial-up to the ISP and we’d send and receive our email in big batches. When ISDN arrived we really thought we were living in the space age.

Our early mail server, even up to Exchange 5.5, simply dialed up to the Internet and downloaded our email, the only problems being usually related to large attachments. Life was good, users didn’t complain, most of them didn’t really know much about this new email tool, let alone the Internet. My biggest headache was running out of paper rolls for the fax machine.

Somewhere in the middle of the 90′s I remember things getting a little more complicated. My staff started to complain that they were being sent emails about degree qualifications or heraldic titles, things they hadn’t asked for. Not long after that the first mass-mailing email worms made an appearance. Of course then my server room then started to fill up; a firewall and an anti-spam solution here, and anti-virus solution there, ISDN turned into an always on broadband connection. The millennium bug kept me awake for months.

The addition of those point solutions continued, and still continues today. I’ve added an email encryption box, an archive with a load of disk space attached, a DLP solution, a footer and disclaimer box, a RAS box (remember those?) which is now a VPN box, a BES server and now I’m being told I need to make all of this resilient to the same extent as dial tone.

And now you want me to strip out and upgrade the one platform all of this sprawling technology supports? Phew!!

I think that this buildup of point solutions in the email management environment has created a mountain of technology that sits at the heart of the concern our CIOs have today. Upgrading any core application of service inside a business is going to require some careful planning and consideration, and there are clear benefits of upgrade Exchange to the latest version. Many IT departments are passing on those benefits to the staff right now, but I think what slows down the process is all of this peripheral complexity.

Finding a way not to fear that complexity, or even better doing away with it all together, is going to make this Exchange upgrade, and the next few that are coming down the pipe, a lot more palatable. Don’t hold back, give your users what they want and modernize – if this means stripping out some of those bits of tin in the network, then now is as good a time as any.

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By on April 4, 2011

Guest Post: The Age of the Email Appliance?

First in our series of Guest posts by Exchange MVP’s is Kevin Ball, exploring a new approach to on-premise Exchange hardware. My interest in appliances was piqued at WPC last year, with the launch of the Azure appliance and if you wanted to retain some Exchange on-premise, but without the all the complexity of managing hardware this seems like a sensible approach. Matched with Cloud Services could Exchange appliances be the future of Exchange on-premise?

Kevin Ball is a Senior Mail Support Consultant, working within the Enterprise Infrastructure Services group at Hewlett-Packard. He has been working with Exchange since Version 4.0 Release Candidate 2, back in 1996, and he has received a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in Exchange Server from Microsoft every year since 2007. Follow him on Twitter for random observations on life including the occasional Exchange-related tweet: @zbnet.

Appliances are wonderful things. It’s great having a white box in the kitchen that cools and freezes stuff with just a numbered dial to adjust – I get to stop my food decaying without having to become a refrigeration engineer and build a cooling plant and know about the safe handling procedures for tetrafluoroethane*.

Exchange 2010 is a great product – arguably the best-ever version of Microsoft’s now very mature enterprise email server. Exchange 2010 has more disk storage options than ever, and can be utilised in vastly varied configurations, which makes it extremely flexible and adaptable to a wide variety of email needs. But every coin has two sides, and variety of configuration options means that setting it up correctly for any given situation needs care, and often expertise. How many IOPS should you allow per mailbox? Will the bus bandwidth of a particular disk controller be fast enough? Are your disks performance-bound or capacity-bound? These and a hundred other questions need answers before you can be sure your hardware spec is up to the task of serving your particular user community with no fear of resource shortage.

Microsoft helps, of course – there’s the famous Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator spreadsheet (http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/02/17/3409348.aspx), which can be used to specify the required disks, memory and processors for a certain number and a certain type of users. But even with all the great tools and TechNet, planning Exchange servers can be daunting for the small- or medium-sized enterprise who lack a tame Exchange expert, or who can’t afford the time and cost of specialised training.

Another option is to hire in a consultant, or outsource to a services company. That works for some, but can tend to be costly. Not everyone needs nor wants to spend money on the luxury of a custom-designed bespoke Exchange configuration. Wouldn’t it be great if we could buy our Exchange servers like we buy our refrigerators – according to their storage capacity, and with just a simple numbered dial to control them? When will the age of the email appliance be born?

Welcome to the stage the E5000 from HP. One fruit of a $250 million collaboration between HP and Microsoft, the E5000 family of appliances (there are 5 different models) are a new venture for both companies in the partnership.

What You Get

An E5000 email appliance is basically a DAG-in-a-box (a Database Availability Group, or DAG, is a group of between 2 and 16 Exchange mailbox servers that can replicate database copies between them to provide highly-available access to Exchange mailboxes). The E5000 chassis contains two blade servers each of which is essentially a ProLiant BL460c G6, with a set of internal and chassis-housed disks (the type and capacity vary slightly according to the model number), a custom disk controller, an on-disk Exchange install kit (this is the first time any server kit has been sold with Exchange binaries included), and a newly-developed wizard that helps you set up the appliance. Also included in the price is a 3-year support contract for both the hardware and the software, that gets you help and replacement bits within 4 hours in the event of a problem or a component failure.

Because the disks are already fitted, you don’t have to worry about IOPS calculations, and bus bandwidth, and disk controller set-up. Each of the two DAG servers has its own RAIDedfault-tolerant array of disks, as the minimum number of servers in a DAG to support JBOD storage is three. Also, as the appliance comes with a wizard, you don’t need to be a certified Exchange professional to ensure the installation is set up optimally – the wizard steps you through a series of questions, prompts you for the information it needs, and then does its magic behind the scenes to deliver you an optimally-configured Email solution.

Does all that sound too good to be true? Is it really ‘plug and go’ Exchange in a box? Well, not exactly; the day of ‘refrigerator-style’ email isn’t quite here yet. There are some things that aren’t included in the box that you’re going to want to get before your new email appliance can serve mailboxes for users. First on the shopping list is a pair of Exchange 2010 server licences (and don’t forget your Exchange CALs whilst you’re in licence-shopping mode). You’re also going to need to buy some kind of hardware load-balancer (or a virtual version), because the Exchange 2010 servers in the E5000 are multi-role servers (each running a Mailbox, Client Access and Hub Transport server role), which means Windows Network Load Balancing (the ‘free’, software equivalent to an external load balancer) can’t be used – it’s incompatible with the Windows Failover Cluster component that the DAG servers need to run.

Is the need to buy an external hardware load-balancer an issue? It might have been 12 months ago, but not in 2011 – the marketplace has responded to the growing need for Exchange solutions to use such devices, and now a number are available that will meet your needs, and are fully certified for and come with install and configuration documents for Exchange 2010 use, so you don’t need to fret. See here for a full list. If you’re at the lower end of the capacity of the E5000′s capabilities, one (or two if you’re committed to a full highly-available configuration) of Kemp’s LoadMasters will suit you well.

So it’s not quite yet ‘plug and go’ email-in-a-box. You need extra bits and pieces, and you’ll need to have some idea how to answer the questions the wizard asks you if you’re going to get the most out of your E5000. It’s maybe not quite an appliance as it stands today, but don’t lose heart. This is V1. Be certain that both Microsoft and HP are aware of the short- comings, and both partners are working hard at developing and refining the concept. Who knows what levels of refinement and automation will be built into future versions of the E5000 appliances? Those who know aren’t telling, but things will definitely improve. Nevertheless, the E5000 isn’t value-less – it’s a bold first step into simplifying the complexity around implementing Exchange, and it’s a great initial effort. It brings an ease of configuration and a level of pre-supplied compatible hardware config to a newly accessible ‘appliance-style’ product, and in doing so begins a revolution that has the potential to help many small- and medium-sized enterprises implement the best-ever version of Exchange with the least amount of hassle and lost sleep – and that is a great step forward for Exchange, and for your users. Refrigerators and E5000s – they’re both pretty cool!

To learn more about the E5000 range, go to www.hp.com/go/E5000

*an inert gas used as a refrigerant in domestic refrigerators. It is denser than air in gas form, so if you breathe it you might die; and when evaporating from liquid to gas it absorbs copious quantities of thermal energy, so if you spill some on your hand you’ll likely get severe frostbite. So probably not a great idea to make your own refrigerator!

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By on March 3, 2011

Give your SAN to your SQL team. Part #1

Exchange 2010 promises to dramatically cheapen the cost of mail storage to the point where it no longer requires SAN based storage to achieve its goals of storing mail in a secure and highly available manner.

Exchange 2010 is able to use virtually any storage you give it, the only criteria being that it supports the IOPS requirement for the workload demanded. Due to the efficiencies in the current version of the storage engine, that means that databases can now be stored on SATA disks, SAS disks, RAID volumes on DAS Shelves, or the holy grail of storage – Tier 1, the SAN.

You may think that SATA is great when it comes to storing videos of the kids on holiday, old emails, documents and your music collection, and we agree. SATA has been the last thing we would have thought of in the modern datacentre, OR that mail server you hide under the desks or in the closet in your small branch office.

So how has SATA become the new rising star of storage, after previously only influencing the desktop sector?

There are two kinds of SATA we need to consider here, desktop or consumer SATA and enterprise SATA. The difference comes in the construction and the firmware of the disks. Enterprise SATA disks have more rigidity, more extra bits in the chassis and firmware that take into account that each disk may be housed in a shelf with a number of other disks which vibrate, spin and potentially influence each other.

Consumer SATA disks on the other hand have a much lower cost construction and are not designed with any of the additional heat or vibration considerations in mind.

So that makes sense – enterprise SATA disks can live amicably in a datacentre – but they’re still SATA. They’re still slow – literally slow. They rotate as slow as 5400 RPM, as opposed to the 10 000 or 15 000 RPM you’d expect from a traditional enterprise disk. Random seek times are what you’d expect, randomly slow. So how on earth do they become good candidates for the most important commodity in your digital life – your companies email?

The Exchange 2010 version of ESE – the Extensible Storage Engine, which is the database that Exchange uses, has a bit of secret sauce, actually it’s a rewrite from the ground up, which makes it 90% faster than Exchange 2003. That’s right, 90%, no typo there. But wait there’s more – it’s also optimised for sequential read and writes, in fact the entire database is logically laid out to accommodate long reads and long writes, exactly the kind of thing SATA disks are good for.

So let’s talk about the trust issues you may have with SATA – it’s STILL SATA, it’s still just a single disk, and just to top things, Microsoft are asking you to throw your RAID controller away as well. Is that still a real world expectation?

In part 2 we’ll have to have a quick look at how Exchange 2010 does High Availability for the database.

CC Image via univrsltransl8r on Flickr

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By on December 15, 2010

BPOS now or Office 365 later- you need to decide now

In my last post I talked a little about Microsoft and their increased activity in the cloud and how that made me feel- very proud as it happens.

In this post I wanted to talk a little about how I think potential customers might feel about the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services Suite (BPOS) offering.

You see, with so many of us telling IT managers and staff that the cloud is such a perfect panacea to many of their ails and consumers using online services for just about everything, it is no wonder that Microsoft created the BPOS cloud offering.

This is a service that delivers Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint from the cloud. All of Microsoft’s core communications products, their crown jewels – outside of the OS space – delivered via the cloud.

The next evolution in this offering is nearly upon us and there is a significant facelift in the works, with a move to Exchange and Office 2010, an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and the addition of Microsoft’s much talked about Lync communications server. Welcome to Office 365!

The Office 365 beta is already out there in production and details are starting to emerge about the transition. This got me thinking with my Sysadmin hat on- if I were thinking about buying BPOS, should I buy it now or wait until Office 365 is released?

It turns out quite an interesting strategic issue and one that needs actioning quickly if you are to take advantage of a number of things. The reason for that is new customers will get Office 365 when it’s released first and existing customers will wait before it’s released and then have up to a year to move- which is totally under their control.

So why would you want to go to Office 365? Here are some reasons:

  • Exchange 2010 back end with significantly improved management features (a lot more control for admins)
  • Sharepoint 2010 with extended customisation
  • Office 2010 available as a web app and as an installed desktop application on a subscription
  • Lync for presence, IM, video, voice

So why would you want to sign up to BPOS now?

  • You want to stay on Exchange 2007- e.g. because Office 365 doesn’t support Office 2003
  • You want to control your migration timescales

Even still, if you are waiting for Office 365 or going to BPOS, now is the perfect time to think about your migration strategy. Orlando posted on Monday about Migrations, but I can’t help but agree with esteemed Exchange MVP Nic Blank when he says “Archive before you migrate” and that’ll make your transition to the cloud quicker and easier. Even if you can have 25GB mailboxes- migrating them is a not a pleasant (or quick) task.

Personally, I would wait for Office 365 because we’re on Office 2007 and soon to be 2010, so there are no client side issues. Plus we’re already on Exchange 2010 and it wouldn’t make sense to go back to 2007. Especially considering the clever things you can do with routing thanks to the CAS role in 2010 and Office 365. But that’s another post.

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By on December 8, 2010

Why would you want to manage your own email?!!

Why BPOS is making me feel smug.

Microsoft has been doing some of their most prolific promoting in recent history about the fact that they are “all in” for the cloud.

They are offering services like Azure to provide application hosting platforms and BPOS to provide email systems and even SharePoint online!

This excites me no end as it’s no secret that over the past few years Mimecast has been pushing the value that “driving tin” into the cloud offers customers. Fewer servers to manage, fewer specialized non-core skills needed internally and less time spent on the never ending parade of vendors and systems integrators eating up your valuable time while they try to flog their wares.

So what does this have to do with Microsoft and Mimecast? When the largest software company in the world manages to adjust its strategy to begin delivering services in a way that we have been recommending for a very long time, it brings with it a certain amount of pride, personal validation, for me at least.

What does it mean for customers?

It means it’s no longer just hype- it’s real and is definitely a firm fixture for not only our future, but the present too.

So what exactly is it that is causing us to consider these things, especially in light of the fact that so many people I speak to are worried about the impacts that cloud computing could have on their jobs?

There are a few simple facts.

  1. Email is seldom a directly revenue generating service for organizations. While email is a critical application, and one that is tightly woven into many business processes, it is seldom the mail system that is responsible for driving growth, unless the organization’s business is providing email services.
  2. Email is a relatively standard and doesn’t differentiate you against your competition. Let’s face it, managing email systems seems pretty mundane to most tech folk, a system that can be run with eyes closed. The problem with this perception is that while the core mail server itself may be fairly standard, the conditions that evolve around email systems are far from it and fluctuate regularly making this seemingly mundane system a real nightmare to get right and keep on getting right.
  3. Email can be used anywhere. Users should be able to access it from the office, home, on the road from a variety of different devices, operating systems and mail clients.

In these changing times- we need to ask ourselves questions:

First off, should we dedicate so much of our staff’s time to a system that does not generate revenue? Surely the answer is no, we shouldn’t have to, remembering there is not a one size-fits-all policy for email. We cannot however ignore the fact that we have to run email systems and that they have to run well.

Secondly, does working on email systems interest the sysadmins and add value to the organisation? Retaining talent is hard in IT and in some sectors email systems are considered “boring” and “don’t move the needle”. So there could be a temptation to delegate email management to more junior staff who end up scared of this complicated beast where any slip means an unhappy incident that is almost always visible to every single user.

Thirdly, do your users don’t care where their email systems reside? Surely most only care that they are able to connect to those systems when they want to, and it works, Data Sovereignty aside.

So, one of the new found choices in an IT admin’s arsenal of tools for messaging is Microsoft BPOS. There is not a one size fits all policy when it comes to what you do with messaging, but if you don’t want to run your Exchange Servers in house- BPOS might be top of the list. Less infrastructure work for you to do, so you can focus on adding more value to your organization. A winner all round.

And now with Mimecast support for BPOS- you can get extended availability and a third party Cloud archive. Welcome to the Cloud everybody!

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By on December 6, 2010

Exchange 2010 Migration Survey: Complexity, Clouds & Silver Linings…

We ran a survey of 590 IT Professionals at Exchange Connections 2010 in Las Vegas last month, from organizations of all sizes and sectors, asking them about their Microsoft Exchange Infrastructure and their plans to upgrade to the Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Exchange 2010 brings important advances to the email infrastructure and many organizations are looking forward to upgrading as soon as they can. Even with these new features the results of our survey show that overall email management remains a complex and resource intensive task and that could be holding up one of the most significant Exchange releases in a number of years.

Just 20% of IT Administrators surveyed have adopted Exchange 2010 to date- is that a really low number considering how long it has been released?

Although 51% are planning to upgrade to Exchange 2010 in the next 12 months, many people are still unsure what the real benefits will be. Just over 8% believe that its most valuable benefit will be simplified compliance.

From what I’ve seen of Exchange 2010, the rest of you are in for a pleasant surprise.

(The full survey results and analysis can be found here- registration required)

The results in more detail

Surprisingly spam and email security remain the biggest problem, even today when we largely think that spam is an old and well understood. As a result 50% of respondent organizations said they had at least two solutions for email, 20% said they had at least three. So are we really still dealing with the age-old problems?

The good news is that some 68% of you plan to upgrade to Exchange 2010 within the next two years, and around 51% within a year. That’s accelerated- about 13%- from our earlier Exchange Adoption report (registration required). However it looks like many people are worried about the resources required to achieve this.

We found that just over 25% of respondents said they didn’t have enough IT resources to tackle the migration.

The key question surely must be: have messaging architectures become too complex to adopt new technology with the resources available in house? This research certainly suggests things have become that way.

And in our day to day work  helping customers with Exchange, we often find that it’s the multitude of systems added to Exchange over the years, to solve single issues such as security or archiving, that create the complexity.  And the net result of all these additions is an architecture that is brittle, and is not resilient to change.  Administrators cannot be certain of the knock-on effects of one change to the rest of the systems, and are then faced with an impossible dilemma – upgrade at the potential cost of downtime or disruption, or stay put.   Their hands are tied by complexity.

Can you see why we’re obsessed with helping IT admins chase complexity out of their email systems?

Looking forward to Exchange 2010, we see that the most anticipated benefit of 2010 is the Enhanced Availability thanks to the new storage architecture of DAG’s etc. Yet this is in contrast to the 12% of respondents that told us that continuity was the most significant email challenge. Luckily those of you who had migrated agreed with us, the enhanced availability was the biggest bonus. I wonder why continuity is far down the list of proposed improvements yet top of realised improvements? One for another post I think.

So what next?

What are the ways of maximizing the investment in Exchange 2010?

  • Look for ways to simplify your messaging architecture to enable you to adopt new technologies faster, be more agile and deliver more value. Chase complexity out of the system- not introduce it.
  • Before migration is the time to get rid of any complexity that could cause downtime during a migration. Getting your mail architecture lean and mean before tackling the migration will reduce opportunities for disruption. For example Exchange MVP Nic Blank says: “Archive before you migrate”.
  • In the same vane- make email system integration a priority. Review your policies and procedures, take the opportunity of upgrading to Exchange 2010 to review more than just the application or OS. Bring everything together to reduce risk and dissolve complexity.
  • Consider leveraging the cloud for more than just storage. And the Cloud is not an all or nothing move either- there are ways to use Exchange 2010 on-premise, hosted or BPOS with Cloud services to extend its functionality and reduce cost- such as Continuity and Archive.

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Mimecast, North America.

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