CompareScope. Office 365 Migration Solutions

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1 CompareScope Office 365 Migration Solutions January 2012 commissioned by

2 Contents Overview 1 Office 365 Migrations 1 Source System Support 1 Migration Features 2 Feature Notes 3 Migration Caveats 4 Summary 4 This research and analysis paper was indepdently-researched, -authored, and -published by Concentrated Technology, LLC, which takes full responsibility for its content. While this paper may have been commissioned by one or more companies whose organization, products, and/or services are described herein, no individual or organization outside of Concentrated Technology has had any input into, or influence over, the contents of this paper, with the exception of independent subcontractors performing copyedit and technical review tasks. Concentrated Technology maintains full control over the final content of this paper. This paper and its contents may not be published or excerpted without the express written consent of Concentrated Technology, LLC, except as specifically permitted under US copyright law. This paper is copyright Concentrated Technology, LLC, who reserves all rights. Concentrated Technology recommends against relying on the content of any paper which is more than 18 months older than the month and year of publication as listed on the front page. Readers of this paper are encouraged to perform their own independent validation, review, and judgement, and Concentrated Technology accepts no responsibility for any damages, whether direct or incidental, arising from the use of, or reference to, the information included in this paper.

3 Overview Organizations of varying sizes are choosing to outsource their messaging and collaboration services to Microsoft s Office 365 product. These organizations are typically coming from an existing Exchange Server, Google Apps, or other services, and need to migrate their user mailboxes to Office 365. In this CompareScope paper, we review the three major migration offerings currently available. Office 365 Migrations All of the solutions reviewed in this paper handle the complete user data store, including mail, contacts, and calendars. When the source system is an Exchange Server, all Exchange-provided folders are migrated. This paper focuses only on the data migration aspect of an Office 365 migration; additional aspects such as single sign-on are something that some organizations will need to consider separately. Organizations wishing to have their old and new systems co-exist during a phased migration will also have to consider that aspect (both Exchange Server and Gmail provide support for coexistence scenarios). We reviewed three solutions for this paper: The native migration functionality offered in Office 365 Quest OnDemand Migration for ( MigrationWiz ( Source System Support Focusing specifically on the ability to migrate to Office 365, the three solutions reviewed offer the following support for source systems: Native Quest OnDemand MigrationWiz On-Premise or Hosted Exchange Server Gmail / Google Apps GroupWise IMAP or POP* *IMAP and POP systems will typically only support , not contacts and calendars, since those systems do not explicitly support contacts and calendaring. 1

4 Migration Features The three solutions in this paper offer the following features. Pricing Native Quest OnDemand MigrationWiz Included with Office 365 $10/user (volume discounts available) $9.99-$11.99/user (volume discounts begin at 5000 mailboxes) Mailbox size limit (other than limits on destination No No 10-50GB mailbox size) End user selfservice option 1 No Yes No Ease of use 2 Good Very Good Very Good Software installation Some 2 None entirely hosted None entirely hosted 6 Monitoring Good Very Good 3 Good Tech Support Phone Live Chat or call-back (additional cost) Mailbox item migration Good Good Good Calendar item migration 4 Good Very good Good Contact item migration 6 Good Good Good Converts Gmail labels to folder N/A Yes Yes hierarchy Converted item fidelity 5 Good Good Good PowerShell cmdlets to automate No No Yes, on request migrations Migration Performance 7 Good Good Good De-Duplication 8 No Yes See Notes Data Filtering 9 No Yes See Notes 2

5 Feature Notes 1 Although MigrationWiz advertises itself as a self-service solution, it offers only a single migration mode. Most organizations will need to have an administrator set up the migrations, and that administrator will need access to users passwords, or use a Google Apps for Business administrator key and secret combination to access user mailboxes. By contrast, Quest s offering offers a similar administrator-focused mode (which can migrate user accounts without knowing their passwords), but also offers a true end-user selfservice mode. In the latter, an administrator sets up the migration and identifies users (by address) to migrate. Those users receive an containing a link to the migration system, where they provide their own password. The administrator can track the overall progress of the migration from a dashboard Web page, send reminder s, and so forth. 2 The native Office365 migration requires a bit more in the way of set-up, and in some scenarios will require the installation of an on-premise directory synchronization tool. The two third-party solutions were both extremely straightforward; Quest s end-user self-service option in particular was extremely easy to use, although it has fewer options for data filtering than the administrator-focused option. 3 Quest s solution offers a real-time dashboard from which migrations can be monitored. However, large migrations can be extremely time-consuming, so in many instances users and administrators will simply let the migration run in the background. All reviewed solutions send a notification once a mailbox has been migrated. Quest s product also provides a live migration log, noting any migration errors as they occur. 4 Calendar items proved to be the most difficult during the migration. With all three solutions, we found rare instances of recurring items that were improperly-migrated often turning items from an all day into a 12:00am to 11:59pm item, especially when migrating from Google Apps/Gmail. With all but the Quest solution, we found that meeting items would lose their meeting organizer attribute, meaning the meeting item would no longer properly indicate who had initiated the meeting request. 5 Fidelity refers to how well the migrated message resembles the original, in terms of formatting, read/ unread status, and so forth. We found that all three solutions did an essentially similar job. 6 The solutions reviewed migrate only user address books; migration of the Global Address List (GAL) from an on-premise Exchange Server solution is not supported. However, for organizations using Exchange Server 2007 or later, a simple PowerShell command can copy GAL entries to Office We tested each of the solutions in a migration of two mailboxes having approximately 30,000 items apiece, with a total mailbox size of approximately 5GB. All three solutions offered similar performance. We felt that the primary limiting factor in performance was the destination mail system, not the migration solutions per se. 8 During our tests, we were able to determine that the Quest product successfully de-duplicated messages, even during a phased migration, meaning that a message which was migrated in two separate phases existed in a single instance in the destination. We were not able to conclusively determine this with the MigrationWiz product, but believe that the product was not de-duplicating messages. Note that, when migrating from Google Apps/Gmail, we did notice duplication on both third-party solutions when migrating a message that had multiple Gmail labels applied. Because these solutions convert labels to folders, a message with two labels must live in two separate folders, which seemed to result in a duplicate message being created. We regard this duplication as more of a weakness with the Gmail label-based organization system; the solutions are simply doing the best they can when converting that to a folder structure. 9 Quest s solution supports a defined filtering mechanism in its administrator-run migrations (but not in the end-user self-service model). Filtering enables older messages (for example) to be skipped during the migration, along with other filter criteria. We were unable to locate such a mechanism in the native or MigrationWiz solutions. 3

6 Migration Caveats Note that Office 365 engages bandwidth throttles when a certain number of messages have been saved into a mailbox. These throttles are designed to protect the stability and performance of the Office 365 system, but can slow down migrations since a large number of items need to be created. Customers may consider contacting Office 365 support to see if these throttles can be temporarily suspended or raised during the migration period. Office 365 can also limit the number of mailboxes permitted in a batch migration, meaning larger organizations may have to split their migration into multiple batches. We recommend that organizations conduct a test migration with a half-dozen mailboxes, record the speed with which those migrate, and use that metric to determine a daily migration window in which a known number of mailboxes can be successfully migrated. Also note that migration solutions are limited by the capabilities of the source and destination systems. For example, none of the solutions reviewed here migrate Outlook PST files, because those files are not accessible to a Web-based migration system. Personal distribution lists are also not migrated, because Microsoft provides no external accessibility to them. These facts mean that a migration from a rich messaging system like Exchange Server to Office 365 may not be 100% complete, simply because of the capabilities of those two systems, and not because of a weakness with the migration solution. Organizations should carefully review vendor documentation and communicate any limitations to users up front, so that users can have reasonable expectations and be prepared to mitigate any inconvenience. Summary Note that Concentrated Technology CompareScope papers such as this one are primarily intended as feature comparisons. We do not conduct a detailed analysis of these features, nor do we use surveys or focus groups to determine which features might be in-demand by typical organizations. We did, however, share this comparison with a small group of small- to medium-sized business customers, asking each one for their impressions. We also asked them to review the solutions Web sites to learn more about each solution. Our respondents generally felt that the Office 365 native migration tool was the most limited and the most difficult to use. For customers on an existing Gmail/Google Apps or Exchange Server environment, the Quest OnDemand solution seemed to be the most straightforward in terms of functionality. Customers especially liked the option to have users initiate their own migrations through a self-service interface, while retaining the option to monitor users progress. Our respondents remarked that Quest s pricing was the most straightforward of the two third-party solutions, and particularly noted that live support was included in the cost of the migration purchase. 4