When migrating one Exchange organization to another organization you have to do quite some work. The traditional methods include a lot of scripting, or a 3^rd party tool like Quest or BinaryTree to migrate one Exchange environment to another.

Migrationwiz is a product that can perform the migration from the cloud, they offer E-mail migrations as a service. This migration can be from any messaging platform to any messaging platform, but for this blog I’ll focus on a migration from one Exchange platform to another Exchange platform (in different datacenters).

After creating an account via the website (http://www.migrationwiz.com) and acquiring the licenses you can logon to the Migrationwiz dashboard.

The left box in the dashboard is the Mailbox Migration section. In this Mailbox Migration section you can create connectors. The connectors are used to connect to the source environment and the target environment.

For the connectors you can select a pre-configured service provider. The major service providers are listed here like America Online, Cobweb, Googly, Intermedia, Office365 etc. These can be select for the source connector (if you want to move from) or for the target connector (if you want to move to). If your service provider is not listed, or you want to migrate your own environment you can select the Source Type and the OWA URL. There are several pre-defined Source Types like Exchange Server 2003/2007/2010, Google Apps/Gmail, Groupwise 7+, IMAP, Lotus Notes 6.5+, Microsoft Office 366, Microsoft BPOS, POP or Zimbra 6+. These are selected using a drop-down box.

In the Items Migrated section you can select which types of items need to be migrated.

The first migration is a single mailbox that’s migrated from one (shared) Exchange 2007 platform to a new (shared) Exchange 2010 platform. In the Migrationwiz dashboard select Perform Mailbox Migration and create a new connector and fill in the Friendly Name, the Source Type and the OWA URL. In the notification area (not visible in Figure 6) you can select where status messages need to be sent to when a mailbox is successfully migrated or when issues arise during the migration.

Click the Create button (again not visible in the screenshot above) to create the new connector. The following step is to enter the credentials of the mailbox that needs to be migrated. The user account and mailbox is already created on the new platform (there’s no Active Directory integration, so reading the source mailboxes will not result in creating target mailboxes).

The notification settings are inherited from the previous step, but changes can be made. There’s also an Advanced Options where logging can be enabled or where certain item types can be excluded from the migration.

Click the Create button to continue. After creation of the connector it is possible to associate more mailboxes to this specific connector. Only one mailbox is migrated in this example so this question can be ignored and click No to continue.

The newly created connector is now shown:

When you click on Migrate Mailbox the migration wizard will start. Select the license type you want to use (or have purchased actually) and click Start Migration. The migration job will now be queued for migration by the Migrationwiz engines.

After the migration a status message is sent, whether the migration is successful or not. My first attempts were not really successful:

When the migration fails there’s an option in the dashboard to contact MigrationWiz support. MigrationWiz has more logfiles available apparently so support could figure out what was wrong. I happened to have multiple URL’s for all Exchange Services (like OWA, Outlook Anywhere, ActiveSync, Exchange Web Services all had a different URL, combined with TMG2010 and a load balancer) and the MigrationWiz could not figure out how to succeed. The MigrationWiz support was excellent, even during the weekend!

After all services and URL’s were set more or less default I could retry and this time the migration succeeded. Before the migration I changed the MX Records and the Autodiscover records and after some time the mailbox was successfully migrated.

After the migration a status message is sent again, both to the migrated mailbox and the administrator (both are configurable though).

In the dashboard there’s also an option to have a look at the migration statistics, both in text format and in graphical format. You can closely monitor the actual migration and check the migration performance.

The Items Migrated and the throughput:

In a future blog I’ll have a closer look on how to migrate multiple mailboxes in a batch.