Flexing Your Messaging Migration Muscles By Nancy Cox   Forget your triceps and deltoids. The real workout in countless corporations is in migrating from paunchy file-based messaging platforms to sleek client/server systems. Whether you refer to them as migrations, transitions or changeovers, migrations are for those with abs of steel. Ask users what they want migrated and, looking up from their treadmills, they'll boldly say, "Everything!" Ask network administrators what they want to migrate, and they'll wistfully state, "Nothing." The optimum solution lies somewhere in the middle. Crucial to the entire process are large repetitions of planning and architectural assessment. In flexing this whole new set of migration muscles, you can select from a variety of exercise regimes. You can tell your users that nothing will be migrated--as one major aerospace company recently did. This com pany installed Exchange and told the users to mail anything they wanted to keep over to their new mailbox. Or you can migrate selected components of the user's mailbox, such as folders and bulletin boards. Or you can go for the full year's contract at the local network health club and migrate everything--within the limitations of time, cost and tools available. Or you can opt for "peaceful coexistence" in which the old and the new continue to function, exchanging messages and swapping directories until a better transition method is in place. To test these regimes, we brought Microsoft Corp.'s Migration Wizard into our Orlando, Fla., lab to migrate cc:Mail Release 6.1 users to Exchange 5.0. The two systems were connected using the new Exchange cc:Mail Connector. The product performed well in our tests, but, before we hit a singl e key, we labored considerably over the entire migration process. Pumping Iron Planning for the migration works five key muscle groups--who, what, where, when and how. As any systems architect knows, the technology is usually up to the task. The political nature of the move and the corporate culture--now that's what causes the leg cramp. Seemingly innocuous questions like "Who gets to go first?" or "What stuff are we going to migrate?" can throw everyone into a cold sweat. The first task is to establish a migration team representing both the new and the existing platforms (systems architects, computer support and mail administrators), the helpdesk, human resources, applications development, legal and training. The team should immediately draft the goals and objectives of the migration; the technical, service-level and organizational requirements; the project deliverables; the project plan and the schedule. If the migration is to be outsourced, a statement of work also must be drafted at this ti me. Selecting who will be migrated determines whether you will transition the entire post office at once or perform a partial migration, choosing individual users on the post office an d migrating them at different times. Migrating all users in one fell swoop is always preferable. If you let employees use the old messaging system in midmigration, you'll end up having to do it over. It's like working one arm's muscles more than the other, developing a "claw" and throwing your sleek physique out of balance. Determining what will be migrated is also key. The migration tools available typically aren't capable of transitioning everything from the old system to the new. All the messages must arrive intact--along with formatting, embedded objects and attachments--for the migration to be deemed successful. As you can see from the "Messaging Migration Utilities Features" chart (on page 155), most client/server messaging systems offer migration tools for prevalent file-based systems. But because market coverag e is nowhere near complete by any vendor and not all components of a user's mailbox are migrated, a whole new industry has been spawned for third-party developers, systems integrators and outsourcers to fill in the gaps. For example, ReSoft International's Migra product line enables users on host-based Office Vision/MVS systems to migrate to Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes or Domino, cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail or Exchange. Binary Tree offers a product called MS-2-Notes that will migrate Microsoft Mail and Exchange users to Lotus Notes. This tool can be run by the user or the administrator.

For the chart on Messag ing Migration Utilities Features What's Cooking With T1 Bandwidth? by Chris Lewis Updated June 6, 1997