Migration Manager for AD 8.15 - Product Overview

Introduction

About Migration Manager for Active Directory

Migration Manager for Active Directory is an efficient, flexible, and comprehensive solution for restructuring your Active Directory. Migration Manager for Active Directory includes capabilities for “pruning and grafting,” directory redesign, and Active Directory-to-Active Directory migration. In addition, Migration Manager for Active Directory allows migrating user accounts from Active Directory to Microsoft Office 365. With Migration Manager for Active Directory, major changes to your directory structure can be safely managed with no disruption to daily activities.

About Migration Manager for Exchange

Migration Manager for Exchange, a companion application to Migration Manager for Active Directory, allows administrators to migrate user mailboxes, public folders, and other Exchange data from one Exchange organization to another in a way that is transparent to the end-users and does not impact user productivity. In addition, Migration Manager for Exchange allows migrating user mailboxes from an on-premises Exchange organization to Microsoft Office 365. Migration Manager for Active Directory and Migration Manager for Exchange are designed to be used together.

Hereafter, unless a specific Exchange version is meant, "Exchange" denotes Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, and Exchange 2013 organizations, servers, mailboxes, etc.

Why Restructure?

There are many reasons why you might want to—or need to—restructure your Active Directory, as follows:

• Organizational Changes
• Active Directory Design Issues
• Active Directory and Exchange Deployments

Organizational Changes

Changes in your organization can require changes to your Active Directory. Organizational changes might cause you to split or merge forests or domains, or “prune” a portion of your Active Directory and “graft” it back to a different place.

Organizational changes that can impact your Active Directory include:

• Mergers and acquisitions that require combining forests or moving existing Active Directory objects to a new forest
• Divestitures that require you to “prune” away a portion of your Active Directory
• Corporate restructuring or reorganization within a department that requires “pruning and grafting” of Active Directory
• Organizational splits that require you to divide your existing Active Directory into two or more distinct Active Directories
• Employee transfers that require “pruning and grafting” to move user accounts and permissions
• Moving from on-premises installations to cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange Online.

Active Directory Design Issues

You might discover that your current Active Directory design does not meet your needs or is not well-suited to your network topology. Perhaps your initial deployment of Active Directory was compromised because of time constraints, limited resources, lack of tools allowing for reconfiguration, or limited information or experience with Active Directory.

Situations that might require you to redesign your existing Active Directory include:

• You followed Microsoft’s original advice to use one forest with one domain, and now you find that this Active Directory design does not address your needs. Though easy to design and manage, single-forest, single-domain designs often suffer from replication latency.
• Security concerns or regulations require separation of lines of business or operating units. To comply, you need to implement a multi-forest design.
• In practice, Active Directory design is affected more by political requirements than by technical considerations. According to analysts, many organizations failed to take this into consideration when planning their move to Active Directory. To meet these organizational realities, you need to create new domains or forests.