PST Flight Deck 9.1.4 - Administration Guide

Portal

PST Flight Deck has a role based web interface designed to deliver information or decision-making authority to those in the organization who require it. The PST Flight Deck Portal (Portal) empowers the PST Flight Deck team to be able to do what they need to, when they need to, without requiring Operators, Administrators, or Architects to intervene. The result is a streamlined migration project with the proper team members being enabled and notified when appropriate for them to resolve the present issue. Throughout the Portal, selecting the Help icon can provide contextually relevant information to you when needed.

Actions, Roles, and Groups

Actions are used delegate access to specific roles. Each action correlates with a feature of the Portal. Actions can be used to grant as much access is necessary to a given role.

Roles can be created as are required and be built to suit the needs of the project. For a smaller project where limited resources are engaged throughout the entire project, one role for all the actions may be sufficient. Larger organizations may wish to create more roles for a higher degree of permission segmentation. For example, an organization may permit a help desk role to see details about a user’s progress, but not wish for them to see information related to the project as a whole. Roles can be prioritized to resolve rights assignment when a user is a member of multiple roles.

Groups are used to associate AD groups with Roles and Locations configured. This enables the ability to create project groups of users that are managed within AD and associate them with the role types created. Groups also have the ability to associate an email address for the product to email the group it is affiliated with when action items are required.

The combination of these three components creates the security configuration for the role based Portal administration.

Features

There are several Portal components associated with an Action and available for assignment. Each Portal component is created with the goal to resolve a project need. The following discusses the functions of each of the available components of the Portal.

User Search

This component provides a handy utility to search for a user or account name and return information about the current status of that user. This utility is frequently helpful for a help desk or equivalent group who receives initial calls from an organization’s users for questions concerning the migration project. The interface can provide information on the user and each of the PST files associated with the users. Initially, it provides an overview of that user’s migration. Details can be obtained by drilling into the info button against the user or any of their files. The User Search is associated with the AccessHelpdeskSection Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Self-service Portal

The user search is also leveraged as a resource for users to see the progress of their personal migration. Appending “SelfService” to the UserSearch page will return the user page for the authenticated user. This portal may be included in project FAQ’s or communication to the user as a method to keep users informed as to the progress of their migration, while lessening the burden on teams supporting the migration. There is no Action associated with this function, but any user from the domain scanned by the product can view their migration’s status and progression by accessing the Self-service portal.

An example of the URL used to access this page is as follows:

http://YourServerName/PSTFlightDeckHelpdesk/SelfService

File Action

This component of the Portal is about empowering the proper team members be able to resolve issues related to the migration without requiring the PST Flight Deck Administrator or Operator’s engagement. PST migrations are complicated projects that involve many groups of the business to get the job done. The File Action component of the Portal presents issue specific web wizards to walk users through remediation of an issue with a file.

Take the following example. A file is being migrated that is presently destined for UserA’s archive, but the product has not been able to gather sufficient information to ensure that the file belongs to that user. PST Flight Deck has a configurable ownership certainty threshold and the ability to block files from being ingested which do not meet that minimum criteria. UserA’s file was blocked from ingestion while someone manually approves the ingestion. If a file is blocked because of such an issue, the help desk could call the user to confirm that the data is theirs and they would like it migrated. Rather than communicating the decision back to the PST Flight Deck Administrator or Operator, the help desk personnel could resolve the issue themselves via the File Action feature of the portal.

The File Action component of the Portal is associated with the AccessBusinessOperationsSection Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Support Tickets

PST Flight Deck has the ability to create, manage, track, and update project related support tickets for a specific user, file, host, or event. This feature enables Operators or other team members to be able to address the largest concerns of a migration, as well as track progress against problematic files. This product feature enables project management groups to streamline the troubleshooting and issue resolution associated with the project for a reduced impact to its end users. The Support Ticket portion of the portal is associated with the AccessIncidentsSection Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Project Status

The project status reports are a series of reports designed to enable appropriate team members access to the data that is important to them. An Operator may wish to know what the progress day over day is while the Project Manager may want to see an overview of the entire project. There are three reports provided over the Portal to help to determine the status of a project.

The “Project Overview” report provides a high-level progress report on the number or volume of files Completed, failed, and remaining over a configurable period of time. This is a good measure to determine the current progress of the project and how far into it a migration team is.

The “Daily Progress” is a useful report to determine at a glance that everything is working as expected. It provides daily ingestion rate information for the past 24 hours. This can help you determine if more users need to be enabled and if you are maintaining the anticipated rate of ingestion through each day.

The “User Progress” report provides metrics on the number of Users with PST files identified and statistics related to them and their progress through the migration work-flow. These charts help to understand the nature of the PST problem identified and what the product is doing to resolve it.

The Project Status portal reports availability is controlled by the AccessReportsSection Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Enabled Users

The “Enabled Users” report provides a list of all the users enabled for migration. It provides some high- level information related to their current status and progress, and a link back to the User Search page for that user. Its access is governed by the AccessProjectManagersSection Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Import

The import feature empowers an Operator to delegate the creation of waves to project managers or other members of the business without the requirement of granting access to a Console. The feature’s accessibility is controlled by the AccessImportUsers Action under Settings > Environment > Roles of the Admin Console.

Operational Activities

The operation of a PST Flight Deck environment is something that requires daily effort and monitoring to ensure optimal throughput. Rate of centralization, rate of upload, size of available disk space, and module backlogs are just a small number of the areas of concern for a PST Flight Deck operator. A failure to perform near daily operation activities could result in a large backlog of work to be performed.

Operational activities can begin at the point of agent deployment when the Discovery process begins and information related to ownership and scope of the PST problem an organization is facing begins to become clear.

Overview

After a PST Flight Deck system is installed, there are some common steps that are taken through a project. For information related to the requirements or deployment of a PST Flight Deck system, please refer to the appropriate guide. A PST Flight Deck system must be configured and tuned appropriately. Best practices to maintain a computer operating system and a SQL database are recommended. Insufficient or contention for available resources will negatively impact the entire PST Flight Deck environment. A common area neglected in a deployment is the SQL database.

Initial Testing

In a freshly deployed environment that has a limited number of controlled agents, PST Flight Deck can be configured to expedite testing. Once appropriate, an end to end test is recommended to ensure all components of the system are properly functioning.

Typically, an initial end to end test is done with the default configuration options enabled. Once confirmed to have been successfully completed, the system should be configured to the design of the project and consecutive testing performed. Changing settings once the Migration Agents are deployed may have undesired results.