PST Flight Deck 9.2 - Administration Guide

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.

Pilots

After end to end testing is completed, it is important to evaluate and configure acceptable threshold values for extraction and ingestion failures. Doing so will prevent the review of every PST with one or two failures and permit an Operator to focus on larger areas of concern.

Once configuration and testing have been completed, the Migration Agent will need to be packaged and tested for deployment. This is frequently done on a small group of users close to the PST Flight Deck team. If the deployment installation went as expected and the workstations can be seen reporting back to the PST Flight Deck server, the system will need to be less aggressively configured to accommodate the added communication from the agents.

At this point you can begin the deployment of the agents to the remaining workstations in an environment. The business pilot will consist of the users who tested the agent package deployment and will provide an opportunity to begin to see bottlenecks within the environment. Tuning the system to a balance of resource consumption and performance is frequently initiated during the business pilot because it is the first time in a project that the system could be busy enough to maximize the performance of the system. Other pilots may wish to be performed depending on the results of initial pilot attempts.

Discovery and Owner Management

After deployment of the Agent to the remaining workstations occurs, the discovery of PST files begins. It is suggested to let this process run until the number of discovered PSTs starts to level out. In smaller projects this may take three or more weeks. Larger projects may take longer.

During the discovery process and through its completion, it is suggested that Operators focus the efforts on ownership identification through the options within Manage > Owners. Accurate and complete ownership identification is one of the challenges in PST migration projects. PST Flight Deck is able to provide suggestions as to ownerships immediately following the initial discovery results being returned. Aggressively managing ownership of files during the discovery phase of a project will drastically reduce the challenges and time needed to manage file ownership at later phases of the project.

The number and volume of PST files may continue to grow as your migration continues, but when discovery is nearing the end, consistently sustained growth can be seen week over week. At this point waves of users can start being prepared for migration. Typically, this initially involves ensuring communication has gone out to impacted users and enablement groups have been defined for the migration.