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Migrator for Notes to Exchange 4.16.3 - Pre-Migration Planning Guide

About the Migrator for Notes to Exchange documentation Introduction Critical considerations Other strategic planning issues Appendix A: Known limitations of the migration process

Develop a written Migration Plan

An enterprise migration is a complex process that requires careful planning and project management. Even a high-level summary checklist of necessary tasks can be long and can expose many details to be addressed for a successful migration. The logistics of the sequence, timing, and coordination of tasks is also important.

The complexity of most migration projects makes planning, foresight, and communications critical to a smooth migration. Halfway through the migration process is no time to discover that a neglected detail or invalid assumption will cost hundreds of hours of user productivity, or cause unnecessary aggravation for end users. Quest recommends that you develop a comprehensive written Migration Plan before you start the migration process.

Developing a Migration Plan is a valuable exercise that leads you to consider and accommodate all the factors that affect an organization's migration. The first six sections of your Migration Plan should characterize your primary needs, environment, and strategies as explained in this chapter:

1
Migration Scenario
2
Provisioning Method
3
Before-and-After Site Configurations
4
Migration Scale
5
Coexistence During the Transition
6
Test and Pilot Migrations

After the first six sections, your Migration Plan should contain sections and subsections that describe suitable choices for all relevant topics in chapter 3 of this guide: Other strategic planning issues.

Know your migration scenario

Most migrations follow a similar basic process with variations to accommodate circumstances and needs—a migration scenario. It is critical that you understand and characterize your scenario before you begin migration planning because your scenario will influence the decisions about the processes and methods you use to accomplish the migration. Most variations to the basic process result from:

•
Migration Destination (Exchange target type):
•
Proprietary (on-premises) Exchange network
A proprietary Exchange environment is one in which the hardware and software are under the control of the migrating organization. Ordinarily this is a local Exchange network—on the same premises as the Notes source, or near enough to use high-performance network cables. However, a proprietary Exchange target can also reside in a different location from the Notes source.
•
Hosted Exchange platform (the cloud)
A hosted Exchange platform is one in which the hardware and software are owned and controlled by a third party. The hosting entity sells, as a service, access to disk space and the Exchange software features. This service model is also known as cloud computing. Most migrations to a hosted Exchange are to Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online).
•
Pre-Migration State of Existing Local Active Directory: Part of the migration process depends on whether your organization already has local Active Directory running for login and security purposes and, if so, the state of any objects provisioned there.
•
If migrating to proprietary Exchange: Do you already have Active Directory up and running? If AD is already provisioned, are its objects already mail-enabled, mailbox-enabled, or neither?
•
If migrating to Microsoft 365: Will you use a proprietary local Active Directory to provision the hosted environment and, if so, will you keep the local AD active after the migration? This method of provisioning permits single sign-on, also called identity federation, so users can access Microsoft 365 services with the same credentials they use for local Active Directory. Alternatively, you could provision Microsoft 365 without local AD, by using Migrator for Notes to Exchange to provision Microsoft 365 directly from the Notes/Domino source.
Your scenario and circumstances might point to a particular method of provisioning the target AD, or you may have a choice. See Provisioning the target Active Directory for information to help you determine how to provision the target AD.

Different combinations of target types and existing local AD can produce an array of migration scenarios. The Migrator for Notes to Exchange Scenarios Guide describes the combinations and explains the migration procedures for each:

•
Migration to Proprietary Exchange
•
No existing Active Directory (or no AD objects yet exist).
•
AD objects in existing Active Directory.
•
Migration to Microsoft 365
•
Provisioning Microsoft 365 from local Active Directory.
•
Provisioning Microsoft 365 directly from Notes/Domino source.

The MNE Scenarios Guide also describes three special scenarios that can occur in combination with one of the previously listed scenarios:

•
Offline Migration: A strategy in which Notes source data, previously extracted from Notes, is migrated directly to the Exchange target. An offline strategy can be valuable if
•
Problematic bandwidth makes direct connection impractical (e.g., if the source and target servers are far apart—geographically and/or from a network perspective).
- OR -
•
The Domino environment is managed by a third party that does not allow admin access.
- OR -
•
A disaster scenario occurred in which the Domino server is destroyed but backup NSF files survive.
An offline migration can be accomplished by either of two approaches:
•
Notes source data is saved to replica or otherwise-disconnected NSFs and the MNE Data Migration Wizard migrates from the NSF files directly to Exchange.
•
The MNE Data Migration Wizard migrates Notes source data to PST files (rather than directly to an online Exchange target) and the PST files are imported into the Exchange target by another application. The MNE Migration Manager for PSTs would be a good choice for this purpose.
•
Phased (Staged) Migration Options: A phased migration strategy is one in which all but the most recent source data is "pre-migrated" to Exchange while users remain active in Notes. The remaining Notes data (a much smaller volume) can be migrated much faster—often all users can be migrated together in a final "cutover" migration. Users continue to receive and send mail and manage their calendars in Notes throughout the transition period while their older data is migrated to Exchange. If the final cutover can be accomplished in a single day or weekend, this strategy can eliminate the need for email, calendar, and free/busy coexistence.
•
Silent Mode Options: A strategy to configure the MNE Self-Service Desktop Migrator (SSDM), the per- desktop migration application, to hide some or all of its screens and retrieve its required values from a configured .ini file, eliminating or minimizing any need for interaction with the end user.

Characterize your migration scenario in the first section of your Migration Plan.

Provisioning the target Active Directory

Different target types (a local Active Directory vs. Microsoft 365) require different provisioning methods. A local Active Directory can be provisioned directly from the Domino source using Migrator for Notes to Exchange tools in combination with Quest CMN Directory Connector (or some other directory synchronizing method). For Microsoft 365 you can use Microsoft AD sync tool to copy objects into the hosted AD from a local, proprietary AD (previously provisioned locally), or Migrator for Notes to Exchange tools can provision directly from Domino.

 
* 
IMPORTANT: If you intend to configure free/busy coexistence between Domino and either a local proprietary Exchange or Microsoft 365, the timing of your pro­visioning task (within the overall migration process) will be affected by this known Exchange behavior:
•
Exchange cannot send a free/busy query to Domino for any user who has an Exchange mailbox. Exchange can direct such queries only to its own mailboxes.
•
The significance and implications of this limitation depend on whether you are migrating to a proprietary AD or to Microsoft 365, as explained separately below.

Provisioning includes mail-enabling and/or mailbox-enabling the objects in the target AD. An Active Directory object is said to be mail-enabled when the AD object record contains a forwarding address to which mail can be routed (i.e., to the user Notes address). An object is said to be mailbox-enabled when an Exchange mailbox is created for it.

Review the information that follows to determine your provisioning method, and note it in your Migration Plan.

Provisioning a local proprietary Active Directory

The MNE tools can provision Active Directory from the Domino source. The typical and most direct method to provision a local AD begins with an MNE directory export, followed by a directory update by the CMN Directory Connector, as illustrated.

Your organization may already have an Active Directory running for login and security purposes and, if so, Migrator for Notes to Exchange can synchronize the existing AD objects with the Domino objects and mail-enable the AD objects. In either case, this provisioning step is necessary before any users are migrated.

 

In many organizations the migrating users are already using AD security objects for network authentication prior to the migration project.Where Notes users already exist as user objects in Active Directory, the CMN Directory Connector (and other directory-update tools) will produce duplicate entities in AD. But MNE includes a Provisioning Wizard that can merge the contact information into the original AD object record and delete the contact, leaving a single mail-enabled object in Active Directory.

Other MNE wizards can mailbox-enable the AD accounts and provision groups in AD.

When provisioning a local Active Directory, be sure to provision all Notes users into AD as mail-enabled objects, without Exchange mailboxes before you migrate the first user. Provisioning mail-enabled objects into AD will facilitate Exchange-to-Notes mail forwarding, to correctly route mail that arrives (or originates) in Exchange for not-yet-migrated Notes recipients. But Exchange mailboxes would disable Exchange-to-Notes free/busy queries: Exchange cannot send free/busy queries to an external server for a user who already has an Exchange mailbox.

This Exchange free/busy restriction becomes irrelevant if you defer creating user mailboxes until before their migration, several steps later. The standard scenario procedures (in chapter 2 of the Migrator for Notes to Exchange Scenarios Guide) follow this approach for provisioning local proprietary Active Directory.

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