One scenario we hadn’t addressed was Hybrid Exchange. The reality is that many organizations turn to a hybrid approach for security or compliance concerns, specific application needs tied to the Exchange Server, and most commonly as a flexible, phased approach to a full Exchange Online deployment.
Today, BitTitan® unveiled new capabilities in MigrationWiz that support the batching and ongoing management of a Hybrid Exchange environment. In this Feature Spotlight, we walk through the difficulties facing hybrid consultants using native tools today; how MigrationWiz redefines the approach to these projects; and the benefits of engaging BitTitan for future hybrid scenarios.
Pain Points: Hybrid Projects Today
Hybrid setups aren’t new. Savvy IT admins and consultants have relied on their own processes via spreadsheets, PowerShell scripts, and the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) to perform these migrations. Ultimately though, these projects remain complex, manual endeavors that tie up top-tier IT resources for extended periods of time.
Over the past year, we have worked closely with Hybrid Exchange consultants to understand the biggest struggles with the status quo and how BitTitan could add value for our customers through MigrationWiz. Those conversations centered around four key pains.
The top two are technical barriers and interrelated: today’s hybrid projects rely on custom PowerShell scripts and spreadsheets to discover users and edit or manage them within different migration batches. Because of that, overall management of batches within this hybrid project is highly manual and complex when you consider the scale of these projects.
As a result, these projects require seasoned hybrid consultants or veteran IT people to manage, which ties up the partner’s most expensive people by hourly rate and could prevent them from working on other high-margin activities.
Finally, many hybrid projects are turned over to the end-user’s internal IT team for long-term management. But because of the complexity and lack of central management for these projects, success rates are often low and partners frequently have to reengage to get the project back on track.
Hybrid Exchange with MigrationWiz
MigrationWiz solves for these pain points by providing a single, unified console on top of Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) to manage and monitor your Hybrid Exchange migration.
The biggest strength of MigrationWiz for hybrid projects is improved batch management. Via the Hybrid Agent, MigrationWiz automates the discovery and creation of user batches while also analyzing delegate relationships, providing customers with a clear map of permissions between users so they can be migrated together to Exchange Online.
Since this automation is built into MigrationWiz, hybrid consultants can forego much of the custom scripting and spreadsheet maintenance found in today’s hybrid projects, which also helps reduce manual errors during this process. From the import of users to finalizing individual batches, all management of hybrid projects can be performed from within MigrationWiz. The result is a simpler, streamlined experience that enables a lower-tier engineer to manage and execute this project successfully.
Many of MigrationWiz features, including Project Sharing, Action Logging and automated end-user notifications, are built into this scenario, too, and the steps in-product follow the same flow as all our other scenarios. Our Knowledge Base has been updated with migration guides and support documents to assist with the adoption of this new functionality.
