Lepide Migrator for Exchange Review

Performing an Exchange migration is always a daunting task for a Messaging Admin, especially when it involves cross-forest moves, or even worse "cut-over" migrations.
I've done several migrations, some were easy, and some were not very fun at all. Depending on who I was working for, some organizations had migration tools to ease the process, and Lepide Exchange Migrator has always been my favorite.

In my current gig we go through a lot of acquisitions, where the users we bring into our organization are cut-over; meaning we create new user accounts and mailboxes in our domain, and then either archive their old mail or if they keep a tidy mailbox, we'll move their content into their new mailbox. The problem with this is, it's always difficult to map their Outlook profiles to their new mailbox, so that involves a ton of busy work.

In this post, I'll go over what the Leipde Exchange Migrator can do to help you with your migrations, and my thoughts on the product.

**Note** For now, this is just an overview. In a future post, I'll go over how to install and use the Migrator.

Notice: This is an unpaid posting. I was however provided with the full licensed software.

Product Features:

Migrate to and fro:

• Exchange 2003/2007 and Exchange 2010
• Exchange 2003/2007 and Exchange 2013
• Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013
• Migration from any Exchange Server to Office 365
• Public Folder Migration
• Intra-forest Exchange Migration
• Cross-forest Exchange Migration

The Migrator can be installed on multiple computers, which act as agents, to increase the migration volume. You can create scheduled jobs to move during off-hours so there's no service disruption. You can filter unwanted mail items so you don't bring over junk and (this is very useful) there's a roll-back feature to undo any or all changes if things don't go as planned.

You can sync the complete source mailbox to the target environment in advance and do an incremental sync before the final cut-over. This helps in avoiding data loss and outage to the users.

It provides a Pre-Migration Analyzer, which will tell you how long a migration will take by calculating network speed, number and size of mailboxes, and bunch of other factors.

It has a Reporting feature that tracks migration history and plans for future migrations and notifies you with email alerts for the job status, job completion, or job cancelation.

It provides the option to migrate the account with SID History and current passwords from the source to target account, which is very useful in cross-forest migrations.

It provides option to migrate Public Folders and also carry over settings like mailbox Access Rights, Send As Permission, Public Folder Permissions, Send on Behalf, and Delivery Restrictions.

And what I think is the most important/useful features, is that it will map the user's Outlook Profile to their new mailbox in the target organization. This is very helpful, since a lot of the work involved in a migration is dealing with fixing Outlook issues.

Product Review:

The Migrator itself is very easy to install. It can run on pretty much everything from Windows XP to Server 2012 R2.
You can install it in either the Source or Target domain.
You will need a two-way trust between the two environments and it does require Outlook (32-bit or 64-bit) to be installed on the machine. The most involved part of the process is setting up DNS forwarding and the trust(s) but you'll have to do that for a co-existence migration anyway.

After the installation, now comes the fun and easy part - the migration.
Lepide couldn't have made it easier to migrate Exchange.

In a broad overview: you create a migration project, connect to the other organization, select the users to migrate (or import a CSV with a list of users) set your filter of what to include in the move, map the mailboxes, create your notifications and schedule and let 'er rip.

As I mentioned above; the best feature of Lepide Exchange Migrator, is the ability to map user Outlook Profiles to the new/target environment.

When we cut-over users, the most time-consuming part is re-doing Outlook profiles. By using the Migrator, after the successful mailbox migration, you can use the Profile Manager to replace the old Outlook profiles of the source with new Outlook profiles of the target (according to the mapping performed at the time of Job creation). You can choose to replace all the Outlook profiles or only the default profile. Also, you can create a new profile when no Outlook profile is found. This make it so easy, instead of manually updating or re-creating the profile with the new Exchange account.

Moving Public Folders is super easy as well. You can sync them back and forth between environments and (unlike native migrations) it doesn't duplicate items.

There were two drawbacks to the product:

Having to create a two-way trust can sometimes break things in your AD structure depending on configuration (we actually had this happen when one of our teams created a trust). I would be nice if there was a way around having to create the trust.

Outlook 2016 is not supported yet. Hopefully the Lepide devs will work that into an update soon, since Outlook 2016 will become mainstream and I'm sure most Exchange admins are testing it now.

Overall, using the Lepide Exchange Migrator makes Exchange migrations from end-to-end a breeze and I don't ever want to migrate without it! :)