Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Migration Services Project Domino to Office 365

Project Goals/Description 

  • ABARTA is planning a transition from IBM’s Domino (approximately 500 mailboxes) to Office 365 for messaging and email requirements. 
  • The company also desires to standardize on a stable hosted platform to reduce administrative costs, increase security and provide an environment to support applications and data within Active Directory Services and Exchange. 
  •  ABARTA seeks assistance in planning and executing a cutover style migration to Office 365. The company desires to configure Outlook clients and migrate from their on premises Domino environment to Office 365 for email, calendaring and contact management as a hosted solution.
  • ABARTA wishes to utilize a “hybrid” model to allow for ease of management and SMTP relay. Active Directory Federation Services and Directory Synchronization will be deployed to allow for ease of administration and to simplify and secure the user login process to Office 365. 


Scope/Key Deliverables


Proposed scope of work includes the following high-level tasks:
  • Assessment and Requirements Analysis
  • Design and Planning
  • Design Proof of Concept
  • Pilot Migration
  • Production Migration Support


Project Timeline

  • Estimate minimum of 6 weeks in duration for the overall project effort.  This estimate is subject to change upon mutual agreement between InfraScience and ABARTA.
  • Schedule listed above is an example of the overall schedule and does not reflect holidays, vacation, or resource availability
  • 339 to 368 hours for the completion of the Domino to O365 migration.


Critical Success Factors

  • ABARTA will ensure all hardware; hardware accessories, connectivity, firewall exceptions, software and tools are in place in time to meet estimated delivery timelines.
  • ABARTA will provide Domino administrative resources to assist InfraScience for Domino migration. This resource must be available to the project.
  • Key ABARTA personnel have a complete understanding of the current environment and have a full understanding of the business drivers and goals.  It is important that the identified key individuals are available throughout this engagement at all times. 
  • ABARTA has an inventory of their existing environment
  • ABARTA will identify managers and key personnel (Final list to be determined at the Project Initiation Meeting) that will be required to participate during the implementation process.
  • Interviews and events will be scheduled in a timely manner by the ABARTA project lead



Project Phases


Phase 1: Assessment and Requirements Analysis
This phase will combine validation of the requirements and assessment of the current ABARTA environment with planning for the project itself.

Services Provided:
  • Identify any mobile devices such as Blackberries, iPhones, Androids in the environment, which require support for corporate messaging.
  • Review Internet protocols, server design, management and monitoring, strategies and applications installed in the current environment.  
  • Assess the current Lotus Notes Domino environment for mailboxes, resources, personal distribution lists, and address books.
  • Understand the Lotus Notes Domino SMTP environment and third party dependencies.
Phase Deliverables:
  • Review of existing Domino environment including database sizes, mail flow, and integrated applications
  • Assessment document detailing findings
  • Itemized list of issues uncovered as well as suggested remediation


Phase 2: Migration Planning and Design
This phase integrates the required architectural and detailed design effort into an organized undertaking. Through design workshops facilitated by InfraScience, the detailed design necessary to establish a foundational Office 365 and Notes migration environment infrastructure will be developed.

Services Provided:
  • Analyze and recommend potential migration tools based on ABARTA requirements.
  • Develop solution for the migration of data from Lotus Notes Domino environments to the Office 365 environment.
  • Prepare detailed installation/configuration report including all steps that were taken in installation of the environment.
Phase Deliverables:
  • Interactive design and migration planning sessions with key ABARTA personnel
  • Develop the formal Office 365 design document 
  • Generation of Initial Migration Plan document
  • Exchange hybrid server configuration
  • Mail flow design
  • Development of the specifications for the production servers

Phase 3: Migration Testing
This phase completes the design through its validation in a non-production test environment.  Rather than a production pilot, in which permanent infrastructure is put in place and certain users selected for migration, the design proof of concept involves the deployment and utilization of temporary test facilities in order to prove that the technologies, processes, and procedures work as expected. 

Since Office 365 is the target destination for this project, an isolated proof of concept lab is not required. InfraScience can use the existing infrastructure with Office 365 in this phase.

Services Provided:
  • Establishing the proof of concept environment
  • Provision and configure Office 365 tenant
  • Validate and test mailbox migration
Phase Deliverables:
  • Final Project Plan
  • Final Migration Plan
  • Deploy and configure any necessary migration infrastructure
  • Document the high level migration methodology to the Office 365 environment
  • Development of user communication plan and associated technical documentation

Phase 4: Pilot
This phase involves putting the designed permanent infrastructure in place and migration of a selected group of pilot users to the new messaging environment.

Services Provided:
  • Establish the pilot implementation infrastructure
  • Transition the users in the pilot group to the Office 365 environment as per the developed methodologies and processes
Phase Deliverables:
  • Deploy the Hybrid Exchange, ADFS, and DirSync servers as detailed in the design document
  • Begin migration of data, in preparation for the cutover
  • Update the Migration Plan document with the realized deployed production environment and detailed project plan, if necessary
  • The finalized Production Migration documentation

Phase 5: Production Migration
This phase involves the final migration of all users to the Office 365 system. InfraScience will deliver migration services to ABARTA at a mutually agreed upon date, as documented in the project plan, and as requested by ABARTA.

Services Provided:
  • InfraScience will perform the migration of Notes mailboxes, resources, distribution lists and mail-in databases to Office 365
  • InfraScience will provide top level support of any issues that arise during the production migration
  • Perform the SMTP cutover (Internet message flow) to Office 365 at the cutover date.
  • Support ABARTA as their team validates functionality of all production systems
Phase Deliverables:
  • Migration of all users and mail-in databases to Office 365
  • Assistance with technical issues encountered during migration
  • Escalation of issues to Microsoft technical support as required
  • Acceptance of Deliverables

Friday, July 11, 2014

Preparing for North Star, Upgrading to Office 365 in 3rd Quarter

In the 3rd quarter we will be upgrading to Microsoft’s Office 365 in preparation for our upcoming implementation of Coca Cola’s North Star project that will consist of the adoption of eoStar Route Accounting Software and Microsoft Dynamics GP.  North Star will allow us to take full advantage of the latest technology, and enable us to improve performance and grow our business.

Last year our former startups, Summit, GTG Beverages, and ThirstMonger, adopted SalesForce as their Customer Relationship Management system.  However, they still used Lotus Notes for email which did not easily integrate with SalesForce. Because of this, additional steps were required to properly record communication transactions. We want to make sure that we upgrade prior to North Star implementation to prevent the possibility of error or unnecessary steps.

Office 365 is a cloud based application which will enable you to have access to Word, Excel, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office tools from any computer where you can get a Web connection, and from virtually any device including smartphones and tablets.  The upgrade to Office 365 will also permit us to connect to additional Coca Cola resources in the future.

If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us.