After nearly a decade of specialization in messaging and messaging migrations, I am retiring from messaging migrations and moving on with my career in Information Technology (IT).
My recent publication, Achieving Process Profitability, Building the IT Profit Center, (http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-28970-3) has been extremely well received, generating a large amount of interest and consequently; and quite unexpectedly I may add, a fair number of different offers. I have chosen to pursue one of those offers and focus my energies on business process automation. I would like to thank this community for all of the support and collaboration that it has encouraged over the years and as my own way of saying thanks to the community at large, I have created freeemailmigrations.com, http://www.freeemailmigrations.com, a website that encapsulates all of the knowledge and tools about email migration that I have acquired and built over the years. It's not all up there yet because I have thousands of documents to sort through, but the essentials are there. The particular reasons I am retiring from messaging and messaging migrations are many, but were solidified by a recent discussion on this list involving Microsoft's MVP program. I came to realize that the recent discussion involved essentially the same issues and individuals from six or seven years ago and I figure that any time you find yourself rehashing the exact same issues with the exact same people as six or seven years ago, it is probably about time to find a new line of work...so I did. For those with a continuing interest in my views on Microsoft's MVP program and the flawed, vendor-centric nature of IT, I encourage you to check out the new home of the IT Ethics Newsletter, http://www.itethicsnewsletter.com. This newsletter focuses on practical ethical issues within IT and; in particular, the co-opting of the IT educational system and definition of an IT professional by vendors as well as the impending regulatory doom that is just over the horizon. For all of my public and private supporters both on and off the list over the years, I offer my many thanks and best wishes in all of your future endeavors. And for all of my detractors and the inevitable "good riddance" replies...well...again, I offer you my best wishes in all of your future endeavors. Farewell, Gregory J. Deckler P.S. My final email migration was completed over the Valentine's Day weekend in the beatiful city of Glendale, AZ. I had the great pleasure of working with an extremely bright and talented IT staff in completing the migration of roughly 2,000 mailboxes from GroupWise 5.5 to Microsoft Exchange 2000. I spent 4 days consulting, configuring the migration environment and installing and configuring Rocket. Subsequently, we began the email migration at 5:00 PM on Friday the 13th. Prep work was completed by 10:00 PM. Prep work consisted of turning off virus-checking software, backup routines, resetting GroupWise mailbox passwords and setting proxy access rights for GroupWise users. We used GBMT for this although one of these days maybe I'll get around to rewriting that horrid little tool. Migrations began at 10:00 PM and ran unattended until about 9:00 AM the next morning. 10 GroupWise PO's spread over a WAN were involved and all were migrated to a single Exchange 2000 server ending up with about a 71 GB mailbox store. Cleanup was completed by about 3:00 PM on Saturday the 14th. It was a "light switch" migration of about 2,000 mailboxes and resources (about 60 GB of email data) utilizing three Rocket migration workstations. Now, they did have some issues, but it was with Exchange itself, not the migration. Their Exchange Information Store service kept crashing. To make a long story short, I quickly helped them determine that it was their anti-virus program e-safe. I explained that I'm not a big fan of anti-virus services on Exchange servers themselves, I just see it as overkill and it tends to cause more problems than it solves. However, they weren't too pleased regardless because their position was that their product, e-Safe, was Certified by Microsoft to work with Exchange 2000 and therefore shouldn't be causing these kinds of problems. Just to clarify, that was the point they brought up, not I. So don't get your panties all in a bunch. Of course, my response was that certifications from Microsoft, either software or otherwise, are absolutely meaningless. I realize that this might offend some people out there, but it's the honest truth and if you can't handle it you are not being objective about the matter. Anyhoo, this last email migration is pretty typical of the results one can expect using Rocket. Users arrived back to work on Tuesday and utilized our new tool, Spark, to convert their personal GroupWise NAB information. Spark is a far, far better tool than AddressMagic or other, similar tools and is now available for free as well. So don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on Wingra, CompuSven, AddressMagic, consultants and the like. Everything you need for a successful email migration of 50 seats or 50,000 seats is all there on freeemailmigrations.com. Although I never had a chance to test larger "light switch" migrations, one could easily perform a "light switch" migration of 5,000-10,000 mailboxes or more using Rocket over a three-day weekend and still get plenty of sleep. Just fire up Rocket and let it go. I have completed a number of 10,000-20,000 seat migrations and larger using Rocket, but that size of an organization generally opts for more of a coexistence period due to client and workstation deployment limitations. These guys out in Glendale had their act together and were able to deploy Outlook and remove the legacy GroupWise client without touching any workstations. And all of the tools and knowledge used to complete this successful email migration and many, many others are now available for free at freeemailmigrations.com. I encourage you to put them to good use. _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=exchange&text_mode=&lang=english To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
