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By Wendy McQuiston, Director, Microsoft Professional Services, Logicalis US

The moment your heart skips a beat? When your CEO mentions the words “merger,” “acquisition,” or “divestiture” and you know that creating a smooth transition for thousands of people from one computing environment to another will be entirely up to you.

We feel your pain – and we did something about it.  We know that migrating users into one Active Directory or Exchange instance, for example, can pose significant challenges, particularly when there’s no time for downtime.  So we asked our solutions experts to develop a faster, easier migration and consolidation method – the Domain Flip Over solution – that is substantially less painful and burdensome for the IT department undergoing these kinds of transitions.

Because of our deep expertise in the Microsoft stack, we were able to develop a very consultative solution backed by automated tooling that is completely based on your business requirements and the outcomes that are most important to you and your organization. If, for example, your company has merged with another and the task is to migrate users from both organizations to Exchange Online, we can move them all at once, we can move them by departments or by site locations – whatever works best for your organization.

By reducing the complexity of the migration and the manual effort involved, this solution is particularly helpful to even the largest enterprise customers in getting through what would otherwise be a very long and arduous process more quickly, with a considerably reduced impact to the user community and, by extension, to the organization’s productivity. And because we have built in an effective rollback strategy, we’re also able to reduce the risk of downtime and errors, giving you a faster and more reliable time-to-value.

The methodology used to complete a software migration, particularly during a notable change like a merger, acquisition or divestiture, will have a sizable impact on your project’s timeline and cost, as well as your organization’s overall perception of the migration’s effectiveness.  Before determining whether to use a custom solution like Logicalis’ Domain Flip Over or a more traditional method, ask yourself the following four key questions.

Is there a size limitation?

Knowing what limitations may exist in number of users or number of workstations is a critical up-front first question. Because the Logicalis Domain Flip Over solution handles migrations of both users and their workstations with a unique cutover method rather than a series of events, it fits any customer size from 100 users to tens of thousands of users. This is an especially important consideration for enterprise customers undergoing a merger or acquisition where the number of users is expected to spike dramatically.

Does the solution have a rollback option?

If you’re like most CIOs, you’ll want to have a fallback option “in case something goes wrong.” With this in mind, Logicalis’ solution architects designed the Domain Flip Over solution with an important rollback feature that is both safe and simplistic. Because the solution allows Logicalis to move user profiles while maintaining their old profiles in the same domain, rolling back to the previous solution is as easy as having users log out of the new solution and log back into the old domain.  Because it’s automated with no manual intervention needed, rollbacks can happen quickly and securely, Logicalis can comfortably test new domains before cutting over, and you can sleep soundly at night knowing there’s a fall-back option during the transition period.

How flexible is the solution?

Traditionally, migrations have adhered to a rigid process, something which has caused untold headaches for IT pros along the way. Most IT pros will admit, they’d love to have the flexibility to plan migrations in the way that makes the most sense for their individual businesses, something Logicalis designed into its Domain Flip Over solution.  Imagine, for example, being able to migrate all users from two organizations at the same time, moving select business units together, or moving groups of users on a department-by-department basis. Find out up front if you’ll be able to plan moves in the way that works best for your organization.

Is there a way to reduce the cost?

Traditionally, no.  But when things are automated and highly scripted, you can reduce cost, risk and time-to-value. Depending on the project’s timeline, you can expect at least a 20 percent reduction in costs with Domain Flip Over versus more traditional migration methods.

 

Want to learn more? Ever wish someone else could manage your Microsoft Exchange? Find out how a managed services solution can help you get entirely out of the business of supporting email. See how Microsoft’s Office 365 can put cloud computing to work for your organization, then learn more about the relationship between Microsoft and Logicalis, a Gold Cloud Platform and Gold Cloud Productivity partner here: http://ow.ly/1LvB309TX9C.