How Do Mere Mortals Do It?

Last month we upgraded our email from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 and SharePoint from 2007 to 2010. What should have been a straight-forward experience turned into 8 – 12 hours of pain.

 In the spirit of “eating our own dog food”, Harvard Partners uses Software as a Service (SaaS) or the Cloud for almost all our server-based needs (email, SharePoint, VOiP phone system, etc.) We are a small company and believe in focusing on our clients and our business, rather than our data center. SaaS provides enterprise benefits (high availability, disaster recovery, BlackBerry, ActiveSync, integration, etc.) with little to no administrative time on our part (or so we thought).

Most of the problem came from our vendor. We utilize one of the leading hosted email, SharePoint, etc. vendors in the world. Their products, reliability, service, and costs have been outstanding. So, what went wrong with our migration?

1. The vendor had us create new email accounts in an Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 environment. This required us to migrate administrative settings (server-based) from one account to another. They had a wizard to help us, but it was only 80% effective.


2. Once our accounts were created in the 2010 environment, we notified the vendor and they began a move of the data from 2007 to 2010. We thought this was the beginning of a migration, but it was really a mock migration to make sure they got things correct.


3. With the mock migration behind us, we were required to change our DNS records to have our email point to the 2010 Exchange environment rather than the 2007 environment. With any DNS change, there is the obligatory 72 hour waiting period.


4. With that done and tested (we are still doing all this work and testing) they then moved our mail (for real). Now, they claim we will not lose any mail during this process. They know when the mail migration starts and when it ends. For whatever reason, the smaller mailboxes moved first. This meant while the larger mailboxes were moving, email for the smaller mailboxes was still going into Exchange 2007. Oops!


5. With the completion of the mail moves, we then had to create new Outlook profiles to point to the Exchange 2010 environment. If you have never done this before, creating a new Outlook profile means you have all new Outlook settings and things like memorized email addresses are gone. Note to self: create an Outlook contact for every new email address you encounter.


6. We are now hours into this process and we think we can now rest easy. Wrong!


7. Time to delete and reinstall BlackBerry and ActiveSync devices. Yes, eliminate the old account and enter a new account.


8. Now, on to SharePoint.


9. The vendor has us create accounts in a SharePoint 2010 environment. Not a big deal.


10. Then we find out the vendor does not migrate content. You must figure out a way to do that yourself. BTW, there are server-based tools that can do the migration.


11. So, we mount the old and new SharePoint sites as a WebDAV drive and copy the files. As the files and directories are transferred they lose their modified date and are given the current date. For us, this is a nightmare. Document dates are part of our “document management” strategy. The vendor had no sympathy for this issue. They did not understand why it was important.


12. The vendor says there is no way to avoid this. We do some research and find someone has written a script that does this correctly. It is a bit buggy, but it gets the job done. We gave the script to the vendor and recommend they clean and tighten it up for their other clients.


13. Now, we think we can rest easy. Not!


14. Moving documents in SharePoint via WebDAV does not move web/wiki pages you create. We still have no clue how you systematically move those, so we recreated them and used cut and paste within each web page to migrate the content.

Most of you who read this have IT departments with Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint gurus who make this look simple. I want you to send each of them a thank you email for all the work they do and you DON’T have to do.

As far as our email vendor, we are still using them. They claim Microsoft makes it too hard. We reference corporate migrations. You leave on a Friday on Exchange 2007 and return on Monday on Exchange 2010. No problem. It didn’t resonate.

The title of this post is “How do mere mortals do it,” and I need to question why this must be so hard? I am sure Google does email upgrades and I know their users don’t even notice. I think about non-IT people who want to use Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry, and SharePoint and wonder how they get through something like this. Do they really know what an MX record is? How familiar must they be with BlackBerry Enterprise Activation?

If SaaS and Cloud are going to win (and we think it should), it needs to be transparent to the user and more reliable than hosting your own solution. Saas and Cloud vendors must recognize this reality and make the investment necessary to achieve that goal.

Consumers of these services (us) must make our voice heard and let the vendors know this is unacceptable and we will move to another vendor thus “voting with our dollars.”

This is one of those areas where I feel we are moving backwards.