You asked for it. We built it.

MigrationWiz®, the industry’s leading cloud-based migration solution, now allows multiple team members to collaborate on individual migration projects through newly released capabilities called Project Sharing.

Building off the momentum from Microsoft Inspire this past July, Project Sharing within MigrationWiz provides IT Service Providers (ITSPs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with unprecedented insight and visibility into Workgroup affiliations, license consumption, in-progress migrations, completed projects, as well as detailed enterprise auditing and reporting.

“When we demoed Project Sharing at Inspire, our customers were really happy to see the added collaboration capacities,” said Mark Kirstein, VP, Products at BitTitan. “For the first time, colleagues can work together for the same customer – and on the same project – without needing to share credentials or having to complete a migration project on one’s own. As one of our most popular requests from SMBs and enterprises, alike, Project Sharing empowers our customers to scale easily, quickly and securely.”

MigrationWiz is the only 100% cloud-based solution on the market capable of migrating mail, documents, personal archives, public folders, and cloud storage from any Source to any Destination – all as one tool, with one user interface. ITSPs and MSPs can migrate anytime from anywhere. With the implementation of Project Sharing, Agents in the same Workgroup can coordinate on the same project – regardless of whether they’re in Denver or New Delhi.

Project Sharing increases efficiency and productivity while streamlining the entire migration experience for both IT professionals and end users. While many ITSPs and MSPs work in silos, Project Sharing fosters teamwork so MigrationWiz users can see:

• All the Workgroups to which a user belongs.
• Every customer that has a MigrationWiz project associated with it.
• A list of all MigrationWiz projects inside the respective Workgroup, even if the project was not created by that individual MigrationWiz user.
• Whether or not a particular Workgroup has licenses associated with it.
• The number of licenses associated with that Workgroup.

Head over to the Product Announcements page for more info, and check out our KB article, Project Sharing in MigrationWiz, via the BitTitan Help Center.

Have ideas for other feature additions to MigrationWiz? Feel free to Contact Us.

As always, happy migrating!

The post Migration Collaboration: Project Sharing For MigrationWiz is Here appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

This post has good news and bad news. Let’s get the bad out of the way first.

Microsoft is raising the commercial price of its perpetually-licensed Office 2019 suite. A 10 percent increase, to be exact, that will take effect October 1. On-prem Office 2019 isn’t the only instance of the jump in price, either. Windows Server 2019 and productivity servers including Exchange, SharePoint and Project Server costs will also climb 10 percent, as will Client Access Licenses (CALs) that enable personal computers to connect and access information on Microsoft servers, and Enterprise CAL and Core CAL suites.

Price also isn’t the only change coming from this announcement. Office’s typical support lifecycle of five years mainstream support, five years extended has been shortened to only two years of extended for Office 2019. In addition, Microsoft will only support Office 2019 on Windows 10, not Windows 7.

Official messaging from Microsoft paints the price hike as a way to “create more consistency and transparency across purchasing channels.” Others in the industry, including Microsoft Directions Research VP Wes Miller, note the (not so) subtle push from on-prem, perpetually-licensed options to a cloud-based subscription model like Office or Microsoft 365.

Microsoft also benefits from a lack of serious competition in the productivity suite arena. Google is a distant second, with Office 365 adoption and growth rates outpacing G Suite. Microsoft is the 800-lb gorilla in this space. They aren’t losing customers anytime soon. And price hike here doesn’t push people towards a different vendor – just a different plan.

As Miller mentioned above, the price increases from Microsoft are meant to make cloud skeptics and organizations with large on-premises footprints take another look at moving to the cloud. Turns out, that push could be good news for you, their trusted managed service provider.

Never a Better Time to Migrate

Even for your customers who cling to their on-prem infrastructure, the writing is on the wall: at least some of their workloads should be transitioned to the cloud. This price hike from Microsoft represents an externally influenced opportunity to approach heavy on-prem customers with a thorough, well-documented migration plan designed to modernize their business and save money in the process.

A couple benefits emerge straight away here. For starters, you look like experts holding a crystal ball: the exact reason these businesses pay for your services. You’ve spotted something down the road that will cost them more and you’re coming with a solution that will save them money, not to mention the scalability and flexibility they will get by moving their infrastructure to the cloud. They know they’ll have to move at some point. Make the case there’s never been a better time than now.

It’s also good news for your business: migrations are a significant source of project-based revenue with better-than-average margins. With a tool like MigrationWiz, you can help your customers save money by moving to the cloud while bundling services around the Office 365 subscription sale to generate more revenue for your MSP.

Maximize Revenue with the User Migration Bundle

In order to really save your customers money from rising on-prem Office costs, you need to be conscious of the price tag on the migration project itself. If it’s too high, your customers won’t bite on the move and simply eat higher Office 2019 costs, which doesn’t equate to more money in your pocket. Additionally, you as the service provider have a vested interest in making sure the migration project goes smoothly. If it doesn’t you, you face financial losses through additional time and support on the project, plus losses in human capital if you botch the project and lose customer emails, data, etc. That’s why choosing a trusted solution for this project is critical – one that will ensure all your customers’ data makes it to the cloud, and one that allows you the greatest margins per user.

BitTitan’s MigrationWiz checks both these boxes. Our User Migration Bundle (UMB) is a single license that offers the ability to move a user’s mailbox, documents, and personal archives from Source to Destination anytime during a 12-month period for $15 flat. This allows you the option of one big migration project in which you move everything, or a phased approach based on type of workload (mail v. documents), management level (C-suite v. entry-level accounts), or other factors that make the most business sense. For most customers, you’ll need to move more than just their mailbox. Why buy multiple licenses and decrease your margins when you can get an all-inclusive license AND use the industry’s leading cloud migration tool?

Besides up-front licensing costs, the other way to maximize revenue is simply to spend less time on the project. A UMB license also includes DeploymentPro, BitTitan’s automatic Outlook configuration tool, to help your team save a significant amount of time and effort flipping Outlook profiles post-migration. Not only can you install via Group Policy and guide users through configuration remotely, it also enables you to track customers through installation and configuration. No more manual set-ups or “every user for themselves.” And no more surprise post-migration labor costs for your techs.

Savvy MSPs will see this change from Microsoft as an opportunity to approach their customers with a sound cloud migration strategy. Contact Us today or visit our on-demand webinar library to learn more about MigrationWiz can help you transition your customer’s workloads to the cloud and increase your profitability in the process.

The post How Office 2019 Price Hikes Open the Door for Office 365 Migrations appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

This is the seventh installment in a new series on the BitTitan blog, “The Complete MSP,” built to help IT professionals stay ahead of the Azure curve and accelerate the evolution of your customers’ solutions.  In previous posts, we covered the growing professional and managed services opportunity around Azure (“Blue Gold: The Azure Gold Rush and How to Cash In”) as well as best security practices (“Azure Security: Five Planning Tips For New Environments“). Today, we look at broader principles for measuring service delivery costs and benchmarking performance. See all posts in the series here.

It’s about time.

You’ll hear service delivery “experts” exclaim that you should never bill services by the hour, especially when pricing and invoicing projects. And it’s good advice! When you bill by the project, any improvements that decrease time to completion ultimately increase your profitability. You are paid the same but use less time.

It’s all about time.

How Long Anything Really Takes

Service executives have reinvented this particular wheel a million times over the years. You set out to price a project. The central question you inevitably ask is “how long does this take?” and apply answers to each task in each phase of the project. When you’re done, you total the time and price accordingly.

Seems simple enough, but the challenge is how do you figure out how long each task takes? You could estimate that each task “should” take so long, but that means your pricing is a guess. Pricing is not something you want to be guessing about. Guessing wrong could cost you big time.

Calculating Costs

Want to know the difference between a good service organization and a great one? The great one knows its costs.

Sear that into your mind: know your costs. The biggest expense in any service organization is often people themselves. Service delivery experts talk about the fully burdened cost of a technician’s hour. That’s not just their salary. It includes their benefits, the cost of their tools, their training, their transport, and other direct costs plus an attributed portion of the rent on space, electric bill, mobile device costs, and anything else that can be specifically assigned to that technician. This tells you what an hour REALLY costs. Then, divide by the percentage of their hours that is actually billable to arrive at what should be their hourly rate.

Task Duration

Now that you know your fully burdened cost, it’s time to figure out how many hours it takes to perform each task.

Here again, you have the data available to you, but again you may not be collecting it. You can know when a technician starts a task, and when they complete that task. All you need to do is to have them record it. Enter it into your system. Over a period of time, you will have collected the start and stop times for each task that is performed. If your tasks are well-defined, you can subtract the stop time from the start time for each instance of a given task to arrive at the actual duration of that event. Take the average of all the durations for each task and you arrive at how much time it takes to complete each task on average.

Benchmarking

We began this exercise to determine how long each task we perform takes. From there, we can multiply by our technician’s calculated hourly rate, determined by adding a desired profit margin to their fully burdened cost of an hour, to arrive at what to charge for each task and ensure we’re profitable.

But wait, there’s more!

Now that you have the duration of each instance of each task performed, you can start to perform some really interesting comparisons! You can, for example, compare each instance to the average. This process is called benchmarking. Group your service instances by which technician performed them and calculate an average for each technician. By comparing each technician’s average against the overall average, you can empirically report on which technician is most efficient, which tasks they may be excel in, and ultimately how it makes the most sense to organize your team.

We’re not finished.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, explains that the fact that something is being observed and measured affects the thing being observed and measured. You can put this to use for you.

Take that stack ranking we just produced showing who performs their tasks most efficiently down to least efficiently. Post it where all your technicians can see it. Update it regularly. Celebrate the top performers.

Then watch the numbers change.

Some, if not all, of your technicians will not like being lower down on that chart. Those who are concerned by it will find ways to become more efficient. You’ll actually see their performance rise in the data. This is the true value of benchmarking: a process to help you create real improvement in your team.

MSPComplete

Benchmarking is one of the great strengths supported by MSPComplete. Peter Drucker’s famous observation that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and you can’t improve it” rings true in service delivery every time. Armed with MSPComplete, you can measure what you most need to manage, and improve it constantly.

The post How to Benchmark Performance and Identify Opportunities for Improvement appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

This is the eighth installment in a new series on the BitTitan blog, “The Complete MSP,” built to help IT professionals stay ahead of the Azure curve and accelerate the evolution of your customers’ solutions.  In previous posts, we covered the growing professional and managed services opportunity around Azure (“Blue Gold: The Azure Gold Rush and How to Cash In”) as well as best security practices (“Azure Security: Five Planning Tips For New Environments“). See all posts in the series here.

Are you so focused on protecting “big data” that you don’t even notice when the high-value “small data” slips away?

It happens quietly. That fantastic engineer who had every IP address in the data center memorized and knew every configuration setting on every device? Yeah…great guy. But he just quit.

That superb manager whose teams always fired on all cylinders because she kept them disciplined in the proper procedures to get everything done? She went to another company.

When key people leave, they take operational knowledge with them: how things get done, how to fix things that break, how to respond to emergencies, etc. Oftentimes, we don’t realize the value of this knowledge until it’s too late. Suddenly, things start to break, or project timelines slip. When people have questions, they don’t know who to ask. When new people are hired, they may sit idle for weeks until somebody properly trains and onboards them.

Having a disciplined documentation strategy will bode well for both the MSP business itself and service delivery to customers. Here’s how MSPComplete from BitTitan can help.

Preserving Processes

While BitTitan Automated Runbooks increase efficiency in every digital system, they also provide an excellent platform for preserving and protecting corporate knowledge:

Configuration Information: As new servers, storage, switches, routers, even desktops, laptops and other client devices are added to your network, their IP addresses and configuration settings are recorded in the runbook. If anyone ever needs to restore a device and needs configuration information, there’s one source of truth for them to turn to. The runbook.

Workflow: A system consists of more than just digital devices. People are also integral to most systems. When we identify tasks that need to be performed periodically in a specific standard sequence, that becomes a workflow that can be tracked by a runbook. The runbook then contains every task or step that must be executed for the workflow to be performed. When new employees join, the runbook can become the tool they need to learn how to do their job.

Wizards: Users often request support to get things done on their own client devices. Just as software products and platforms provide wizards to automate their installation and other functions, the runbook can provide users with wizards that walk them through many common and some not-so-common activities.

The Quest for Consistency

There’s a larger shift needed away from “there’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over” to a scalable, repeatable model built around a single standard of success. And you already have those processes within your organization – the problem is, they are scattered amongst your people and probably not consistently followed.

No longer does the solution for consistency have to lie solely in training. Your runbook can guide your people through each process as it looks when it’s done properly. This dramatically increases the frequency of getting things right the first time which increases employee satisfaction while reducing costs and driving efficiency.

Leveraging Runbooks as the Best Place to Document Everything

The BitTitan Runbook Library gives you a tremendous jump start on creating your own comprehensive runbooks. Just browsing through the library will fire off great ideas for you. MSPComplete was designed to be the ideal toolset for managing services. Those services may be provided by digital systems, or by human beings, or better yet – a combination of both. By turning your corporate knowledge into a consistent, actionable runbook that gives everyone the blueprints for success and ensures your end customers receive the best managed service experience from your team. Want to learn more about MSPComplete? Reach out today!

The post Documenting the Details with Automated Runbooks appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Over ten years ago when the cloud was still in its infancy, I made the prediction that it would become increasingly difficult to manage.

While the cloud has fulfilled many promises, it’s also created new problems. Today’s IT professionals and service providers run the risk of Cloud Click Fatigue Syndrome – the result of dozens of interfaces and hundreds of pages, forms, and steps necessary to manage the cloud and deliver IT services.

That’s why we created MSPComplete – a solution built to help IT professionals manage activities, not objects, and create repeatable activation, deployment, and support services for SaaS.

Watch the video below or contact us today to learn more about how to avoid Cloud Click Fatigue Syndrome!

The post MSPComplete: The Cure for Cloud Click Fatigue Syndrome appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Register now for our upcoming webinar: Checklist for Successful OneDrive to OneDrive Migrations

Join us Tuesday, September 25th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific as Technical Sales Specialist Tanner Strobel walks through best practices for a OneDrive to OneDrive move, including a migration checklist to ensure success with your next project.

According to a recent Spiceworks survey, OneDrive is now the most commonly used cloud storage service in the workplace, ahead of other solutions like Google Drive, Box, and Apple Cloud. And as we see both OneDrive usage and tenant to tenant migration scenarios increase, understanding how to migrate between OneDrive instances will win you more business down the road.

In addition, BitTitan recently debuted a new technical update for MigrationWiz specific to OneDrive migrations, greatly improving throughput while lifting item and file size restrictions.

Don’t leave documents behind. Move more than just mail with MigrationWiz.

The post Webinar Alert: OneDrive to OneDrive Migration Tips appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Your customer has options when it comes to productivity suites and cloud providers. Your migration solution should be able to support them all.

MigrationWiz offers the industry’s most extensive roster of Sources and Destinations, including support for migrations heading to and moving off of G Suite. In the video below, BitTitan Senior Technical Sales Specialist and Microsoft MVP Kelsey Epps walks through a short demo of an Office 365 to G Suite migration. If you have a project like this on the horizon, check out our complete guide in the BitTitan Knowledge Base.

Moving more than just mail? Learn how you can increase project revenue and margins through our User Migration Bundle – a single per-user license enabling you to move mailboxes, documents, and personal archives for up to 12 months.

The post Video: Migrating to G Suite From Office 365 appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

MSPComplete is the future of IT service delivery and the cure for Cloud Click Fatigue Syndrome. Watch a quick five-minute demo of the platform below and consider the following: what do you want to automate? Let us know in the comments.

The post MSPComplete Demo: Automation in Action appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

This is the ninth installment in a new series on the BitTitan blog, “The Complete MSP,” built to help IT professionals stay ahead of the service provider curve and accelerate the evolution of your customers’ solutions.  In previous posts, we covered the growing professional and managed services opportunity around Azure (“Blue Gold: The Azure Gold Rush and How to Cash In”) as well as the effectiveness of automated runbooks (“Blue Magic: Wield the Power of the Runbook“). See all posts in the series here.

All you need to do to convince yourself that Office 365 represents a tremendous opportunity for you as a Managed Services Provider (MSP) is to visit https://portal.office.com. It is immediately obvious that very few customers are going to want to administer all of the complex and extensive capabilities of the platform themselves. Your best salespeople will be quick to point out to their customers that while it is possible for them to do so, there’s really no way they will get all the potential value out of Office 365 unless they engage you to help them manage the environment.

Emphasize Your Customer Value Proposition to Increase Deal Value… to YOU!

Customers who have simply signed up for Office or Microsoft 365 on the Microsoft website and attempted to deploy it themselves have discovered that it is simply too large and powerful a platform for them to attempt this alone. Many MSPs who use MSPComplete to augment their customer value proposition have been able to clearly demonstrate how much more benefit customers enjoy when they engage a competent MSP partner for their deployment projects.

Those MSPs take the time to explain to their customers the many ways in which they help them get more value by performing a variety of high-impact services, all of which are enabled by MSPComplete. These include:

Cloud-Readiness Assessment: Any substantial upgrade to systems represents a rare opportunity to rid the system of challenges, outdated software, hardware that is no longer compatible, groups containing users who are no longer there, mistaken security and rights settings, and much more. The only way these challenges are going to be changed begins with identifying them. A comprehensive assessment of the entire environment assures that every opportunity for improvement is located.

HealthCheck for Office 365: HealthCheck for Office 365, a component of MSPComplete, automates examination of all the data points that can become impediments to your successful migration to Office or Microsoft 365 so you can remotely examine and report on everything. Producing this assessment as an initial engagement serves to significantly shorten your sales cycle and impresses your customer with your attention to detail and your intention to keep their costs minimal.

Onboarding: Automated Provisioning of Office or Microsoft 365 services dramatically reduces the time it takes for you to provision and configure all cloud services for all users by automating all the related processes. You’ll even create your own automated wizards enabling users to log themselves into the new services for the first time. Instead of moving from console to console in service after service to click boxes, fill out fields, and complete the onboarding process, the Wizard will do it all for you, only stopping to ask for needed inputs.

Installations & Migrations: Users will also appreciate the ease of installation of various services when automated using MSPComplete.

Many Pre-Rollout Services: Before you can roll out Office or Microsoft 365 to your user communities there are many services which may need to be performed, including troubleshooting of restrictions, limits, rights, and authorities; configuration of the Outlook email client for each user; preparation for migration of mailboxes; setup of SharePoint Online sites and automations; public folder migrations, and so much more. Many of these are accomplished using “out-of-the-box” automation that come with MSPComplete.

Preparing for the Future: The initial conversion and migration to Office or Microsoft 365 is not the end-point. In fact, it is very much the beginning. Going forward, new users will continue to be added, new applications will be added, and many other changes will be required.

Your Intellectual Property: The automations you create to perform each of these changes represent re-sellable intellectual property for you, and great facilitation for your customers.

Ongoing User Support: Many refer to them as “frequent flyers,” the most often requested services. Password resets. Disabling departed users. Rights changes. Many of these are handled by out-of-the-box automations. You’ll create your own custom automations for the rest. This will speed problem resolution for your customers while it reduces costs for you.

Your Complete MSP Toolset

Remember that your customers don’t need to know what tools you use to perform these services, and very likely don’t care. The customer’s concern is that you assure optimum delivery of all cloud services and reliable, continuous performance.

Use MSPComplete to SILENTLY augment your ability to deliver services to Office and Microsoft 365 customers, making your increased ability the marketable advantage. As you use MSPComplete you’ll innovate new automations and create new services. Focus all of your marketing on those services that are powered by MSPComplete, and enjoy your customer’s greatest appreciation of what you do for them.

The post Using MSPComplete to Manage Office, Microsoft 365 Service Delivery appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Let’s face it – moving isn’t fun. Relocating to a new home or city might be an exciting prospect, but the thought of physically transporting all of your possessions from one location to another is just the opposite. It’s time-consuming, it’s exhausting, and it’s a logistical nightmare.

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you face this all the time in the form of cloud migration projects. And the worst part is, it’s not even your stuff! It belongs to your customers. It’s mailboxes and data like documents, PSTs, and public folders, and it needs to move somewhere else, either into the cloud or between clouds.

Just like moving to a new house, MSPs have a couple options. You can try and do it all yourself. You can bribe a friend with pizza and beer who’s done a migration or two before and hope for the best. Or you can engage a moving company – a cloud migration tool – to do it for you. Here’s why that last option is the best.

When It Comes to Migrations, Time is Literally Money

While most cloud migration tools come with a per-user license cost, your margins from time-savings far outweigh that cost. If you’re smart, you’re also charging your customer a per-user cost and you’ve bundled important planning and other assessment services around this tool and the cloud subscription sale to increase revenue on the project.

A big benefit of a cloud migration solution is speed. Tools like MigrationWiz accelerate that transition, moving data as quickly as a customer’s Source environment will allow. That’s the whole point of a lift-and-shift migration: get those applications and workloads into the cloud as quickly as possible.

By enabling you to perform large migrations over the course of a single weekend, these tools limit the potential for downtime and interruption to the end user’s experience, while offering support and troubleshooting options if the project goes awry. They also come with resources like step-by-step migration guides that walk through specific Source-to-Destination scenarios. All of this equals a faster, more reliable solution for you and a seamless experience for end users.

The Real Recovered Cost: Opportunity

There’s always the question of what else you could be doing.

Migrations performed with a cloud-based tool don’t require your entire organization to manage the project. They don’t need someone to go on-prem to the customer and deploy anything locally. And they don’t require hours of labor from the whole team over the weekend. The less time (read: labor costs) you spend on this project, the greater your margin will be. In fact, according to reviews from IT professionals who have used MigrationWiz, driving internal and operational efficiencies is the top reason they decided to purchase licenses for their project.

That’s the beauty of automation at the core of these tools. A single technician can configure, execute, and manage a migration, and if you need to collaborate with other members of the team, Project Sharing is here to help.

“Still Got Boxes in the Garage?”

That’s the true test of how complete a move is, right? And just like moving to a new home, the work isn’t over after your last migration pass. That’s like the moving company unloading the truck on your front lawn. It’s not where the stuff belongs, and it means a ton of extra work for you to get settled in your new place.

BitTitan helps MSPs unpack customers in the cloud with DeploymentPro, our automated Outlook configuration tool. Included in the User Migration Bundle and deployable via Group Policy, the agent runs silently in the background to remotely flip Outlook profiles. It saves your people from in-person visits to desktops or devices to configure Outlook post-project, and ensures signatures, rules, and other pieces are in place for end users. Talk about a margin booster.

So that’s it! Next time you need to move, hire MigrationWiz. We don’t mind the heavy lifting.

The post Cloud Movers: We Like the Heavy Lifting appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Guess what? OneDrive is now the most commonly used cloud storage service in the workplace, ahead of other solutions like Google Drive, Box, and DropBox. As we see both OneDrive usage and tenant to tenant migration scenarios increase, it’s important to understand how to migrate between OneDrive instances.

That’s why the latest addition to BitTitan’s library of on-demand webinars centers around OneDrive document migrations, walking through what items we help move, pre-migration planning tips, and a full demo of a project with a look at customization features through Advanced Options.

Check out that webinar now or read about recent updates to our OneDrive connector, which lifted file size and item count restrictions previously in place and greatly increased throughput.

Got a project on the horizon? We’re happy to help.

The post On-Demand Webinar: OneDrive to OneDrive appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

While G Suite still has a lot of ground to gain against Office 365, promises of security, collaboration, and a lower price point have continued to guide customers away from Microsoft’s established productivity suite, particularly in the SMB sector. Whether G Suite is your Source or Destination, MigrationWiz is here to help. In the guide below, we walk through a mailbox migration from Office 365 to G Suite using MigrationWiz. For a complete list of migration guides, explore our Knowledge Base in the BitTitan Help Center or watch this demo video.

Prepare the Source Environment

1. Create an administrator account in Office 365 to be used for migration, or use the global admin account for the tenant.
2. Export user list to a CSV file. This can be used when bulk-adding users to your MigrationWiz project later. You can copy and paste the user list into the Source Email column in your MigrationWiz project dashboard under Add > Bulk Add. Steps: From Office 365 admin portal > Users > Active Users > Export > Continue.

Prepare the Destination Environment

1. Create users on G Suite. For assistance, see the G Suite admin help article here.
2. Grant MigrationWiz OAuth 2.0 access to G Suite, which will be used to authenticate. This is used for both mailbox and document migration projects.
   • Note: If you are migrating to multiple domains, repeat these steps for each domain.
   • G Suite as the Destination (full scopes):
     • https://mail.google.com/, https://www.google.com/m8/feeds, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.group, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.user, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive, https://sites.google.com/feeds/, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.sharing, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.basic

Prepare the Customer, Endpoint, and Licenses in MSPComplete

1. Create the customer
2. Create the Source and Destination Endpoints.
   • For the Source endpoint:
     • Click Endpoints > Add Endpoint > Enter endpoint name > For endpoint type, select Office 365.
     • Click Provide Credentials radio button, and enter the admin account credentials.
       • Note: This should be a global admin account. If creating a separate admin account for the purpose of migration, read the Office 365 section here.
   • For the Destination endpoint:
     • Click Endpoints > Add Endpoint > Enter endpoint name > For endpoint type, select G Suite / Gmail.
     • It is necessary to add ALL domains that will be migrated to. This means that if there are users in one project with domain names Sourcedomain.com and Destinationdomain.com, then it is important to ensure that both of these are added under Your Domains, when creating the endpoints. When you add a domain, you need to click the “+” button.
     • Enter Administrative email address.
       • Note: This is the account that has admin access level to the Google admin portal.
3. Purchase licenses. We recommend that you purchase the User Migration Bundle license for this migration scenario. User Migration Bundle licenses allow you to perform multiple migrations of User mailboxes, documents, and personal archives, plus Google coexistence configuration and allows the use of DeploymentPro to perform post-migration Outlook email profile configuration.
4. Deploy DMA to users (optional). Once DMA has been deployed to users, check the Users tab in MSPComplete. This will be populated with the user accounts that have DMA installed. DMA can be deployed by these options:
   • Via Group Policy Object (GPO): recommended because no end user interaction is required.
   • Via email.

Configure and Launch Project in MigrationWiz.

1. Watch this video to see a walk-through of the steps below.
2. Create the Mailbox Migration project.
   • Create the Mailbox Migration project > Select the customer > Select the Source endpoint > Select the Destination endpoint.
3. Add the accounts (also referred to as items) that will be migrated to the project.
4. Set the Project Advanced Options.
   • The following options are most valuable for this migration scenario:
     • Set to use impersonation at the Source. Checkmark the Use impersonation at Source box.
     • If this is a large migration project, then the value for Maximum concurrent migrations, under the Performance section, can be set to a very high value, e.g., 250. If using impersonation, there is no limit for concurrent cloud to cloud migrations.
   • Add folder mapping: FolderMapping=”^INBOX/->” under Support/Support options. This will map folders to the root label on the Destination mailboxes, rather than under inbox/label name.
5. Run Verify Credentials.
6. Notify users that a migration is occurring. Send email to all users telling them the time and date of the migration.
7. Pre-Stage pass: Select the users > Click the Start button from the top, and select Pre-Stage Migration > Under the Migration Scheduling section, from the drop-down list, select 90 days ago > Click Start Migration.
8. MX Record Cutover. Change over MX records on the DNS provider’s portal. Also include the AutoDiscover (CName) setting.
9. Send email to end users to let them know what to expect for their Outlook profile reconfiguration.
10. Full (Delta) pass: Select the users > Click the Start button from the top, select Full Migration > Click Start Migration.
11. Run Retry Errors.
12. Look through the user list and click any red “failed migration” errors. Review information and act accordingly.
13. If problems persist, contact Support.
14. If users will be using Microsoft Outlook with G Suite, they will need to follow the instructions here, to download and install G Suite Sync for Outlook and create a new Outlook profile that connects to G Suite.
15. To receive project statistics via email, click the pie chart icon in the MigrationWiz dashboard.

Moving more than just mail? Check out the User Migration Bundle – a single 12-month license to move mailboxes, documents, archives, and automatically configure Outlook profiles for $15/user.

The post Migration Guide: Office 365 to G Suite appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

You’ve heard it over and over: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the ultimate goal. The holy grail. The most important business model holding the attention of everyone in the channel.

The truth is, MRR isn’t the whole story. But why should you care and how do you integrate fee-based projects with MRR? In a new white paper from BitTitan, we dive into how MRR really works, why it’s perceived as so important, and why it’s just one piece of the revenue puzzle.

Click here to get your free copy of “Creating More Value (and Revenue) Selling Office 365.”

Besides MRR, we explore other sources of project-based revenue around Office 365, including assessment and planning strategies, provisioning and configuring subscriptions and services, as well as user education and adoption support.

Don’t leave money on the table – learn how to combine MRR with strategic projects to increase business profitability.

The post White Paper: How to Create More Value (and Revenue) Selling Office 365 appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Migration projects are inherently complex. Your migration solution should be the opposite.

MigrationWiz, the industry’s leading cloud migration solution, just got even easier to use with the introduction of WalkMe. Through carefully curated guides and step-by-step instructions, WalkMe’s in-product directions help migration project owners navigate through set up, customer creation, KB articles, and more.

New paths have also been included for MSPComplete, BitTitan’s IT services automation platform. Additional guides will be completed in the coming weeks to broaden support for specific projects. If you have suggestions, feel free to drop them into the comments below or contact us with your feedback.

Where Can I Find WalkMe?

WalkMe paths can be activated through a new button in the top navigation bar of MigrationWiz labeled “Guides.”

Choose a guide from the list or type your question into the search bar, which populates with results directly from the BitTitan Help Center. Once a guide has been selected, step-by-step instructions will now appear. You may close WalkMe guides at any time by clicking the “x” in the upper right-hand corner of the alert.

Why WalkMe?

WalkMe offers four key benefits for BitTitan customers:

• Project Guides: Whether you’re moving just a mailbox, documents, or simply creating a new customer, WalkMe provides a step-by-step experience to help users through onboarding and complicated migration scenarios.
• Shoutouts: Since MigrationWiz is a SaaS solution, we’re constantly pushing updates both big and small. Now when we release a new feature – like Project Sharing or OneDrive upgrades – a pop up will flag that update for users and provide more information about the new functionality.
• Direct Line to Help Center: Help Center links and KBs are now available directly in the product with integrated SEO.
• Solution Analysis: Through WalkMe, BitTitan Support and Product teams are now able to identify what paths users are taking through the platform, allowing us to proactively identify issues or roadblocks within the solution and make adjustments accordingly.

A seamless project execution experience remains a top priority for our entire organization and a key part of our broader vision for Customer Success. Look for future updates and additional tracks for WalkMe in the coming weeks.

Happy migrating!

The post Introducing WalkMe Guides for MigrationWiz, MSPComplete appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Every migration presents its own challenges. Through Advanced Options in MigrationWiz, we provide a robust set of customization features that allow you to modify and control many aspects of your project.

REGISTER TODAY and join us Tuesday, November 13th as BitTitan Senior Technical Sales Specialist Antonio Vargas walks through Advanced Options in MigrationWiz, highlighting features such as:

• Project Sharing for Migration Collaboration
• Folder and Recipient Mapping
• Impersonation and Delegation
• Date Range Filtering
• PowerShell SDK

Registration links are specific to regions. Sign up today and learn how to optimize your next migration!

Located in the Americas? Register here.

Located in EMEA? Register here.

Located in APAC? Register here.

The post Webinar Alert: 5 Key Uses For MigrationWiz Advanced Options appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Zombie uprisings, bat swarms, and creaky door hinges may haunt your nightmares around Halloween season. The thought of a migration project gone awry? That’s a scary prospect for IT service providers year-round.

While a transition to the cloud may seem easy in theory, migrations are far more difficult and detailed than many think. The reality? Moving to the cloud is a time-consuming, highly technical process that is often executed poorly.

Regardless of organization headcount or size of migration, there are several planning and pre-migration steps businesses can take to ensure a smooth transition. Here they are:

1. Take it One Step at a Time

Chances are high businesses are moving more than just email to the cloud. Public folders, archives, and documents are all coming over, too. Focusing on one workload at a time can help simplify the migration process, ensure all data is transitioned seamlessly, and easily identify errors post-migration.

2. Identify Dependencies

Today’s infrastructure is tightly woven together through integrations between email servers, CRMs, cloud directories, and more. When migrating to the cloud, consider where interdependencies exist within the network, and be ready to reconfigure those to point towards new systems post-migration.

3. Consider Cloud Hybrid Accessibility

Hybrid environments becoming the norm, not the exception. As organizations move away from on-premises, the once-simple login process for employees to access connected systems becomes more complicated. Consider making this easier for employees by creating a single master login for applications housed on different parts of the infrastructure, while also ensuring all locations sync with one another.

4. Keep Compliance Top of Mind

Compliance never ceases and security is a large barrier for many organizations when it comes to migrations. From HIPAA to FERPA, consider the entire process of the migration and ensure each step abides by preestablished legal rules and other guidelines.

5. Save or Clean Up Archives and Legacy Systems

Migrating to the cloud is a good opportunity for businesses to clean out archives, decommission legacy systems, and generally clean up infrastructure. While some documents’ use has expired, audit and/or other legal policies may require archives be kept for certain durations and thus moved to the cloud. At the same time, many businesses archive data that’s not necessary to keep. Follow and understand these policies before the move to ensure the necessary documents shift to the cloud.

6. Select the Proper Cloud Provider

Between evolving business needs, hybrid environments, and larger shifts like M&A activity, it’s important data flows seamlessly from one environment to another. Different providers offer different benefits: consider what makes sense for the business, factoring in longevity, scalability, cost, integrations, location/latency, and security. Hybrid environments offer good bargaining leverage for organizations, so take advantage of it.

7. Plan, Test, and Plan Some More

There’s a strong correlation between smooth migrations and planning. Define what will be moved, when it will be moved, and notify the proper people who will be impacted by or involved with the migration. Have reasonable expectations about how long it will take to complete and set those expectations with employees, especially if any downtime is expected. Test a single instance of the migration to identify any errors early in the process; if errors are found, adjust before the actual migration project begins.

8. Expect Post-Migration Cleanup

Regardless of how smooth the transition is, there’s always some amount of reorganization that’s required post-migration. Whether it’s missing documents, misconfigured accounts, or integration errors with other systems, read migration reports and identify what is missing from the final destination to make reconfiguring as quick as possible.

Ready to get started with your next project? Register for a free BitTitan account today and start migrating!

The post 8 Ways to Avoid Migration Nightmares appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

When Microsoft first introduced their Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in April 2009, partners were alarmed. They feared these new online versions of Microsoft Office would cannibalize their software sales, not to mention the servers those software products ran on.

They were right.

Far from the few web-based apps offered in the original BPOS platform, Office 365 has grown to be a remarkably robust suite of services that go far beyond just Microsoft Office.

Microsoft 365 effectively extends the services of Office 365 to include tools for the complete management of the users’ operating system, management of their mobile devices, and management of effective security for the entire ensemble.

In the latest white paper from BitTitan, we dive into Microsoft 365 and how MSPs can design, package, and deliver services to increase your bottom line.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY OF THE MICROSOFT 365 WHITE PAPER

The post White Paper: Why MSPs Prefer Microsoft 365 over Office 365 appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

For the third year in a row, MSPComplete has been honored by CRN through their annual Tech Innovator award program, highlighting standout hardware and software solutions available in the channel. MSPComplete was selected as a finalist in the “Best MSP Technology” category after being selected as the overall winner of “Best MSP Software” in 2017. This year’s winners will be featured in the December print issue of CRN, as well as online at CRN.com and through the CRN app.

In compiling the 2018 Tech Innovator Award list, CRN editors evaluated 300 products across 34 technology categories using several criteria, including technological advancements, uniqueness of features, and potential to help solution providers solve end users’ IT challenges.

Learn more about our award-winning IT services delivery platform.

MSPComplete helps IT professionals automate business outcomes by driving repeatable, scalable, and efficient IT service delivery processes with one-click automation. Catch a closer look at how MSPComplete works and get started for free today. 

The post MSPComplete Highlighted by CRN as Top MSP Software Solution appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

One way MigrationWiz differentiates itself from third-party alternatives or manual methods is its robust set of Advanced Options, enabling IT professionals to fine-tune elements of their migration projects for higher speeds and better alignment with business goals. Through these customization capabilities, we ensure a more efficient migration for service providers and a smooth transition for end users.

Our latest webinar, 5 Key Uses for MigrationWiz Advanced Options, is now available through our on-demand webinar library.

In this session, BitTitan Partner Technical Strategist and Microsoft Certified Solutions Master António Vargas walks through a handful of the top Advanced Options including:

• Project Sharing for Migration Collaboration
• Folder and Recipient Mapping
• Impersonation and Delegation
• Date Range Filtering
• MigrationWiz PowerShell SDK

Got a project on the horizon? We’re happy to help.

The post On-Demand Webinar: 5 Key Uses for MigrationWiz Advanced Options appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Raise your hand if the office crowd thins out as the New Year approaches.

A normally unproductive block for most organizations outside of retail, the end of December is a wonderful time for one group in particular: IT teams. With many workers out of the office and offline over the holidays, IT has the opportunity to tackle larger projects without normal risks like downtime or interruption for end users. One of the projects that falls into that category? Migrations.

Source Speed and User Downtime

Speed and downtime are two elements of a migration project that greatly impact its overall success. Executing a project over winter break allows you to maximize speed and minimize potential downtime for end users.

When we talk migration speeds, the limiting factor is the end user’s Source environment. With workers offline, bandwidth at the Source is maximized, allowing for maximum data migration speeds to expedite the project. MigrationWiz can easily handle up to 250 concurrent migrations, meaning your data is transferred over in a matter of days, not weeks, and everyone makes it to the Destination before the New Year.

Performing a migration over winter break also gives project owners more time to troubleshoot and solve issues that would normally result in extended downtime or interruption and cause greater business losses.

Hey EDU – We’re Talking to You!

Need to move thousands of college kids off a legacy email system? Good luck finding a better time than December. As students make their way home for mid-semester break, IT teams can take advantage of empty campuses and offline students to make much needed upgrades to critical systems. For some, that includes a data migration to a new environment. In addition, BitTitan offers special discounts for education and nonprofit organizations. Contact us for more information scoping those projects.

Bundling with BitTitan

For migration projects that include more than just mail, there’s no better option on the market than BitTitan’s User Migration Bundle: a single license to move mailboxes, documents, and archives for one user from Source to Destination. This provides IT teams with extra flexibility in project timeline while preserving margins. For those heading to Office 365, a UMB license also comes with DeploymentPro, an automated Outlook configuration tool that enables IT to set up profiles remotely. No more individual desktop visits or post-migration cleanup. And with a 100% SaaS deployment, you don’t have to be in the office at the end of December, either.

The post Bundle Up for the Holidays with BitTitan appeared first on Bits & Bytes.