BitTitan’s webinar series is back this month with a must-see segment covering Teams migration projects!

Following the release of Teams migration capabilities to MigrationWiz earlier this year, BitTitan experts will be walking through planning best practices, project configuration, and early pitfalls we’ve seen with this new project type. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how to perform these migrations and new knowledge to expand services on their next tenant-to-tenant project.

See below for your custom link based on region – and tell your IT peers about this opportunity!

Located in the Americas? Register here.

Located in EMEA? Register here.

Located in APAC? Register here.

The post Webinar Alert! Smart Strategies for Teams Migrations appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan, the developer of MigrationWiz and global leader in managed services automation, today announced it is enhancing its longstanding relationship with Ingram Micro, the world’s largest distributor of technology and cloud services, by launching an exclusive global partner offer to accelerate cloud adoption for partner customers. With the new offer, qualified Ingram Micro partners can receive free User Migration Bundle licenses for three upcoming migration projects for a total of 50 free MigrationWiz licenses.

BitTitan has achieved over 60 percent revenue growth in its business with Ingram Micro in the first half of 2019 and the two organizations continue working together to enable IT professionals to scale cloud services internationally. The User Migration Bundle license is valid for one year to migrate mailbox, document and personal-archive files, as well as automate Outlook profile configuration. Approved partners are those who have not yet purchased BitTitan products through Ingram Micro between January 1, 2018, and July 31, 2019. A minimum of five User Migration Bundle licenses must be purchased to receive up to 50 free licenses per an Ingram partner company across three separate purchases.

BitTitan has worked with Ingram Micro globally in the SMB space for four years. Together, BitTitan and Ingram Micro partners have moved over 200,000 mailboxes to the cloud for end users worldwide with MigrationWiz. BitTitan continues to grow throughout Ingram Micro’s partner base, providing mailbox, document, personal archive and now Microsoft Teams migration services. To date, BitTitan’s MigrationWiz has migrated 15 million mailboxes globally to the cloud.

“We are deeply committed to providing our partners with the tools to help them build a successful cloud practice, while offering the most powerful portfolio of solutions to help them solve their customer’s problems,” said Tarik Faouzi, vice president of cloud products at Ingram Micro. “By enhancing our relationship with BitTitan, who shares our commitment to the channel, we are able to extend to our partners BitTitan’s powerful cloud-migration services to organizations around the globe.”

Opportunities for growth within the cloud-services market continue to emerge. Gartner’s February 2019 Market Guide for Cloud Office Migration Tools estimates that “by 2023, less than 20% of businesses will be substantially provisioned with on-premises collaboration and communication capabilities.”

In addition, Microsoft’s end-of-support deadline for Exchange 2010 and Windows 7 in 2020 presents an immediate opportunity for partners to facilitate upgrades and grow their business or capture new business before the end of the year.

“BitTitan is committed to ensuring our partners are equipped with the right tools to adapt to evolving cloud demands and can scale to the unique needs of global customers,” said Geeman Yip, BitTitan founder and CEO. “We are proud to work with Ingram Micro as we continue to focus on delivering cutting-edge solutions to our partners to securely migrate data and optimize the cloud experience for customers and end users worldwide.”

This press release was originally distributed via Business Wire. View that release here.

The post BitTitan and Ingram Micro Provide Enhanced Cloud-Migration Services appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan is currently testing new Hybrid Exchange Management capabilities in MigrationWiz with select partners. In this Feature Spotlight, we discuss the difficulties of current hybrid processes and the benefits of the new management features in MigrationWiz® for this scenario. Check back in the coming weeks for additional content around Hybrid Exchange Management.

For over a decade, MigrationWiz has been the go-to solution for all types of migration projects. From the early days of BPOS and mail-only moves to today’s multi-workload projects, we’re here to ensure success in the transition to a new environment.

One scenario we hadn’t addressed was the hybrid Exchange environment: the coexistence and maintenance of an Exchange Online instance alongside an on-premises Exchange Server. The reality is that many organizations turn to hybrid configurations for security and compliance concerns, specific application needs tied to the Exchange Server, or as an intermediate step to a full Exchange Online deployment. The process for establishing this environment has been less than ideal, including the hand-off from a consulting partner to the end-user organization.

Today, BitTitan® unveiled new management capabilities in MigrationWiz that leverages Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) to support the configuration and ongoing maintenance of a hybrid Exchange environment. Currently in beta with select partners, Hybrid Exchange Management will be generally available later this year.

In this Feature Spotlight, we walk through the difficulties in establishing a hybrid environment today; how MigrationWiz redefines the approach to this configuration; and the benefits of engaging BitTitan for future hybrid scenarios.

Pain Points: Hybrid Exchange Management Today

Hybrid setups aren’t new. Savvy IT admins and consultants have created manual processes via a combination of spreadsheets, PowerShell scripts, and the Exchange Admin Center (EAC). Ultimately though, these processes lead to a lack of visibility and control over this configuration and tie up top-tier IT resources for extended periods of time.

Over the past year, we have worked closely with hybrid Exchange consultants to understand the biggest struggles with today’s processes. Here’s the feedback we kept hearing:

• Batch Management: Adding, removing, managing groups of users is highly manual and inefficient. The EAC UI only supports adding one migration batch at a time and provides limited batch management capabilities, such as moving a user between batches.
• Creation and Management of PowerShell Scripts: A lack of sophisticated capabilities in the EAC leads to custom scripting or adding users one batch at a time.
• Limited Status Updates: PowerShell commands to fetch information from the EAC often have a twenty-minute delay. IT needs to see live statistics about their project.
• Low Success Rate in Transition to End-User Org: Service providers and consultants often struggle when it comes time to hand off the hybrid configuration to the customer. Internal IT teams need an easier and less-manual process to manage their own migrations over the long-term.
• Expensive Resources: Because of these struggles, hybrid projects are typically sourced to tier-3 IT professionals – high labor costs that also tie up valuable personnel, made worse by the poor hand-off.

Managing Hybrid Configurations with MigrationWiz

MigrationWiz solves for many of these pain points by providing a single, unified console to manage and monitor your hybrid migration in real-time.

The biggest strength of MigrationWiz for hybrid projects is improved batch management. MigrationWiz automates the discovery of Source AD user data and CSV creation to bring users into migration batches. While the EAC only supports adding one batch at a time and offers limited ability to move users between batches, MigrationWiz can automatically import multiple batches and offers far greater functionality to manage projects before sync and cutover.

Since this automation is built into MigrationWiz, hybrid consultants can forego much of the custom scripting and spreadsheet maintenance found in today’s hybrid projects, which also helps reduce manual errors during this complex process. The result is a simpler, streamlined experience that enables a lower-tier engineer to manage and execute this project successfully.

Many of MigrationWiz features, including Action Logging and automated end user notifications, are built into this feature, too, and the steps in-product follow the same simple flow as all our other scenarios. Our Knowledge Base has been updated with Migration Guides and support documents to assist with the adoption of this new functionality.

Bottom-Line Benefits

All the research and features compiled into this scenario boil down to this:

A Simpler, Faster Experience: Fewer configuration steps, with more control, for quicker time to value.

A Reduction in Project Resources: A dedicated, lower-tier engineer can manage migrations 2-3 hours a week vs. a lengthy, on-site consulting engagement and still create a seamless turnover to end-user IT.

A Secure, Risk-Free Process: End users don’t have to provide partners with RDP or password access to the console. Automation removes the manual, error-prone steps that accompany any migration.

The result? A better solution to simplify these configurations, preserve margins, and ease the transition to the end user.

Hybrid Exchange Management will be widely available later this year and we plan to share more information, documentation, and demos as it’s finalized, including information about licensing. To learn more about this scenario, view new documentation in the BitTitan Help Center. We will be constantly updating both these pages with additional information. Check back soon!

The post Feature Spotlight: Hybrid Exchange Management with MigrationWiz appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Microsoft Ignite arrives in Orlando November 4-8^th, bringing BitTitan together with technology leaders and practitioners from around the world for four days of visionary discussions and hands-on learning.

Both the Voleer and MigrationWiz teams will be in attendance to connect with partners and technical professionals, understand their unique challenges, and share how our solutions can help solve problems today.

Where can I find the BitTitan team at Ignite 2019?

BitTitan is a Gold Sponsor of Ignite 2019 and will be exhibiting at Booth #1335. The MigrationWiz team will be on hand to discuss our recent Teams migration capabilities. The team will also provide a preview of Hybrid Exchange Management features, a new solution currently in beta with select partners.

Voleer experts will be in the booth to demo our out-of-the-box automated IT Assessments platform. This tool provides insights and data into your Office 365, MSFT Teams, and Azure environments with one click. You can streamline repetitive tasks and track security standards, all while optimizing costs and increasing productivity.

Don’t miss this session: “All-In on the Cloud”

BitTitan CEO Geeman Yip will be delivering a 20-minute presentation on Monday, November 4^th in Theater C, discussing best practices for a serverless, 100% cloud strategy. Using BitTitan as the primary use case, Geeman will outline the benefits of being “all-in on cloud” and how to transition your remaining infrastructure off-premises.

Book a meeting!

Want to have a longer conversation with our team? We’d love to chat. Follow the link below to book a meeting with our team and we can set something up.

See you in Orlando!

Book a meeting with BitTitan!

The post Event Preview: Microsoft Ignite 2019 appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

We have all been there: you work with a potential client over a few weeks through a series of meetings, telephone calls, online questionnaires, maybe a rough order of magnitude which becomes a statement of work and maybe you even gave the client a half day discovery workshop to bottom everything out into a final statement of work ready for final review and signature. You send the SOW over via email or DocuSign, awaiting the client’s signature, and turn the provisional kick-off date into a reality as you do your best to manage your professional services team bench.

Then, like the Bjork song – “it’s oh so quiet” – they do not respond to your voicemails or emails.

You think you are there. A little concerned maybe with the silence, maybe, but you assume they are mulling it over, so you crack on with other proposals and time passes, but then you get that email that throws a potential spanner in the works.

That email typically says something along the lines of:

“We need to discuss your pricing – this is too eye-watering.”

This is a common problem: discounting requests from a part of the business that probably doesn’t appreciate how important a well-run but likely challenging Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration is for the business, or the costs associated in such a migration.

Sometimes I’ve found myself giving away unpaid consulting in pre-sales and ended up doing all the work for another partner, or maybe for a migration vendor who supplies their own competing professional services. The potential partner then tries to get discounting through leveraging another potential supplier (“If you don’t offer this discount, I will have to go with X because this is just too expensive for me).

These days, to avoid this issue, I prefer to establish my potential competition up front. “If we scope this, will we get the business? Or am I competing with another bidder?” I ask in a nice, nurturing way so as not to put anyone on the defensive, of course!

It takes courage – but you only have to brave enough for a matter of seconds to ask the question. Then you just keep quiet, waiting for a response.

From personal experience, some customers can treat systems integrator partners (especially niche migration partners) with a level of disrespect, believing that they’ll only do this project once. Or they have underestimated the project budget and will ask the partner to discount with the promise of “If you discount it for us this once, we’ll make sure we keep bringing you back!” But if you give them one discount, they’ll keep asking for more and more.

Discounting needs to be avoided upfront, firstly, by building draw-down professional services time into your SOW from the get-go. This is not to build unnecessary fat into the proposal to be removed later, it is done because most projects, despite all parties working honestly toward an ideal workflow, will have unexpected delays and challenges. Understanding that, and building time into the schedule, reduces confusion and frustration later.

Secondly, and this is another part that takes courage: when discussing budget with the prospective client you should get a number in round figures from them BEFORE sending the SOW in. This gives you an idea of your budget and prepares you for discussions if you are significantly over their proposal (if you’re significantly under, you’re under-charging!). If your SOW is within this ballpark, then you must stick to your price, as they are already prepared to pay it.

However, if you submitted your SOW first without asking if they have the budget and if they are willing to spend it, then you are on your own as you left yourself open for the CFO or procurement to come back and ask for the discount, or for them to simply choose another provider.

The post Pricing Guidance: How to Navigate Office 365 Tenant Migration Discussions appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Ready to migrate Microsoft Teams?

“Smart Strategies for Teams Migrations” is now available in our on-demand webinar library.  In this broadcast, we break down the best practices and pre/post migration steps to facilitate a smooth transition of Microsoft’s popular collaboration application between Office 365 tenants.  With adoption growing, now is great time to learn about this new migration scenario so you can include in future project scopes.

View On-Demand Now!

The post On-Demand Webinar: Smart Strategies for Teams Migrations appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about new features, improvements, and bug fixes for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz Improvements

• Select multiple items with Shift-Click
  • MigrationWiz now supports Shift-Click to select / de-select multiple migration items. Simply click the first item you want to select to highlight it, then go to the last item while holding down the ‘Shift’ key, then click on the last item. This will select a block of items for action.
• Call-to-actions under Help menu now opens in a new browser tab

MigrationWiz Bug Fixes

• Fixed the previously missing filter/sort action dropdown when browser window is resized.

The post October 2019 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan Customer Stories is a new series on Bits & Bytes highlighting successful migration projects delivered by BitTitan partners around the world. To view more case studies like these, visit the Customer Stories tab on our website.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Get in touch!

Meet the Channel Partners

Coolhead Tech is a Google Cloud Partner based in Austin, TX, specializing in applications and services specific to G Suite, Chrome, and Google Cloud Platform. Since 2008, the company has been serving IT departments and channel partners in their journey to adopt, protect, and manage cloud investments. The company recently opened affiliate offices in India and the Philippines and has been named a CRN Next Gen Channel Partner three years in a row.

LunaTek Solutions is a premier provider of IT Consulting Services, Technology Solutions, and Staffing Services. Founded in 2015 by proven IT executives, their experience and expertise with leading technologies and best practices enables them to contribute a seasoned, broad-based perspective to organizations. LunaTek Solutions is proud to be labeled as one of the best modern technology partners in the U.S., working with Fortune 500 and startup companies alike, driving cloud-first initiatives, programs, and technologies, creating meaningful software solutions that overcome complex enterprise challenges, and an industry-leading provider of cloud-enabled corporate IT managed services.

In 2019, LunaTek Solutions, on behalf of their client, Prepaid Technologies, approached Coolhead Tech following the acquisition of a division of Karmic Labs. As part of the integration of the two companies, LunaTek sought Coolhead Tech’s migration expertise to consolidate users from two separate environments – Office 365 and G Suite – into a third, standalone G Suite domain. Through a close teaming agreement between the two Austin-based shops, the team delivered a tailored solution for Prepaid’s unique situation, using the BitTitan MigrationWiz solution.

Bringing Businesses Together in the Cloud

Following the acquisition, Prepaid faced a consolidation challenge: the fintech company needed to move about 50 users from their existing Office 365 tenant and about 50 users from Karmic Labs’ G Suite environment into another existing instance of G Suite.

“A big advantage for companies in migration projects like these is stakeholder participation,” said Rob Ernst, Strategy Solutions Consultant for Coolhead Tech.

Like all types of migration projects, success lies in preparation. After developing a consolidation project plan, Coolhead Tech went on-site to test migrations on important accounts, such as executive assistants, to correct any specific user issues and confirm all other users would migrate smoothly the following weekend. Another key watchpoint was ensuring settings on the Destination domain – such as eDiscovery policies – wouldn’t undo work from the migration. For Coolhead Tech, communicating migration challenges like these with end users and including them in the migration planning is non-negotiable.

“Having PrePaid’s IT Director and their local MSP taking charge of the project itself–being involved in the planning and execution–was critical to the success of consolidating these accounts into a single environment.”

Once the plan was defined and testing was complete, Coolhead Tech went ahead with the full migration, using MigrationWiz.

MigrationWiz: The Collaboration Consolidation Engine

A longtime partner of MigrationWiz, Coolhead Tech points to three main benefits of MigrationWiz: quick endpoint configuration, great product documentation, and the ability to migrate mailboxes and documents concurrently for a fast transition to the Destination.

While another popular G Suite migration tool handles a single workload at a time, MigrationWiz scales automatically based on available bandwidth and throttling limits to migrate workloads simultaneously, accelerating project timelines and limiting the possibility for downtime. As for the documentation, it’s all in the details.

“Understanding the Source accounts and how to use the migration tool helps us set expectations with end users and plan for what that Destination environment will look like.”

Partners Make It Possible

Ernst is quick to point out the power of LunaTek engaging Coolhead Tech in this project.

“This project is a great example of a Google Cloud MSP and a Microsoft MSP coming together – pooling collective knowledge about these systems – to deliver a tailored, cross-platform solution for the benefit of a fast-growing fintech company.”

Since the initial Cloud migration project, the Google Cloud and Microsoft Partners continue to team up on additional post-migration support services through Coolhead’s Google-certified admin service.

The post Microsoft and Google Cloud Partners Team Up, Engage BitTitan for Multi-Source Migration appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Couldn’t make it to Ignite 2019? Here’s a roundup of news from BitTitan and Microsoft at this year’s event.

Moving 100% to the Cloud: Why, When, and How

BitTitan CEO Geeman Yip and IT Director Nik Thumma delivered a 20-minute presentation to a packed house on Tuesday focused on transitioning from on-prem systems to a fully cloud model. Geeman and Nik walked through BitTitan’s own journey to the cloud over the past five years, covering project management tips and hidden costs as well as the inevitable pitfalls that come with this type of project. That session is viewable on-demand here.

Teams, Teams, and More Teams

Private Channels

Arriving to Teams is a new group called Private Channels, enabling users to collaborate and converse within a Team in a more secure and private manner. Any members of the topline Team, including Guests, can be added to a Private Channel up to 250 members. Private Channels are denoted by a lock icon to the right of the channel name. Note that integrations with Stream, Planner, and Forms are not supported as of this writing, though Microsoft ensures those are on the way. Learn more about Private Channels here.

Integration with Outlook

While the ultimate vision for Teams is to curtail email usage, new integrations with Outlook help users move conversations from Outlook into Teams and select the method of communication that will be most effective. These new integrations enable users to send information from an email into a Teams channel and vice versa. In addition, Microsoft introduced a new Tasks feature that integrates with other applications like To Do, Planner, and Outlook to provide a “single pane of glass” view for action items assigned within Teams. Learn more about these updates via ComputerWorld.

Teams Clears 20M Daily Active Users

Coming on the heels of Ignite is a surprising growth figure for Teams. Redmond shared its daily active user count has risen from 13 million in July to over 20 million today. That’s significant growth in a short period of time, indicating many organizations already in Office 365 are beginning to pay attention to this new workstream collaboration market. It’s an ominous sign for the future of Slack, who’s stock was significantly down on news of these adoption figures.

Machine Learning, AI Arrives to Office 365

Microsoft also introduced new capabilities across applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. For Word, these new features suggest more concise phrases or grammar and the context around the change. Excel users will now be able to record actions within the application and save to a script. Another big change for spreadsheet fans ais new functionality that allows users to ask questions about a data set and be presented with formulas to answer those questions without having to create or write them. Updates also arrived for Outlook, including the ability for Cortana to read emails out loud. Learn more about these features with this great roundup from VentureBeat.

Miss us at Ignite but want to chat about an upcoming migration project? Contact us today!

The post MS Ignite Recap: Announcements and Takeaways appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan Customer Stories is a new series on Bits & Bytes highlighting successful migration projects delivered by BitTitan partners around the world. To view more case studies like these, visit the Customer Stories tab on our website.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Get in touch!

Meet Alstom, Exakis Nelite

Alstom is a global integrated transport system leader developing and marketing systems, equipment, and services for large-scale transportation projects. Following General Electric’s acquisition of two peripheral business units, Alstom Power and Alstom Grid, which also included the company’s Shared IT Service Center, Alstom had to rebuild their entire IT department from scratch, including a company-wide migration from BPOS-D to Office 365. For that, they turned to Microsoft Gold Partner Exakis Nelite.

The Challenge: Tight Timelines

Time was the biggest hurdle for this project. Alstom made the decision to move to Office 365 with nine months until the end of GE’s Transitional Service Agreement (TSA); however, GE’s IT team returned management of the alstom.com domain only one month prior to the end of the TSA. Moreover, no TSA extension was possible because Microsoft data centers hosting the BPOS-D services were being decommissioned, and Microsoft was not inclined to negotiate any extension. Initially, Alstom had expected to benefit from Microsoft FastTrack Center services to move the mailboxes. However, Alstom became no longer eligible for FastTrack due to the lack of the source messaging domain name and the risk that timeline may not be enough to recover all data.

Because of the tight timeline and large project size – 40,000 mailboxes totaling 140 terabytes of data – Alstom turned to Exakis Nelite, who in turn tapped BitTitan and MigrationWiz to help migrate to Office 365 and a new messaging domain.

Why MigrationWiz

Exakis Nelite chose MigrationWiz for its cloud-to-cloud migration experience and the ability to route this project through regional Azure data centers in Europe. MigrationWiz also gave Exakis Nelite better control and flexibility over what source items – mail, calendars, contacts, notes – were migrated, enabling Exakis Nelite to filter and move data by date range to expedite the transition.

With a small five-person project team and an airtight migration plan, Exakis Nelite was able to move Alstom’s 36,000 individual users to their new domain and onto Office 365. The flexibility to migrate items based on date ranges proved crucial – only the last month of data was migrated to primary mailboxes, allowing Exakis Nelite to complete this migration in under a month, with older items migrating to Exchange Online Archives in a second step.

This strategy allowed the team to migrate all 140TB of data and give users a smooth transition to the new systems. It also avoided the potential for severe network congestion when 36,000 individual users recreated their Outlook profiles and downloaded their .ost files on the same day. When GE returned management of the alstom.com domain name a month prior to the expiration of the TSA, the cutover of the domain name was straightforward with the addition of messaging alias.

“MigrationWiz gave us the flexibility we absolutely needed, so we could control what to migrate, and when. That was the critical factor that allowed us to complete a large migration, on a timeline we couldn’t control, with minimal impact on the business.” – Stéphane Detruiseux, CISO and VP Technology, Alstom.

The post Exakis Nelite Leverages BitTitan to Complete Large Divestiture Migration on Tight Timeline appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Whether it’s your next book, a new dentist, or in our world, software, we look to our colleagues for reviews. We trust our friends and coworkers to provide honest feedback about their experiences – and we weight their opinion heavily in our buying decision.

If you’re new to BitTitan, chances are you’re doing your homework on MigrationWiz and other third-party solutions, maybe even native methods from Microsoft and Google. You’ve got questions: can MigrationWiz handle my scenario? How is it better than other tools or doing this myself? Is it worth the investment?

Case studies hold some of these answers – as does /r/Office365 and /r/msp – but there’s another place with an extensive library of reviews on MigrationWiz: Gartner Peer Insights.

What is Gartner Peer Insights?

Gartner Peer Insights (GPI) is a reviews and ratings platform for technology end-users to share their experiences with IT solutions in over 300 different categories. Those submissions pass through a robust review verification and moderation process before publishing on the platform. Once public, these reviews are an invaluable source of feedback for other teams looking into solutions for their specific use case. Aside from the individual reviews, solutions in the same category can be compared side-by-side across factors such as Integration & Deployment, Service & Support, and Product Capabilities.

Vendors themselves, as well as Gartner, invite customers to periodically leave reviews on GPI. BitTitan does not supply monetary incentives for reviews on the platform and invites all customers – regardless of satisfaction with the product – to provide feedback. Gartner does provide incentives from time-to-time, including reviews from customers that were invited by a vendor.

MigrationWiz Reviews

As of this writing, MigrationWiz is the most-reviewed product within the “Cloud Office Migration Tool” category, carrying a 4.7/5-star rating through more than 180 reviews.

So what’s all the noise about? For many customers, it’s the ability to deploy the tool quickly and configure their migration project in a matter of minutes. Where other migration solutions may require on-premises installations or lengthier configuration steps, MigrationWiz users are up-and-running with fewer steps and headaches.

Another factor for high ratings are enate product capabilities. MigrationWiz received high marks for scalability, ease-of-use, and integration with Source and Destination systems.

Common Review Themes: Standardization, Time Savings, and Overall Experience

Nearly 70% of individual MigrationWiz reviewers give it a perfect 5-star rating – sorting through all feedback, trends begin to emerge.

The first is standardization. With its range of supported scenarios, MigrationWiz makes it easy to build your migration service package around this tool. Partners know what to expect, how much it will cost, and know they can turn to the tool and the BitTitan team to simplify any project they may take on (click on any of the reviews below to see the full review at the source).

There are a lot of free, manual ways to perform a migration project. Yet returning customers realize significant time savings when running projects through MigrationWiz. The tool migrates faster than manual methods, reduces configuration time, and allows customers to focus on other components of the project while the migration runs in the background. For those routinely performing these projects, time savings is critical to preserving margins and engineers’ time.

The last theme boils down to the overall customer experience. We like to be involved in projects. We’re proactive about engaging and planning without charging for professional services – we simply want you to be successful. And support is available 24/7 to anyone that purchases as MigrationWiz license, regardless of project size.

See For Yourself

Don’t take our word for it. Compare MigrationWiz side-by-side with other third-party solutions and read the most helpful reviews from the last 12 months to understand why IT administrators around the world have made this solution a key tool in their portfolio.

Got a project coming up? Get in touch today!

The post Gartner Peer Insights: The Reviews Are In! appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about new features, improvements, and bug fixes for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz New Feature: SharePoint App-Based Authentication

Last month, we launched new app-based authentication for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Office 365 Groups (Documents) migrations, and Teams migrations. This app will provide greater security and reduce the potential of Microsoft throttling. It will replace the previous Office 365 authentication, which has been subject to increased throttling by Microsoft recently. This new authentication method is specific to Office 365 tenants.

Note: This app must be added in both .microsoftonline.com tenants (Source and Destination) to reduce throttling and failures due to Microsoft throttling policy changes. Refer to this help article for more details.

MigrationWiz Improvements

Advanced Options

• Set a limit of 400 for the ‘Maximum number of concurrent migrations’ to better manage the processing capacity.
• After the fix, the user will see a warning if the number exceeds the 400 limit.

Teams-to-Teams Migrations

• Improved error messages when an assessment fails.
  • Previously, the error message did not indicate which specific user e-mail address was not a Global Administrator.
  • After the fix, the specific user e-mail address is clearly indicated.

The post November 2019 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Earlier this year, Google launched their Cloud Partner Advantage program with the intent of recruiting new partners to move customers into the Google cloud ecosystem. With this partner recruitment effort, there is an increased demand on IT service providers who will need to move their customers off other productivity suites, like Microsoft Office 365, and into G Suite. The essential component of moving productivity suite data like email, documents, calendars, etc. is data migration. And, as we all know, manual migrations are complex and time-consuming. That’s where MigrationWiz®, the migration automation platform from BitTitan®, comes in.

Over the last few years, IT service providers have trusted MigrationWiz to migrate hundreds of thousands of users to G Suite. IT services providers care about improving the speed, overall performance, and security of migrations because it makes them more efficient, able to take on more projects, and secures their customers data from vulnerabilities and threats. Answering these needs, BitTitan has continued to enhance the speed and security of our G Suite destination capability within MigrationWiz.

Today, we are excited to announce a major improvement to G Suite destination migrations in MigrationWiz: the ability to migrate mailboxes from Microsoft Office 365 to Google’s G Suite Gmail via the Gmail API for increased speed, performance, and security.

With MigrationWiz’s new Gmail API endpoint selection you can:

• Optimize throttling by using your own Gmail connector, which increases both speed and performance.
• Increase security from password spraying attacks increasingly linked to IMAP.
• Satisfy a wider range of customer requirements with the ability to choose between IMAP and Google API.

Learn more about migrating your customers to G Suite!

There are several options available to Google partners when migrating their customers. As a Google Technical Partner and domain expert in all kinds of migration scenarios, the MigrationWiz team offers a highway to G Suite, enabling you to sell and onboard customers to their new environment as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Want to learn more about migrating mailboxes from Microsoft Office 365 to Google’s G Suite Gmail via the Gmail API? Contact us today or visit our Help Center for more information about our pre- and post-migration solutions.

The post Now Migrate to Gmail with Google API or IMAP! appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

The 2019 European SharePoint, Office 365, & Azure Conference (ESPC) 2019 in Prague opened with a spectacular fire-dance performance. Then, Jeff Teper, Microsoft CVP of Office 365, took the stage in front of a full house of over 1,500 visitors from across Europe. During his keynote presentation, Jeff shared that this was his fourth ESPC and that he enjoys attending these events, as they are opportunities for us to embrace the great cloud community we share.  Jeff then reiterated Microsoft’s vision to Empower every person on the planet to achieve more.

Jeff outlined the five key investment areas Office 365 is focusing on for growth and customer value:

1. Knowledge
2. Intranet and Engagement
3. Collaboration
4. Developer platform across Office 365
5. Security, Compliance, and Ease of Management

For Knowledge, Jeff shared that the number one problem customers have is finding the right employee skills. Key to this is to help build current employee skill sets and empower team members to increase the knowledge required to do their jobs. He talked about this being the real power of AI, something that technology can now do. AI can help connect people to the right content when and where they need it.

He introduced Project Cortex, a new AI platform geared at identifying and tagging information for greater findability. Jeff explained how this platform will organize the tagged information automatically and then deliver the data back into the applications workers user every day.  With this platform, users will be able to identify what is trending, build topic maps, and find acronyms associated with the relevant data. Project Cortex will provide tremendous savings in terms of time and money.

For Intranet and Engagement, Jeff and his peers talked about the communication and collaboration needed to connect digitally across borders.  Microsoft’s new Office 365 offering includes enhanced intranets with landing pages designed specifically for employee engagement. These new landing pages and intranet improvements enable companies and employees to share who they are, what is happening, and how to find the pertinent information already stored on SharePoint, again using AI to find relevant texts, presentations, and video content within company intranet sites. Microsoft is also providing thousands of royalty-free images to make company and user content beautiful, including mixing reality with 3D effects.

To build a stunning intranet site out of the box, Jeff suggested visiting lookbook.ms.com for how to flag news, post events, identify resources, find personalized content and much more. To further enhance engagement, there is a new Yammer enabling conversations across the organization that are populated into normal Outlook notification views.

For Collaboration, the Microsoft presentation team shared how to access information both inside and outside a company with complete security using AI-powered collaboration. In addition, new tools within Office.com provide layout ideas from actual PowerPoint samples; enhanced editing with colleague tracking capabilities within Word; and, customized views enabling data modeling within Excel. To enhance the usage of Outlook mobile, the combined suite of PowerPoint, Word and Excel now autoloads into the Outlook mobile experience.

For Developers, Microsoft Office 365 is offering a graphic and SharePoint framework with fluid integration. All the data is housed in SharePoint but the framework enables the ability to extend across Microsoft 365.

And finally, in terms of Security, Compliance and Ease of Management, Office 365 is focused on easy yet secure. There are sensitivity labels applied to teams and/or files to determine the level of security required and determine who does or does not have access to the information. These labels can flag confidential data such as credit card information and identify items that may be considered top secret. This information is automatically scanned, applying the security rules upon accessing and exiting the data. These enhancements help companies meet compliance needs and block inappropriate access to data based on applied policies.

Jeff concluded his keynote by inviting the attendees to participate in numerous sessions focused on Teams, SharePoint, and a deeper understanding of Office 365 offerings.

At the BitTitan booth following the keynote, we talked to a wide variety of MVPs, end users, consultants, integrators, and MVPs from across Europe. We were very pleased with the number of new contacts we met and the dozens of opportunities of identified opportunities for migrating Office 365, both on-premises-to-cloud as well as cloud-to-cloud.

See you at ESPC 2020!

The post Recapping ESPC 2019! appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Since introducing capabilities to migrate Microsoft Teams last July, we’ve been hard at work to expand features in MigrationWiz® for this scenario. Learn more about recent enhancements below or head over to the BitTitan® Help Center for step-by-step technical documentation on how to configure and launch your Teams project.

Select Individual Teams to Migrate

Following the Source assessment, MigrationWiz users can now specify which individual Teams they would like to migrate, and which should be left behind on the Source. This is important for migration scenarios such as a divestiture where only a subsection of Teams need to be moved, or to clean up sprawl from the initial deployment.

After the assessment completes, users will be able to edit the Assessment Summary CSV to specify which Teams to migrate. Once this modified CSV is imported, the assessment results for the project will reflect on the Teams selected for migration, providing you with the amount of data, number of users, and required licenses for the new project constraints.

Additional guidance for selecting individual Teams can be found here.

New SharePoint App-Based Authentication

BitTitan recently transitioned from Office 365 authentication to app-based authentication for workloads including OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. Benefits of this change include increased security and a lower risk of throttling from Microsoft specific-to-Office 365 tenant projects, including Teams-to-Teams.

Note that this app must be added in both .microsoftonline.com tenants for the Source and the Destination to successfully reduce throttling and failures from Microsoft policy changes. Steps for adding and removing this app are linked here, in addition to our complete KB on SharePoint App-Based Authentication in the BitTitan Help Center.

Support for US Government Tenants

In addition to commercial Office 365 tenants, MigrationWiz now supports migrating to or from a government tenant. This requires special commands to connect, or login errors will persist.

Note that due to limitations from Microsoft, images within Conversation History will not be migrated directly to Channels on the Destination the way they are with commercial tenant scenarios. They will still appear in the HTML file tab labeled “Conversation History” on the Destination.

Best Practices for Teams Migrations

Six months’ worth of Teams projects have resulted in lessons learned. Check out our Collaboration Migration Best Practices KB for tips when planning and configuring your project. The right plan can help limit errors, throttling, and other mishaps to keep your project on-track.

You can also learn more about Teams projects and MigrationWiz in a recent on-demand webinar. BitTitan technical experts cover pre- and post-migration tips in addition to a short demo of this scenario.

The post New Enhancements for Microsoft Teams Migrations appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about new features, improvements, and bug fixes for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz New Feature: Gmail API Available as Destination Endpoint

Prior to this release, the only option for migrating mail from Exchange Online to Gmail was via IMAP. With this release, MigrationWiz users can now select which protocol they would like to leverage for this specific migration scenario.

This allows mailboxes to be migrated even when IMAP is disabled on the Google tenant. Customers can now use their own G Suite account instead of using a BitTitan service account to improve throughput.

Note that:

• Customers will need to create a customer tenant service account and enable APIs
• Customers will need to upload the account credentials JSON file during endpoint

Supported workloads for this migration scenario include mail, contacts, calendars, flags, and mail thread.

Customers can still select between IMAP and Gmail API endpoints; however, they cannot be used interchangeably.

Learn more about this update in this post on Bits & Bytes.

The post December 2019 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

BitTitan Customer Stories is a new series on Bits & Bytes highlighting successful migration projects delivered by BitTitan partners around the world. To view more case studies like these, visit the Customer Stories tab on our website.

Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Get in touch!

Meet the UK’s Leading Breast Cancer Charity

In April 2019, Breast Cancer Care and Breast Cancer Now took the bold step forward to become one charity. Now known as Breast Cancer Now, the charity is steered by world-class research and powered by life-changing care.

The charity believes that if we all act now, we can change the future of breast cancer and make sure that, by 2050, everyone diagnosed with the disease lives – and is supported to live well. The merger was a perfect opportunity for the charities to combine the power of care and research and increase its impact. A key part of that integration was migrating employees from both organisations into a single Office 365 tenant.

“It’s critical from a day-to-day perspective, being able to share data and work together as colleagues of one organisation,” said Tom Bowlby, Head of IT & Facilities at Breast Cancer Now. “After a merger happens, you’re trying to move away from a culture of ‘us and them’ and the technical things we do behind the scenes like this work toward that end goal.”

Tom and Senior IT Manager Brigid Macdonald broke the project down into two phases: first, they needed to move both London-based organisations into the same space, set up trust relationships with Active Directories and telephony, and prepare the target Office 365 tenant. The second phase was the actual consolidation of users and data into one tenant. For this, they turned to Nero Blanco IT and BitTitan®.

Migrating Together with Nero Blanco and BitTitan

With the Breast Cancer Now team completing phase one work, the IT migration specialists from Nero Blanco turned to phase two: the migration of 250 user mailboxes and OneDrive accounts, as well as shared mailboxes, archives, and data in SharePoint and Teams. As a close partner of BitTitan, Nero Blanco got the necessary information from the team at Breast Cancer Now and began mapping the project within MigrationWiz®.

For this project, Nero Blanco used a pre-stage approach. In August, Nero Blanco began migrating user mailboxes and data in the background in preparation for a late September cutover. With the majority of data already migrated, Nero Blanco was able to cut over all users within a single weekend and move the combined organizations into a single Office 365 tenant with high fidelity and minimal escalations post-project.

The Right Team for the Job

Breast Cancer Now was connected to Nero Blanco through a BitTitan employee and frequent supporter of the charity after the merger was announced. For Breast Cancer Now, it was the expertise and specialization in this type of project that convinced them to engage with Nero Blanco.

“We work with many partners, but the ultimate decision came down to the fact that this was bread-and-butter for Nero Blanco,” said Macdonald.

“We were able to combine professional services on top of the BitTitan tool to deliver on-time and on-budget,” said Fabrice Barbier, Business Development Executive at Nero Blanco. “For us, it was an enjoyable project because of the collaboration with Breast Cancer Now – good people to work with.”

With the tenant consolidation project behind them, Tom and Brigid continue to work with their internal IT team and partners to help Breast Cancer Now push ahead as a single organisation, providing support for today and hope for the future for anyone affected by breast cancer in the UK.

To learn more about Breast Cancer Now or see how you can get involved, visit https://breastcancernow.org/. 

The post Nero Blanco Helps Breast Cancer Now Integrate Charities After Merger appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Mergers and acquisitions are common catalysts for migration projects but present unique challenges for internal IT teams and service providers.

In the next installment of the BitTitan webinar series, we sit down with Bill Rieger, Principal Consultant at KiZAN Technologies, to talk through best practices and project management tips specific to this migration scenario. Bill and the KiZAN team know the ins and outs of these projects and the MigrationWiz solution, having delivered several projects for the same Fortune 500 customer to support their aggressive acquisition strategy.

BitTitan Senior Technical Sales Specialist Lauren Brunson will be joining Bill for the discussion, which will also include a demo of MigrationWiz and a focus on the BiTitan PowerShell SDK: a key feature of MigrationWiz to help simplify and streamline large M&A projects.

To cater to our global partner audience, we are offering this webinar in three different time zones.

Located in Americas? Register here.

Located in EMEA? Register here.

Located in APAC? Register here.

The post Webinar Alert: Migrations During Mergers & Acquisitions appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Migrating an organization’s email and/or archives to a new platform can be a challenging task without the right approach and the right tools. Careful planning and execution is required to ensure that all data is successfully migrated to the new environment, impact to end-users is minimized, and the expected outcome is achieved. The use of third-party services and tools can help simplify and streamline the migration process.

In a new report from Osterman Research sponsored by BitTitan, we review key planning considerations and other steps to prepare for an email migration project.

Read the executive summary below or download your free report here!

Executive Summary

Migrating an organization’s email and/or archiving systems to Office 365, Exchange Online, Google G Suite or some other email, collaboration or archiving platform is not an easy thing to accomplish. There are a number of critical decisions to make in advance of migrating to a new platform, and the migration process itself requires careful planning and execution over an extended period in order to avoid data corruption, lost chain-of-custody for sensitive data, and ensuring a minimal impact on employee productivity. There is a sequence of activities that must be scoped, agreed upon, and carried out properly in order for the migration to be successful. Aligned with the activities in the migration process are a range of third-party products and services that can simplify and streamline the migration process, improving the end result, while decreasing the risk of human error during the process.

The post Osterman Research: The Importance of Doing Email Migrations the Right Way appeared first on Bits & Bytes.

Product Release Notes contain information about new features, improvements, and bug fixes for BitTitan solutions and services. For the most current information, visit the Product Announcements section in the BitTitan Help Center. For additional questions, visit the Community Forums.

MigrationWiz New Feature: Select Individual Teams to Migrate

MigrationWiz now offers the ability for customers to specify which Teams they would like to migrate between tenants. Following the built-in Source Teams assessment in MigrationWiz, a CSV file will be generated and can be modified to include or exclude individual Teams in that migration.

Refer to this KB for more information on this feature.

MigrationWiz New Feature: Migrate Teams to/from US Government Tenant

In order to enable this feature, you’ll need to use these specific Advanced Options:

If migrating from a US Government Tenant, add:
OneDriveProExportEnvironment=AzureUSGovernment

If migrating to a US Government Tenant, add:
OneDriveProImportEnvironment=AzureUSGovernment
More information on this scenario can be found here. 

MigrationWiz Improvements

• Gmail API
  • Following the release of this new connector last month, we made improvements to batching mechanics while adding a retry for failed items in a batch. This has increased throughput using this specific connector by 50%.
  • We’ve also improved error messaging around invalid labels and how to workaround using folder mapping.
• Teams Migration – Mapping Renamed Folders
  • Teams Channels or groups have been renamed, but in Teams (and SharePoint), the Display Name is changed, not the actual MailNickName (the username in the team SMTP address). When a Teams migration is run, the migration creates the Team and the Teams Channel with the new name, but the Files are being migrated as a SharePoint site, which gets put under the old name.
  • The renamed channels need individual mapping commands to move channel files into the correct location during the migration process.
  • Add the foldermapping commands to the Support Options section of the Advanced Options.
  • E.g. FolderMapping=”^TeamA/Shared Documents/Oldname->TeamA/Shared Documents/Newname”
    Note: Enter the correct information for each team mailnickname and channel name in place of “TeamA”, “Oldname”, and “Newname” in the example.
  • More information regarding this Teams mapping feature can be found here. 

MigrationWiz Bug Fixes

• Teams CSV
  • Previously, when a user clicked on the download link, a new tab was opened temporarily before the download started.
  • After the fix, the download action now starts immediately without opening a new tab.

The post January 2020 Product Release Notes appeared first on Bits & Bytes.