Posts Tagged nick bowyer
Migration from Office 365 P plan to E plan
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud, Office365 on March 7, 2012
One of the things that impresses me with the cloud offerings from Microsoft is the great partner community dedicated to delivering the solution. In this blog I want to talk about the experience I had recently moving a customer from the P Plan of Office 365 to the E Plan. I talked about the reasons why this migration became necessary in my earlier blog post . In this post I will talk about the migration of the DNS records and the mail data, as we are deploying CRM Online we will not be transferring any existing Sharepoint configuration, rather bulk copy the files using explorer to the new Sharepoint structure.
Microsoft have their own reasons for creating two separate product offerings within Office 365, one of which is the Google compete aspect. The P plan is a direct competitor with Google Apps/Docs/Mail and is priced accordingly, it does however miss out on a few important features, SSL (secure) connection to Sharepoint Online, more than 25 users (50 users hard limit), no Active Directory integration to list a few. Microsoft don’t currently offer customers any tools to migrate from the P Plan to the E Plan and you can’t purchase E Plan licenses from a P Plan tenant. This is where a partner steps in to make life extremely easy, MigrationWiz have been at the forefront of providing cloud migration tools for a number of years now, my first interaction with them came when I wanted to migrate a customer from Gmail to BPOS – Microsoft Online Services back in 2010.
The experience with MigrationWiz has only become better since my last trial. The interface is slick and easy to understand and for around US$10 per mailbox it just doesn’t make sense to attempt to migrate any other way. I would suggest that Microsoft purchase MigrationWiz but then again I appreciate the neutrality provided by their current position. There are a few things you need to understand when performing such a migration and while simple to understand, they may interrupt your services and/or mail flow.
Understand your DNS, this has to be the most important part of the migration. I spoke earlier about DNS Records and in this case too you will need to make changes to these records. The DNS record allowing you to route mail and authenticate users is only able to be associated with one tenant of Office 365, so if you are migrating to another tenant as in this case you will need to plan when to move this record across.
Verify Domain process Office 365
You will get an error when you attempt this in Office 365 if the domain is associated with another tenant.
Domain verification error Office 365
I suggest that you choose a weekend to migrate your customer as the DNS changes may take up to 24 hours to complete. It needs to start with “releasing” or deleting the DNS record from the old tenant, this will initiate some hidden scripts which de-provision the record from the services in the back end. It is important to understand that at this stage you will still be able to access the user accounts using their tenant alias @.onmicrosoft.com . Email will stop at this time, you could employ the use of a “mail bagging” service, usually provided by your ISP, make some enquiries as it will prevent email from being dropped in the time you take to transfer the record to the new tenant. Changing your MX record at this time to the mail bagging service will prevent mail from being dropped. The domain name will take some time to be released from the old tenant, Microsoft advise this could be up to 24 hours, if after 24 hours it still won’t allow you to verify the domain in the new tenant then make a call to Microsoft Support and they will manually release the record. Once you have verified the domain in the new tenant of Office 365 you will then be able to redirect the MX record again, pointing it to the Office 365 servers. Again this should be completed on a weekend or an outage window of at least 24 hours.
DNS Settings for the Exchange Online service and Lync Online
I used the premium license of MigrationWiz as I wanted to make a couple of passes to migrate the mail. The other thing this allows you to do is perform a complete migration without interrupting any mail flow for the customer. At a cost of US$11.99 per mailbox it was only $2 more than the standard single pass license. Before I migrated any mail data I needed to ensure the mailboxes I was migrating to existed in the new tenant.
Having purchased the P Plan originally I had no Active Directory federation or synchronization to worry about, Microsoft gave me a couple of great tools to create the user accounts by way of uploading a CSV file with the usernames in it, this was exported from the old tenant of Office 365 using the free poweshell cmdlets, if you don’t know how to use Powershell i highly recommend you do as it will make life a lot easier. When importing the users from the CSV file you will need to change the user account ID to use the default tenant id @.onmicrosoft.com as the domain will not be verified yet.
This CSV file can then be modified and used in the MigrationWiz portal to configure the mailboxes you want to migrate. Credentials can be that of an administrator, as administrator accounts have access to all users mailboxes.
The mailbox migration status in the MigrationWiz dashboard
As you can see from the screenshot above, the console in MigrationWiz is clean and easy to understand, mirroring the experience had within the Office 365 environment. The status of the migration can be seen at a glance and any errors are easy to identify and fix. The beauty of using a cloud to cloud service is that my bandwidth isn’t used, all the data is transferred direct from one data center to another. Be aware that the migration does take some time therefore I would recommend using the premium license of MigrationWiz that allows you to make more than one pass of the mailboxes, the first, a week before the migration date and once again after the MX records have been migrated. Contacts, Calendar and email folders are migrated using this method and users will not notice the difference when they connect to their new mailbox.
The last thing to remember is that the user’s passwords will need to be changed. I this case I logged into every account and changed the users passwords via the portal. This was fine for the 20 user accounts I was migrating, however the Powershell cmdlets I mentioned earlier could have easily achieved the same result allowing you to set a default password for the new accounts. The auto discover record will allow the devices to automatically redirect the connection to the new mailbox.
I hope this has shown how easy a migration can be once you have chosen a cloud service, with the tools made available by Microsoft and more importantly by the partner community it can be achieved in a few easy steps.
Next Post
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Uncategorized on February 28, 2012
Great step-by-step blog to setting up CRM integration with Sharepoint Online
In November 2011, Eric Boocock from Microsoft announced a change to SharePoint Online (Office 365). The change included the ability to enable document management using the SharePoint List Component with CRM Online.
Since I’ve been waiting for this feature for several months, I decided to give it a try. The first thing I did was to clear a 4 hour block of time from my schedule to implement the solution. I was aware that several articles list a few clicks here and a few clicks there, a tweak here and a tweak there and you’re done. I also understand that one person’s experience with a new feature can vary from another’s so I decided to allow ample time to deal with any unexpected issues.
The key article I used to understand the steps required to implement the solution is one written by the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers; CRM…
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CRM Online and Sharepoint Online
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud, Office365 on February 28, 2012
Last year (2011) Microsoft released a cloud version of their CRM Software, CRM Online. This was fantastic news to those of us out there who had faced the cost barrier of deploying CRM software. Really at the time the only competitor of any standing was Salesforce.com and even though Salesforce bought CRM to the cloud, it too was expensive.
The great thing about Microsoft CRM is that you get the sweet sweet integration through outlook and the other products in the Office stack. The great benefit now with Microsoft CRM Online is that Office 365 – Sharepoint Online now supports full integration as well allowing document management of your CRM created customers/contacts to be held within your Sharepoint online site.
And thats where I found a “but”. If you have managed to be an early adopter of Office 365 and at some stage in the past selected the Small Business “P” plan of the offering then your CRM => Sharepoint Online integration will come to a grinding halt. There is no support for the CRM list solution within the P Plan of Office 365. The other piece missing from the Sharepoint Online experience in Office 365 P Plans is the lack of a secure connection (SSL). The simple steps for installing CRM components in Sharepoint online can be found here if you did the smart thing an purchased the Enterprise offering or “E” plan. This has also been talked about before in more detail by a fellow WordPress blogger here.
The only way out of this somewhat disappointing situation was to migrate this customer from their P Plan to one of the available E plans. This meant I needed to setup an entirely new tenant or customer within Office 365 as there is no ability to move from the small business offering to the enterprise offering of Office 365. Moreover Microsoft doesn’t provide any “wizards” to assist you with this. My recommendation for any customer thinking about moving to Office 365 would be to choose from the enterprise range of products.
A few things to plan ahead of the move.
1) First of all setup a new Office 365 tenant. http://www.office365.com
2) Ensure you have easy access to the DNS settings for the domain you plan on moving
3) Plan for the migration. This means informing users of the changes and the cut-over date.
I plan to move this customer over a weekend. I am able to setup everything within the new tenant of Office 365 ahead of time but due to the reliance on the DNS records I will only cut over after business hours on a Friday night. Microsoft suggests that 24 hours may be required to “release” the domain record from the old “P” Plan tenant. You will NOT be able to add users to the new tenant until this has been released.
I thought I would share some of the “tricks” that helped me with this move.
1) Powershell is fantastic! – I managed connect to the old P plan tenant of Office 365 and export the users details to a csv file using a simple command. This saved me time and allowed me to import the users into the new tenant in a matter of seconds, be aware that the domain must be transferred BEFORE you import users. Also pay attention to the difference in cmdlets out there for BPOS and Office365, you can download the Office 365 cmdlets here or through the admin console.
2) Connect to Sharepoint Online using explorer in order to migrate documents to the new libraries. This method will avoid using bandwidth as the documents will be copied in the cloud rather than coming down to your PC. It also allows you to drag and drop documents, a task that you may want to assign to someone more familiar to the document structure used by the business.
3) Think about migrating user emails. I used the migration tool within Office 365 using the Exchange 2010 setting, this worked sweet as I had the auto discover settings still pointing to the old tenant.
I will update this blog post after the migration has completed and let you know of any “hiccups” on the way.
Cloud buffet
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud on February 7, 2012
The Swedish got it right when making a meal out of something. Instead of the meat and three vege they decided to invent something called a Smörgåsbord, a choice of several dishes served at once in a buffet style for a fixed price. This kind of dining became popular not only in Europe but around the world, offering a wide variety of choice while providing exceptional value.
I liken this to where cloud computing is today. Recently I have been working with a few businesses who had previously had to build their own systems around what they required involving great cost and a level of commitment. Think of turning up to a restaurant having pre-ordered a steak, only to look at the menu and decide you want the duck… Sometimes changing your mind isn’t restricted to what you feel like for dinner, in business too things may not end up where you thought they would when you set out.
Cloud computing is the smörgåsbord of Information Technology. For a low price and usually at a per user per month billing cycle you are able to pick and choose from a range of products from a number of suppliers. Most technologists refer to this trend as being the “consumerization” of IT, technology which was once restricted to those who could afford to deploy it is now available to the masses. With scale comes economy, most cloud platforms today are built from the ground up with scale in mind. Provisioning and billing being the cornerstones of any good cloud service, making it simple and fast for a customer to deploy the software and once deployed even easier to pay for what they use. More importantly this means one thing… its going to get cheaper.
The sheer number of cloud offerings on the market are impressive, you name it, and it’s probably hosted in the cloud. One example is websites, I am definitely NOT a programmer by any short stretch of the imagination and never have been. The last time I wrangled with any code was back in school with Basic, Pascal and Assembler being the main languages used, nowdays you have even more choice, ASP.Net, VB, C++, C#, PHP etc to name a few. HTML is the language of the web and another language I am not brave enough to spend any amount of time understanding. Thank god then for my “cloud service of the week”, I discovered www.wix.com through a friend and found it unbelievably easy to stand up and design a website. And I am not talking a simple website, this website was able to have animations, embedded video and even a e-commerce plug-in if I so desired. Within an hour I had something that resembled something of what my client wanted and gave us something to build from, and I didn’t see one piece of HTML. More importantly I was then able to hand it over to my customer to allow him to publish his own content, keeping his website/brand current and relevant. This really rang true what value I saw in the cloud computing movement, something that was simple to use, fast to deploy and very very cheap when compared to building it yourself.
The pick ‘n’ mix of technology is upon us, go ahead and make a pig of yourself!
Cloud concern?
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud on February 2, 2012
Recently the press in New Zealand and around the globe have been all over a man called Kim Dotcom and his case relating to the “Mega conspiracy” and the Megaupload site. The press the world over love the fact that Megaupload was widely regarded as the place to store your illegally downloaded movies and music.
More recently I watched a discussion on TVNZ Breakfast between Petra Baghurst (presenter) and the editor of Computerworld magazine (journalist) about the Megaupload case and more generally the topic of cloud computing. I watched in disbelief as the editor of Computerworld, Sarah Putt, managed to give what I consider a poor explanation of cloud computing and its associated risks. When I considered people with little or no knowledge of cloud computing would be watching I became concerned that the Megaupload fiasco would have a negative impact on cloud computing uptake within businesses in NZ.
Having built and then sold cloud computing solutions now for over 10 years I thought I would spell out the reasons why Megaupload and its issues couldn’t be further from the truth behind cloud computing.
When Sarah talked about the FBI in the USA deleting the user data from the Megaupload website she failed to talk about a couple of key aspects which would put someones mind at ease. Instead she made a statement which left the impression that everyone’s data could be deleted at any stage by the FBI or any government agency without notice from ANY cloud service. This simply isn’t true.
Lets get one thing straight, cloud computing is a BIG bet for most technology companies and we aren’t talking small companies either. Microsoft, Google, Amazon are some of the leaders in the cloud computing push with many others following. The big companies all have big legal teams, these teams have been working with governments for years to better understand the regulatory requirements when it comes to hosting customer data and understanding complications that arise when its hosted offshore. In short, if there was ANY risk that any of the big players would end up having their customer data deleted by the FBI overnight, they simply wouldn’t have attempted to provide the service in the first place. Furthermore these service providers all spell out in plain english the regulatory requirements for their customers:
http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13602
I liken it to an owner of a Gallardo holding Lamborghini responsible when they break the speed limit. When was the last time you posted a speeding ticket to the manufacturer of your car?
Understanding your legal requirements as a consumer of cloud services is the first thing you should do before deciding to move.
The other very important thing I was amazed Sarah Putt missed was the fact that in most cloud scenarios a user is able to gain access to their data when they aren’t connected to the internet. Google may currently fall short in this area, however when using the likes of Office365 in conjunction with Sharepoint workspace, a user has an offline cache of their data from which they are able to make a local backup at any time. There are many more cloud services that provide an offline cache such as Dropbox etc. And lets not forget the fact that Outlook provides the ability to work offline, giving users access to their email, contacts and calendars when they aren’t connected to the internet/email service. This serves as piece of mind rather than a requirement of a cloud service and I use the term “dis-mount strategy” to talk about the ability to recall your company data from the cloud should your situation change. Another great product that allows seamless “dis-mount” from the cloud is Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 has been architected to co-exist with Office 365, allowing customers to maintain a local Exchange server for email while utilizing the cloud for additional email capacity.
At the end of the day as with any business decision due-diligence needs to be undertaken before using a cloud service and this includes what to do in the event that you need to recall your data from the cloud. In most cases the risks will be mitigated especially when choosing to use a product from a reputable brand with a strong market presence and a good roadmap for future releases.
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