ZUG, SWITZERLAND (PRWEB) May 11, 2016
Codenamed Project ADAM, the tool supports moving Public Folders and Shared Mailboxes from Exchange 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and Exchange Online to Office 365 Groups. In addition, the tool is able to export public folder data to PST files.
Microsoft Exchange Server is the world’s most popular enterprise email system. Over 20 years, companies have used Exchange public folders to store many different types of data records essential to business processes and communications. In some companies, public folders hold terabytes of items such as email messages, calendar appointments, tasks, documents and contact records. Although public folders are functional, they have been obsoleted within Exchange Online by the provision of more modern and capable collaboration facilities, specifically Office 365 Groups. Office 365 Groups provide document sharing, threaded conversations, shared calendars and OneNote notebooks, and access to task-based planning via the new Office 365 Planner application.
Much of the foundation for Office 365 Groups comes from Exchange Online. However, Microsoft has not provided migration capabilities to allow customers to move the essential business data held in public folders to the new platform. According to Microsoft, over 70 million active users connect to Office 365 monthly and the number of Office 365 users is expected to grow dramatically as companies move away from on-premises versions of popular applications such as Exchange over the next five years. The need for those companies to move data off obsolete collaboration platforms exists now and will only increase as companies move to the Microsoft cloud.
Collaborative Development
Working with Microsoft, QUADROtech ADAM brings the power of its Data Analytics and Migration engine to Office 365 Groups. The patent-pending technology in the analytics engine permits a deep analysis of the Public Folder hierarchy and content resulting in a recommended approach for a high-quality and effective migration of the data. Customers who have been waiting for nearly 20 years to have a viable path forward for public folders now have that capability – and not just the ability to move data. The most important and interesting feature delivered by QUADROtech is the analysis of public folders to understand what data exists in the folders, what data is valuable, and what should be moved forward to Office 365 Groups. There’s no point in migrating everything as that could mean that old, obsolete, and unwanted data ends up in the cloud.
Tony Redmond, a veteran Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP) and QUADROtech board member, said “After 20 years of solid service to Exchange customers, it's time to change the basis of collaboration to something more modern, more capable, and more powerful. Office 365 Groups provide that basis for collaboration for Exchange Online tenants. Being able to move Public Folder content to Office 365 Groups is a great step forward.”
Public folders can span extremely large hierarchies and volumes of data. Unlike other Public Folder migration tools, ADAM introduces the concept of Dynamic Grouping, using deep analytics to identify the logical splits between the subfolders in the public folder hierarchy, based on permission sets and common folder properties. Exchange administrators can review the output of the analysis before migration and to extend or narrow the scope via a powerful user interface to remove redundant or irrelevant data.
Peter Kozak, QUADROtech CEO said “Public Folders have been de-focused in the Microsoft Roadmap, leaving organizations with significant volumes of data stuck in a time warp with information in a repository that they cannot move forward to an alternate, modern solution. Consequently, businesses lose value from the data they already hold and are unable to take advantage of more modern functionality that they are paying for through their Office 365 subscriptions.”
More than a simple migration tool
ADAM is designed to be a total data migration solution. Although public folders are the focus of this announcement, ADAM can also automatically provision Office 365 Groups, shared mailboxes, and rehydrate shortcuts from archiving systems, such as Veritas Enterprise Vault, as part of the migration process. With full support for QUADROtech’s Sync’n’Switch technology, the product provides full item-by-item auditing during the migration process and is available either as a Cloud Service, requiring no hardware or deployment of infrastructure, or as a service that can be delivered on-premises.
Kozak continued “I am especially proud of our Deep Analytics Technology (DAT). This amazing technology provides an automated process for analyzing data held in legacy systems which takes the characteristics of the data into consideration to determine the most suitable modern target system. The properties and characteristics include, but are not limited to, size, age, content type, and ownership. For instance, an object that has not been accessed in seven years can be considered obsolete data and might therefore be recommended for deletion or for export. By comparison, a public folder that is accessed by multiple users on a sustained basis for the last three months might better be moved to an Office 365 Group. To make an optimum determination of the target system, multiple properties of the data are considered and measured through an advanced process of analysis. The determination arrived at is the system best suited to host the data in such a way that its functionality and usefulness are retained.”
QUADROtech expects its DAT technology to be rolled out to its other products during 2016, including processing data drawn from other IT systems such as files stored in a document management system or a shared file server.
For more information on Project ADAM, visit http://quadro.tech/ADAM, or come and see the tool in action on the QUADROtech stand at WPC 2016, stand 742.
About QUADROtech
QUADROtech (http://quadro.tech) is the only provider of integrated tools for managing email archive, mailbox and PST file migrations. Its technology is a key component in email infrastructure changes, enterprise desktop refresh projects, rollout of latest versions of Windows, and the adoption of Microsoft Exchange 2016, Office 365 and Enterprise Vault. QUADROtech’s staff of industry experts and its worldwide network of partners help customers avoid the costliest, time-consuming and risky aspects of migration projects.