Manage your migrations to minimize co-existence

Exchange 2010 is beginning to get traction out in the real-world, which is by no means a bad thing.  As folks begin to upgrade, though, there is a chance that you’ll end up with extended co-existence between different software versions and packages, and that can make life a living hell for technical staff. Multiple versions of multiple platforms can be difficult to manage at best, and if that management must continue for months (or longer) you could be setting yourself up to fail right from the start.

Co-existence of platforms is a necessary thing. Especially in larger organizations, the likelihood that you will be able to move all your users and systems from one software package to another in a weekend is slim at best. So, no matter if you are moving from a totally foreign system like Notes, or just upgrading between 2003 and 2010 on the Exchange platform, you will almost definitely need to have both systems running for a period of time as you move users and 3rd-Party tools.  The key is to keep that time period as short as you can, and here’s why.

When multiple versions of a messaging platform (or multiple platforms) you must make sure you’re patching both independently, staying up to date on multiple security threats and dealing with end users who have to have changes made across both system sets.  Since it is highly unlikely that you will have the benefit of extra staff during the migration, that means that the existing staff suddenly find themselves doing twice the work.

If the same number of people are forced to do twice the work, things fall through the cracks.  Patches get applied incorrectly or not at all, threats are left unaddressed and shortcuts abound.  It’s easier to open a hole in the firewall than try to deal with two sets of rules to manage connectivity. It’s easier to only focus on news and updates for the newer systems than to try to keep up with the influx of information for both platforms. The upshot of this is; that the longer you have both systems co-existing, the more opportunity you’ll find for something to break on one platform or the other.  This endangers both systems, and possibly everything else in your environment.

So, when planning for your migrations, work as much as you can to ensure that you do not require extended periods of co-existence if they can be avoided.  Sometimes you will need to have extended migration timelines – it’s unavoidable – but wherever you can do migrations quickly, you should.