Specifications Phase (Design and Plan)

During the second phase, the SGMT tool creates reports on which you base the architecture of the target platforms, as well as migration modalities. As part of this phase, an integration platform is built to support deployment of SGMT for a first-pass analysis and profiling.

Next comes the qualification of your data. Potentially the most demanding task in this part is the analysis of the LDAP data quality. Indeed, all data must comply with the toolkit's requirements (based on RFCs). This task integrates as well the synchronization processes between the source platform and the target Sun platform.

Do not underestimate the effort required for writing these “mapping functions.”

To have an idea of the performance of the source system, statistics are extracted through the IMAP interfaces of the source platform. This process detects as well possible anomalies on the source system, including:

• Mailboxes that do not have uids, uids that are not unique, or invalid characters that have been used

• Folders that were created without a type

• Mail messages that were corrupted on Microsoft Exchange that cannot be read with Outlook

• Folder names that contain a slash (/)

• Calendar items that contain invalid data, duplicate uids, or wrong time zones

• Overly “large” mail messages

These anomalies with source data present key risk factors that must be understood for the migration to be successful.

Once you have collected such data, you can then:

• Specify the allocation models for users on the message stores

• Specify and size partitions

• Simulate disk space allocation before the actual migration, taking into account or not the relinker functionality in the Message Store (to avoid migration storage expansion)

Once all these tasks are completed, you are then able to:

• Customize the toolkit to your particular project's needs

• Test the customized toolkit

• Drill down into user profile data

• Drill down into user messaging data

Finishing the specification of the overall platform involves performing LDAP provisioning, user allocations, disk space requirements, and so on.