Migration Problem Statement

A messaging migration project involves many activities, spanning management, technical, and methodological issues. Figure 6 illustrates the high-level view and overall direction of your migration project.

Figure 6 Initial State of the Migration Project

Understanding the importance of the migration problem, Sun has developed specific steps (phases) for a migration project to drive a platform from a certain source groupware to Sun Java System Communications Services. This entails understanding:

• Your business, its Service Level Agreements (SLAs), policies (security, archiving, and so on), your organization, and its processes.

• The actual platform running the source groupware system. In particular:

  • Hosting data, general architecture, flows, and so on.

  • User data provisioning, data quality, double provisioning, synchronization, and so on.

  • Disk space usage and other statistics. Specific attention should be paid to the storage expansion rate, which is resolved in the second phase of the project.

The migration project relies on information extraction tools which support some of the steps:

• SGMT provides tools to identify LDAP data issues and to remap user data in a flexible manner. This enables specification and customization of the synchronization between the source and target LDAP services.

  For example, some user login strings can contain characters that are forbidden on the target system. Additionally, because of consolidations in the Directory Information Tree (DIT) into a more global flat tree, duplicate IDs can occur. SGMT detects these problems before and not during the migration such that you can contact users and take corrective actions before migrating.

• SGMT provides tools to compute statistics on users, to simulate their reallocation on the future system, and to evaluate partitions. This information supports ordering or specifying storage requirements as well as refinement of the architecture.

• SGMT then performs the actual migration of the data and provides a migration user status, which allows other systems or clients to take appropriate actions. For instance, the user desktop login scripts can decide to launch Sun Java System Connector for Outlook for each user after—and only after—the user is migrated.