Friday, May 17, 2013

Quest NME migrations with Exchange Online Wave 15


I have done quite a few Lotus Notes to Exchange online migrations using Quest's Notes for Exchange migration toolkit.

One of my favorite features is the admin pool. 

So what is the admin pool? The admin pool creates a pool of global administrators that can be used for migrations as Microsoft throttle the amount of data that can be migrated per user name. An example of an admin pool is displayed below.




This feature works great when migrating to a Wave 14 Exchange online tenant but not so well when migrating to a Wave 15 tenant.If you want to use an admin pool to migrate to a wave 15 you need to submit a service request to Microsoft and below is an extract with the instructions from Quest.

Microsoft has informed our Product Team that they are changing the procedure for requesting exemption to the PowerShell throttling.
Each Tenant Admin, as an Office365 customer, please submit a service request individually. Microsoft would like to receive requests directly from the Tenant Admin.
The Tenant Admin should open a service request and reference "Bemis Article: 2835021".  The Microsoft Product Group would also need following information in the request:

1.     The tenant domain (tenant.onmicrosoft.com)
2.     The version of Exchange (These requests should all be for Wave15)
3.     The number of mailboxes that are being migrated
4.     The number of concurrent admins accounts that will be used for the migration
5.     The number of concurrent threads that will be in use
6.     The number of runSpaces will be created per minute
7.     The proposed limit (powershellMaxTenantRunspaces, powershellMaxConcurrency, etc.) and number to increase the limit to

For items 6 and 7, Tenant Admin may probably need to take the total number of threads across all migration machines that you plan to use and add a buffer because it is not easy to know in advance how the timing of the runSpaces will occur.

As a result, it may be safe to assume that  all potential runSpaces could be created within a minute, so 6 & 7 should probably both be submitted as the total number.

More Information About # 6 & 7

If there are 5 migration consoles designated for the migration and running 3 threads each, it is safe to assume that you may have 15 runSpaces created per minute.

In case of you may decide to increase threads or add migration consoles later, even it is safe to assume that you may have 15 runSpaces per minute, to provide a buffer, you may want to ask 25 or 50 (each)  powershellMaxTenantRunspaces, powershellMaxConcurrency, etc. 

Microsoft will only do this for a minimum of 1000 users that are migrating to Exchange online. 

So the way I got around it was by doing the following.In this instance there were 3 nme migration machines.


  1. Create New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "ApplicationImpersonation" –User admin@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
  2. Then create 3 nmeadmin accounts and assign an exchange online license to each account.
    nmeadmin1@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
    nmeadmin2@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
    nmeadmin3@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
  3. Install the Windows Azure Directory module for powershell on each nme machine which you can download HERE
  4. Create an Admin Role called Quest , add in the following roles
    Application Impersonation & Migration
    as per the image below
  5.  Add the 3 nmeadmin accounts as members to this role.
  6. Add the 3 nmeadmin accounts as members to the Organization Management - Admin Role
  7. On each of the nmeadmin machines configure an Outlook client for each of the nemadmin accounts. So one account per machine and do not enable caching.
  8. So when you come to the point of migrating enter nmeadmin1 credentials into the migration wizard on machine1 , nmeadmin2 credentials on machine2 and nmeadmin3 credentials on machine 3 as per the image below.
This will then allow you to migrate from Lotus notes to Exchange online wave 15. I am sure Quest will resolve the admin pool issue as it is such a cool feature and really speeds up for migrations.

At the time of writing this post this relates to Quest NME version 4.7.0.82 displayed below.



Saturday, May 11, 2013

Cloud Accelerate Partner Support


One of the benefits of being a Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner is that you can get dedicated  Cloud Partner Support which is available 24 Hours a day 7 days a week.

So how do you access this benefit as there is no dedicated phone number.

The way you access the Cloud Partner Support team is by logging a service request via your partner tenant. So you can log a service request through your own partner tenant for one of your customer's tenants.

This really is an excellent service. Its like having a Microsoft Premier Support contract. I have logged a number of service requests via the Cloud Partner Support team and their response time is excellent.

HERE is a document providing an overview of the Cloud Deployment Program Overview

QUEST NME unable to create admin pool


In the image above I ran into an issue when trying to create an admin pool for on Quest Notes For Exchange migration toolkit.This was for a migration to Exchange Online.

So the first thing i did was set-executionpolicy unrestricted -force on both the x64 and x32 versions of powershell. But that didn't fix the issue.

Most enterprises have quite a few group policies and sometimes these policies are applied before the machines have been moved to an OU that has inheritance blocked.

So to remove the group policies causing the issue. 

Browse to HKLM\Software\micrsoft\windows\currentversion\group policy and then delete any S-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx keys.

Ensure you have the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for powershell installed on all the nme machines.


Once I had removed all the group policies I could create the admin pool and proceed with migrations.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

An internet connection is required to ensure that your subscription for Microsoft Office is not interrupted


I have a customer that has a new wave 15 Office365 tenant and click to run is not compatible with Windows XP. Like most corporate customers , my customer had a proxy.

So I ran the Office365 readiness assessment tool which you can download HERE 

The results of the test stated that Office365 ports could not be contacted.

The reason for this is because Office365 communicates to the service via networkservice.

Lets say my proxy was 1.1.1.1:8080 then run the following command and Office will activate fine.

bitsadmin /util /setieproxy networkservice MANUAL_PROXY 1.1.1.1:8080 “”

If you need bitsadmin for xp you can download it HERE .