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Eight Best Practices when Migrating Calendar Data

By Zyg Furmaniuk and Russ Iuliano, Sumatra Development

Migrating your calendar data from one platform to another is a lot like a plane flight: the most challenging parts are the take-off and landing. And like travelling via plane, getting to your final destination may end up taking different routes or even involve alternative forms of transportation.

The purpose of this paper is to share the best practices we’ve identified that have helped our clients over the past eight years decide which migration strategy is right for their organization. If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch.

1. Establish clearly defined business objectives.

What are your business goals? Hard to believe, but many customers skip this step. Having business goals will help you know which migration strategy is best suited to your organization. Here are some questions to help you get started defining your business objectives:

• What are you trying to accomplish (e.g., lower costs; improve user workflow; simplify support; minimize impact on the organization; require the smallest possible outage window)? Something else?

• When do you want to ‘go live’? • How much calendaring history do you want to migrate?

2. Understand any constraints and technical requirements

You selected the new calendaring system. Make sure you understand any constraints that your business or software places on this project. For example:

• What kind of financial and human resources are you able to devote to this project? (E.G., we can only dedicate one person and $500 to the project.)

• What are your most important technical constraints? (e.g., must work with Macs; the conversion must complete within a 12 hour ‘outage’ window.)

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• What calendaring functionality is critical in your organization (e.g., conference room scheduling, group calendars)? Does the new calendaring system support this functionality? How does this affect what you require for calendar data migration?

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•

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.

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4. Trust, but Verify (a.k.a. TESTING, TESTING, 123) OK, you’ve identified a few solutions that look like they will meet your business goals. Each has pluses and minuses. Don’t rely on anyone else’s claims. Before you sign a contract, prove the solution works by setting up a test lab to see if it is successful with your data in your environment (unless you like the thrill of the unknown). Your test lab results helps you decide which solution works best for your organization. Remember to make your test lab’s environment match your production environment. You do not want to discover a legacy application running in production strips crucial information out of meeting requests, or your handheld synch tools are dependent on outdated O/S patch versions.

5. Connect What You Test To Your Business Goals

Migrations present numerous testing opportunities. But if you’re smart, you’ll test those parts that tie back to the goals.

If your goal is to… …then test… A. Minimize the impact on

your organization • How long the process takes. • What data get migrated, and what does

not. B. Have the highest possible

data conversion accuracy • How much data gets converted (or, make

sure you can get a list of the items that do not get converted).

• Check the meetings to ensure they have all of the attendees, and their responses. Is the meeting time correct (especially around daylight savings time)?

• Is the meeting agenda present?

C. Re-create conference room bookings

• Look at each resource’s calendar. Compare the results with the legacy calendar. Are the calendars identical?

D. Minimize time users (especially senior ones!) spend re-keying data

• See B, above. • Test delegate/proxy access to others’

calendars. • Make sure you can update (and cancel)

meetings, and that attendee calendars receive those updates.

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E. Ensure the smallest possible outage window

• How long the end-to-end process takes (remember to include the time to configure users, run backups, disable hand-held devices, etc).

• What happens when things go wrong? Test the solution to ensure there it has a viable ‘rollback’ option.

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6. Define a timetable Things go wrong. Tasks take longer than you might have initially believed. By having a timetable you’ll understand the impact of “X” factors like systems that have to be rebuilt, users re-created, resources re-provisioned. (But you already know some of what can go wrong because you tested the solution

as part of your vendor selection process.) Here is a sample timetable: Figure One: Sample timetable

7. Communicate, communicate, communicate Changing a tool users tap into every day can unsettle them. If one of your goals is to minimize the impact on the organization, develop a communication program to help your users understand why you are undertaking this migration and how it will affect them. Engage the organization, invite questions, and be ready with answers. Customers with the most comprehensive communications plan had the most satisfied users after the migration. Provide interim updates to keep them apprised of your progress.

8. Training for a successful rollout The data migration looks like it’s going to be successful. How are you going to make your users as happy as you are? By showing your users how it works with their data in action. So why not invite administrators for your top brass into the test lab to have them review their boss’ calendars? By seeing how thoroughly the information has been imported, folks will get excited and tell others in the organization.

Sumatra has been migrating calendars for organizations large and small since 2001. Whether you use Meeting Maker, Lotus Notes, Oracle, or have a home grown system, we have successfully moved more than a billion calendar events

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for more than a million users around the world. When you’re putting together your short list of firms to get in touch with, put us on your list. To learn more, please email info@sumatra.com or call us at: 617-233-3708. ©2009 Sumatra Development LLC. All rights reserved. All brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.