Up late and blogging...

Had some down time this evening so I wanted to quickly blog about some of our thinkig around the GUI and the PowerShell tasks.

The New Consolidated Transporter Management Console;

The decision to make life easier for the admin by consolidating the tools in the Microsoft Transporter suite into a single install and unified console was really a no-brainer. IT departments constantly are looking for ways to ease migrations and a single download and single management console is obviously easier than separate tools with different interfaces. This was really a no brainer. However….

A New Migration Platform on PowerShell;

We already had some existing tools and although I guess we could have bundled them together with some ‘menu’ interface this would have not really consolidated the experience. Instead we decided to take a step back and consolidate the core functionality by building a common migration platform based on PowerShell. The GUI then would use this platform and would not only provide a single console but implement a single consolidated underlying functionality. (Same authentication method, similar conversion experience, similar client install requirements, etc.)

Using the PowerShell Tasks;

So how it works is that all functionality in the Microsoft Transporter stems from a core set of PowerShell tasks that do the actual work. For example , in a user migration the Management Console calls the ‘Get-DominoUser’ and ‘Move-DominoUser’ tasks to do the actual work. These are the core PowerShell migration tasks:

Get-DominoUser : Lists users in a Domino Directory
Move-DominoUser : Migrates users to Active Directory

Get-DominoMailbox : Lists Domino mailboxes

Move-DominoMailbox : Migrates mailbox content to Exchange 12

Get-DominoApplication : Lists Domino applications on a server

Move-DominoApplication : Migrates application data to Windows SharePointServices

Beyond these core tasks are more specific tasks such as Get-DominoApplicationData or Add-SharePointApplicationData and a set of tasks around coexistence. This made it easy to build the GUI, but what really is cool (if you like this sort of thing) is that all this functionality can be automated, scripted, and enhanced by you. The sky really is the limit.

enjoy...

Erik