Introduction
When you migrate to Office 365, Migrator for Notes to Exchange (MNE) requires "Full Access" rights to each end-user mailbox in order to populate their new Office 365 mailbox with mail. MNE is designed to automatically grant itself "Full Access" rights at the beginning of the migration and then remove the rights when it is finished.
A slight delay
The issue is that there can be a significant propagation delay, before the rights that MNE grants itself become active. In order to work around this issue there is a "PropagationDelay" parameter that can be added to MNE, so that MNE will grant itself rights and then wait, the configured number of seconds, before attempting to start the migration. Although this solution allows MNE to seamlessly migrate without any additional intervention, this solution can add anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes wait time to the front end of the migration process before data starts moving.
A proactive approach
MNE now includes a new PowerShell cmdlet that is able to proactively grant permissions to the migration collection ahead of time:
Add-MNEMailboxAdminPermission
Here are the steps:
1.) Use the MNE "Office 365 administrative functions (license assignment)" process, or the MNE "Prepare local AD accounts for Azure AD Directory Sync" process, or even an external process to mailbox-enable the users in the User Collection that you intend to migrate to Office 365.
2.) Open a PowerShell Console
3.) Run "Import-Module Quest.MNE.Powershell" in the console to load the MNE PowerShell cmdlets.
4.) Run the following command, customized with the name of the MNE User Collection you will be migrating:
Add-MNEMailboxAdminPermission -CollectionName TestCollection1
5.) You will still need to wait upwards of 30 minutes before starting the migration with the MNE Migrate User Data wizard, but now the migration should start moving data within a few minutes.
6.) Once the migration is complete, the following command can be used to remove the "Full Access" rights using PowerShell:
Remove-MNEMailboxAdminPermission -CollectionName TestCollection1
Additional information
When migrating to Office 365, we would still suggest adding "PropagationDelay=1800" under the "[PowerShell]" heading of your MNE Global Default Settings (see KB article 114843) . This will act as a failsafe in the event the PowerShell cmdlet above was forgotten. During the beginning of the migration process, MNE will detect if it already has "Full Access" rights to the user's mailbox and if it does, then it will ignore the "PropagationDelay" and begin migrating immediately.
In conclusion
For those customers looking to migrate outside of business hours every minute counts, following the steps above, as part of a pre-migration process, will allow data to begin migrating as soon as possible after initiating the migration process.
This is just one of the many PowerShell cmdlets provided with MNE, more can be found in the MNE Administration Guide to help automate your migration process.
Additional information about Migrator for Notes to Exchange can be found on the technical documentation site.
For current customers, you can download Migrator for Notes to Exchange here.
For customers that are interested in evaluating Migrator for Notes to Exchange, you can sign up for a trial here.
If you have any questions or feedback about this or any other feature of MNE, please let us know on the discussion forums!