Simplify pre-migration analysis with Essentials

Welcome. This is Quest Unscripted. A vlog series on trending topics-- And Quest solutions related to Active Directory-- Office 365-- --oh, and don't forget Azure AD. You're here because you have questions. We're here because we have answers-- I think. We will address questions we've received from customers-- Experiencing the same challenges as you. All the goal of helping you confidently move-- Manage-- And secure your Microsoft environment. We call the show Quest Unscripted because-- Except for this intro-- Nothing we say is scripted or rehearsed. And we're pretty sure you'll notice that right away. Hey, folks. This is Roy on screen. My name is Ghazwan, and we have Bryan Patton, and we're all from Quest. We're going to be talking about-- you know what, Roy? I was doing-- I was sitting on a webcast where we were helping out a customer do a migration from their files shares to OneDrive, and the consultant had opened up Essentials, and opened up the pre-migration analysis component of Essentials. And I thought, oh my God, like I have to tell every single customer about this little utility that we have because it really helped reduce the planning and pre-migration time that you can put into things, so that you're executing migrations on time and you're efficient doing it. So my question to you is, can you tell us a little bit about the pre-migration analysis that's built into Essentials? And what it can do? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So Essentials is cool because it has a variety of pre-migration analysis reports built into it. The two notable ones are based on source, whether you're coming from a so-called familiar SharePoint territory and moving to 365, or whether you're coming from a file system. And in both situations the idea behind the pre-migration analysis reporting is to give you information that's going to be relevant to that specific use case of moving from that particular source into the 365 paradigm, right? So from a-- while there's tons of things that'll give you reports that we even sell, right? So I can probably cite Enterprise Reporter and things like that to give you information about file systems, but when it comes to moving that data to the 365 target now we need to know things along the lines of is this content-- or am I going to have to-- am I going to run into issues with file path lengths? Am I going to run in to block file extensions? Am I going to run into all these very, very specific and unique factors that come into play with the 365, and specifically SharePoint Online world. We can kind of pinpoint those and target those two. I mean the whole goal of it all is to prepare you as an operator for the remediation that will very likely be necessary when transforming from that file share paradigm to the Office 365 world. Roy, I have a question for you as well. I'm seeing like all the different data that you're moving to this new system, what's the most common time period where our customers say, you know what, we don't need data that's older than x date? What day do you usually say? Well, that's kind of up in the air. So it changes obviously from client to client, but generally I mean these days it's like this quarter or this past two quarters because right now everyone's trying to move for the pandemic to get off online, it's the online paradigm. The most critical data is going to be defined by the need of the company, but generally speaking quarter or two. You know passed by half fiscal year, or something along those lines. But again, it changes depending. And really just for those who don't know, so what's the output of that file that we're producing from pre-migration analysis? So today-- and product that I'm referring to, which is called Essentials for Office 365-- we put that out in the CSV format. And that's cool because it's like it's enriched CSV so that you get like a rack report style scenario. So you see reds, ambers, and greens. Red is stuff that just flat out isn't going to move very easily, if at all. Amber's are things you're probably going to have to take some sort of steps to remediate or mitigate in mid-flight. And then green this stuff that's just going to come across no problem. And there's lots of different factors that play into what defines red, amber, and green, and you have total control over those. So it's a pretty cool dynamic little system, and at least in our experience so far it's been very helpful for when people use it. Yeah, I was surprised when I saw the results when we ran it in their environment. I was like everything is like right there. You go from knowing nothing about the environment all of a sudden oh, I see what my problems are going to be. And then you can obviously start going the path of what do I do about it. Roy you mentioned Enterprise Reporter, you mentioned file reporting, so Bryan, I know that's not the focus, but in Enterprise Reporter we do some pre-migration reporting, and we do have some file reporting as well. So I'm not sure if you want to address the file reporting from pre-migration, or just pre-migration reporting and Enterprise Reportor in general. Yeah. Yes, so depending on the different type of migration, there are different reports I would want to run. If I'm doing an AD to AD migration, I want to find out where do we have duplicate users? Where we have duplicate groups? Duplicate computer names across different forests that maybe migrating. And talking about the context of data, I may just want to have a better understanding of what file types do we have out there? We do have a storage analysis piece, where I can get some different visualizations of different unused data, or data that has been used in x period of time. Where do I have MPEG files, JPEG files? Other things that you may see and identify as against your organization policy. You can identify that so you can create your criteria of stuff that you may just want to leave behind in the legacy environment, so you could migrate just what is relevant to the existing business today. And you know what, the value and the power of what Quest can bring to the table is the fact that we are talking about files shared to Office 365, pre-migration analysis work, and we're also talking about Active Directory to Active Directory pre-migration analysis work. We really span the Microsoft platform end to end. Wait Ghazwan, just wanted to point out not everybody is going to move completely to Microsoft 365. So if you want to answer the question, where does Ghazwan have access to both my on-premises file servers or NAS devices as well as OneDrive for Business, we can kind of correlate and pair that different data together for you as well. Correct. Cool. Well, I appreciate both of your time. Thank you.