Creating a Deployment Plan

After considering all the various issues involved in your migration and forming the migration team, you are ready to write the plan. A rough plan formulated in your head is not enough. Your plan must be detailed on paper, and all team members should review it for holes and problems before you move forward.

A test environment that can simulate your current platform and determine the viability of your plan is essential. Such an environment gives you two important advantages. First, you see whether your plan will work. Second, you have a chance to practice your skills at migrating the information. You’ll become familiar with the screens, choices, and options. Learning about the migration from a semi-real-world scenario will help eliminate surprises.

Most smaller and medium-sized organizations don’t have the funds or space to create a simulated environment. But those organizations that do have space and can afford a testing lab will be miles ahead in resolving problems and can even prevent problems from occurring during the real migration.

As part of this migration process, you should create a contingency plan that gives you options in case of failure, disaster, or unexpected results. A contingency plan should include the following:

• Outline of anticipated problems and methods to solve them

• Rollback plans at each stage of the migration process

• Clear definition of the point at which a rollback is no longer desirable or is impossible

• Method and order for migrating DRBHS, BHS, and public folders

• Method of decommissioning old servers

• When to and who will move the Exchange Server 2003 into Native Mode