What is our primary use case?
I am a technical officer for a university. We are merging two institutions into a single tenant, so all the existing systems need to be migrated to the new tenant. We need to migrate all our Microsoft resources and applications from the other servers to the current environment. We use Quest for that.
How has it helped my organization?
If a user has been migrated from one tenant to another, Quest migrates all their data, including their Microsoft Teams data. In rare cases, we might move a single mailbox from one user to the other tenant. They have several options to choose from. You can migrate the whole OneDrive or opt for a single version or multiple versions of files to be synced and migrated across the client. We can see the analytics of each individual user's mailbox content. You can see how much has been migrated and what's left. If the sync has failed, you can go back and redo it.
You can do all the Teams data. We have migrated all the Teams channels and Teams files within the channel itself, but we have not migrated individual chats. I think there is an option to migrate an individual chat up to only 30 or 90 days. We don't need to migrate the Teams chats. We only migrated data from the Teams channels.
About 90 percent of our users were satisfied with the migration. About 10 percent could not migrate fully because of bad mailbox rules or a corrupted folder. Some mailbox folders did not appear on the new tenant. We need support to re-migrate the mailbox.
What is most valuable?
Quest allows you to customize your migration. For example, you can opt only to migrate Microsoft Teams and the related data or you can migrate all of Office 365. You can also choose to migrate accounts and mailboxes. Sometimes, we don't want to migrate SharePoint data, or we only want to migrate specific users.
Quest's support for multiple workloads is critical, especially when dealing with large volumes of data. Once you've linked Exchange, Teams, and OneDrive, you can easily implement a policy for the workloads and migrate them all simultaneously.
The interface is easy to use. They have a project card for each or each tenant. We are merging two universities, so each has its own project card to manage users or devices. The interface is clear, so you aren't confused about where you are going or which department you are migrating to. The project cards are nicely displayed on the interface. The workflows or desktop agents that are interlinked with the policies are given a separate module where you can see all the policies or workflows that you can set up for migrating the environment.
What needs improvement?
Their support interface is not so great because you need to go through several links before you can raise the ticket. Sometimes the interface freezes up, and there is some downtime. They give us some notice. It says at the top of the interface that there will be scheduled maintenance in a given region or there is currently an outage. You can see upcoming downtime in the portal and plan accordingly.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used Quest for one year.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Quest support nine out of ten. They always respond in less than 24 hours. We contacted them about an issue with the desktop agent on all the desktops we are trying to migrate from the old tenant. That did not work as expected. It was the only case that took several days to resolve. For all other queries and small issues like agent updates, they have provided a solution within 24 hours.
They send regular emails about outages and planned maintenance. Quest support is nice, and the notifications are accurate. They keep us informed about every issue and whether the notifications are relevant to us. When you log into the portal, you can immediately see an upcoming service interruption, and plan accordingly for the migration.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial installation went fine, but we had limited time to discuss the project with the Quest team once it started. They gave us an overview of the Quest tool but did not discuss its entire technical side. The deployment went smoothly. All the data has to be migrated at the same time. We started with mailboxes and Teams. Once that was done, we migrated Microsoft groups.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing model is nice. You don't need to assign everyone the same role or subscription for each administrator of each project project card. There are different roles and you can pay for a license based on how many features they can access. I don't know how much it costs, but the licensing is easy to understand. I'm also unsure whether you can get government discounts or if there is some flexibility to negotiate.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
It's critical that Quest is an ISO-certified solution because all the universities are managed by the government. We have strict requirements for data security Demand everything has to be done accordingly. We have an SLA with an IT services provider and they deal with Quest. In 2022, we started looking at Quest on Demand because other universities already use it. That's why our IT consultan recommended it.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Quest On-Demand Migration nine out of ten. Before implementing Quest, I recommend auditing the configuration of your on-prem and cloud environment. Once you decide to purchase Quest, you should determine what subscriptions or licenses you have in case there are any updates of any features or the agents. You need to be careful when managing it and have a proper deployment team that can communicate to the end user what's going on.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.