Quest On Demand Migration Reviews

We use the solution for M&A - Office 365 tenant mergers.

We can migrate all of our users/shared mailboxes/OneDrives/MS Teams/SharePoint Online into one dashboard! 

We can connect a source tenant in seconds, perform an initial discovery, and work out the number of licenses we need (and the volume of data that needs to be moved). This allows us to accurately plan and allocate the necessary resources to the project from the outset. 

We can rapidly provide high-level plans with confidence to key stakeholders.

ODM has given us the platform to rapidly support our M&A activities and tenant consolidation from the get-go. We're able to pre-stage all of our users' data from the various O365 services and minimize the cutover window from tenant to tenant. ODM saves time by not having to continually monitor migration processes through the use of task scheduling and email alerting.

The comprehensive user guide allows you to self-skill or works with the Pro Services team for knowledge transfer. Quest genuinely is flexible and you can do what works for you.

It's a "one-stop shop" for tenant-to-tenant migration, negating the requirement for various tooling and additional license costs. We can easily and simply work out the cost for any migration work that is required with the licensing model.

The ease of use is great. We can begin skilling multiple members of the team to support concurrent M&A migrations to offer better support to our businsses ambitions around growth.

Being able to migrate on-prem directory synced accounts/shared mailboxes to cloud-only is a huge plus point for those wanting to move away from the traditional Active Directory.

They need to make the dashboard editable in the browser instead of only through CSV/scanning tenants. This would have sped up correcting any mistakes or changes to mappings.

They should introduce a module for migrating power automation for users.

There needs to be better handling of the various M365 group states instead of having to ensure you follow the exacting order for migrating them. Think M365 groups with/without Teams or with/without SharePoint sites attached.

Error handling resolution could be a little more helpful with some more tips/presenting the entire error front and center. That said, the support team is willing to help with any issues you may have with misconfigured source tenants!

We opted not to migrate chats due to how they are presented to the target users. The guide does say this is a Microsoft limitation.

Lastly, allow us to set the session timeout and be tab aware.

I've used the solution for two months.

Collections offer you the ability to run concurrent tasks and logically group your migrations.

They have an excellent and attentive support team!

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup is super straightforward. You can set up your accounts in each tenant and simply sign in.

You have to apply some thought to splitting your migration workloads into collections to concurrently run tasks and be optimal with the Microsoft limitations/throttling.

We implemented the solution in-house, leaning heavily on the ODM-publicized documentation.

We looked into various other options, including:

• Avepoint
• Bit-titan
• Sharegate

Each had its own "issues," which meant they didn't quite work for us in their current states.

We use it for migrating the users and data from one company's domain into another company's domain. We are merging tenants to align both companies under a single Azure environment.

We still haven't finished the migration yet.

It's a cloud solution and we connect it to our Azure environment to handle the migration.

It has completely sped up the process of migrating files. We would have had to have done that manually and then checked on what were the outstanding copies of files to be uploaded or what had changed in the interim. I wouldn't necessarily say it has improved anything, but speed and efficiency have definitely been realized as a result of the tool.

We're using it to migrate Microsoft Teams which is still a fairly new tool. It's only about three or four years old. And having a partner that really understands it and knows the ins and outs and can answer questions—and if they don't know the answers to the questions, they go and find out or they try and develop a solution for you—is absolutely vital.

As the project manager, I really like the dashboard feature where I can see what the progress is. That allows me to do some easy reporting. The dashboard is incredibly easy to use. Even a non-IT persona could look at the dashboard and get all the information they need to know.

Also, the solution supports multiple workloads. We've got Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Azure under the same place. It's really easy to see the progress in each of those areas. It's very important to have everything in one place. Otherwise, we'd have to use different platforms to handle different parts of the migration.

We also have no issue with the security or the privacy surrounding it. They seem to have thought of those elements.

In addition, it's absolutely critical that On Demand Migration is ISO-certified. As a company, we are not exposing ourselves to risk during the day-to-day. And when we are choosing a migration partner, we have to assess all of those types of requirements. If a solution is not as certified as we are, then we're not going to go with it. The fact that this solution is ISO-certified is incredibly important.

In terms of Microsoft Teams, the only disappointment for us has been how the chats are migrated. They just don't look exactly the same as they would if you were logging on as normal. Obviously, when it comes to the user experience, you want the look and feel of everything to be replicated identically, and chats is the only part of it that doesn't look identical. However, it's not a "car crash." It's a slight deviation from what people would expect. I had to explain that to the company this morning and no one raised an eyebrow or had any complaint or feedback about it. They just accepted that not every tool is 100 percent perfect. 

That is the only drawback and the only area that the tool doesn't seem to cover, but I don't think it's a limitation of the tool. I think it's a limitation of Teams. So we completely understand why, and maybe in the future they will work out a way to work with Microsoft to get that to look and feel a bit better.

We've been using Quest On Demand Migration for about one month.

It has been very stable. There has been no reason to question that at all.

It's incredibly scalable. We are actually only migrating 170 users and Quest said that's very small in terms of the scale of migrations they're used to. They can handle up to hundreds and thousands of users because the tool is built to scale.

We had some calls with Quest's sales and solutions teams prior to the deployment, where we are asked questions about functionality and they answered those questions, but I don't think we've been in touch with them since we had the tool, which is encouraging.

We haven't specifically used Quest tech support, but I have no doubt that a couple of the people they had on the calls with us were from their tech support team. They were very knowledgeable.

Positive

The initial setup of On Demand Migration was very straightforward. It was done in 10 to 15 minutes. The confirmation and the instructions to log in were sent to me and I set up an account for my colleague who is the lead engineer. He then attached the domain, or the tenant, to the tool and started creating users almost immediately. Within a couple of days he was able to start migrating the data.

It's difficult to measure ROI, but as I said before, we would have had to do things very manually without this solution. You set the parameters in the tool and it goes off and does the job. Then it tells you what it couldn't do and you just fix that. Otherwise, we'd have to be doing these 170 users manually, individually, checking them again and again. The tool gives that time back to us. So the only return on investment is that we are not spending man-hours looking at things.

I thought On Demand Migration would be more expensive. I'm pleased with the cost that was quoted. We've not taken on any professional consultancy from them. That's where the costs can add up and they were very honest about that. We didn't need to because we had a seasoned lead engineer working with us. The cost of the individual licenses is reasonable for what the software does.

In a previous company I used MigrationWiz, but I don't have in-depth knowledge of it because I wasn't part of the project team. MigrationWiz was used to cover some of the things that Quest can do, but it wasn't a holistic solution, whereas Quest is.

It was our lead engineer who told us to go with Quest because of the recent merger or partnership with Binary Tree Power365. The fact that those two came together made it a very attractive proposition because they covered off a lot more bases.

Most users are aware that they're being migrated and, once it has happened, there will be some things that will noticeably change because their organization is merging with another organization. Things like the URL they will use for SharePoint and for their OneDrive for Business will change. They are going to notice those things, but day-to-day, they should notice very little impact.

I'd absolutely encourage others who are considering this solution to go ahead. I don't think there's another tool in the market that covers the same scope that it covers. I would advise them about the Teams chats, but even by the time this review is published they may have fixed the problems with those chats. It's such a minor point that it's just a cost of doing business. Not everything's going to be 100 percent perfect. But if anyone were to ask me for a recommendation for a tool, I wouldn't say try this or this. I would say the only one you need to know is Quest.

Most use cases for Quest On Demand Migration are when a customer has an old tenant, and for some reason they have to migrate their data to a new Office 365 tenant.

I'm an independent consultant working with products from Quest, and doing projects with those products for my customers. Certain customers organize their licenses themselves, because they have their own dealer. In some cases, I also organize the license and resell products to the customer.

On Demand Migration is a cloud product, software as a service.

The bottom line is that using On Demand Migration results in less effort for my customers to bring data over or to work with the data at a new location. It's not only less effort but there is less complexity and less cost involved. If they would have to do this type of work manually or build their own solution, that would cost them endless money. Quantifying how much they save by using the solution is very difficult, but building something like this on their own would require spending five or 10 times what they invest for the licenses for the product.

The time savings are similar, on the order of five to 15 times less when using the solution as compared to building one on their own.

The solution is really stable when it comes to mailbox migration and all of the following work very well:

• the mail content 
• the OneDrive for Business content
• migrating all Azure AD objects.

These three parts are really solid.

It's really easy to configure and you don't have to deal with errors. It's migration that I would call "fire-and-forget."

It's definitely the Microsoft Teams functionality that has a lot of aspects where improvements are needed. Microsoft 365 Groups are tightly connected to Teams and there are a lot of improvements needed there as well.

I see potential in the SharePoint functionality. But right now, when it comes to SharePoint migration, we often have to use another tool because the SharePoint part in On Demand Migration is like a kid; it's very young and not mature. I would get rid of other products and only use On Demand Migration for SharePoint, if I could. The capability is there, but it is not that strong at the moment. That could change in the future.

I have been using Quest On Demand Migration for about one and a half years, but I have been working with Quest products for about 15 years.

It's potentially solid. Mailbox and Azure AD object functionality are very solid. It's the Teams stuff, especially, that is not that solid. It has also to do with the interfaces to other manufacturers' products, among other things; it's not that solid and stable at all.

There is also a part called Public Folder which is a pain. You can solve issues with it, as a consultant, behind the scenes, but never show to a customer how painful that is.

It's quite scalable. But the more you have to scale, the bigger the project is, the more you need to automate. One problem with the product is that we, as independent consultants, do not have access to the automation components, which exist, apparently. If I had to do a really large project and automate, I think I would drown in trouble. It would make life complicated and would take more effort. I know from Quest consultants that those automation interfaces are around, but we are not allowed to use them at the moment, unfortunately.

It's scalable for small and mid-size projects, but when it comes to large stuff it could be complicated.

In terms of increasing our usage of the solution, if the projects are around and they are increasing, I would definitely increasingly use it. When you're familiar with something, you aren't interested in using another product.

My experience with Quest technical support has been very good. They are also human beings, so they can't necessarily help with every case, but they really are okay. They are helpful.

In this field, you don't really have many options. There is the SharePoint Migration Tool, which I have used. And it has happened, at times, in the past, that I have used tools from other vendors.

Setting up On Demand Migration is very straightforward. Depending on the customer's environment it usually takes three hours, perhaps half a day.

The implementation strategy always involves talking to the customer to make sure I understand what kind of security setup they have. That's the most important thing to get it working.

I'm not very familiar with other similar solutions because I'm really focused on Quest. But in terms of how long the setup takes, you don't have hundreds of thousands of settings to configure. It's really easy to use.

Sometimes Quest Support is involved in the setup. If the standard procedure does not work, if there are errors I'm not familiar with, then I involve Quest support. In most cases, it's a standard procedure and you don't have to involve anybody. But it does happen.

Its price-to-value ratio is quite okay. It's much better than it was one year ago.

The solution is on the more expensive side, when you compare it not only to BitTitan but to other tools in the cloud market. Of course, you receive things like Quest's support organization. 

Licensing is not really easy. You don't have the option to buy a very small license to just migrate certain stuff. You always get pushed to use enterprise or big licenses, which include things that the customer never uses. I miss granularity on price at times.

I have had hands-on experience with Metalogix, when it comes to SharePoint, and I have done one project with BitTitan.

It's difficult to compare Metalogix with On Demand Migration because they are completely different, including the architecture. BitTitan is quite similar to On Demand Migration in a lot of areas. BitTitan is really its closest competitor.

The big feature that is most spoken about when it comes to On Demand Migration is the ability to migrate Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and 365 Groups content, and public folders. I use those features, but they are more complicated and not that stable at the moment. Still, they are useful and helpful.

The user-friendliness is okay. In most cases, my customers don't really use the product. They just tell me, "Do it. Use this product," so they cannot say if it's user-friendly or not. The end users almost do not see anything directly in the product.

Anybody who is using the product should have a look at the current limitations. The documentation is very up-to-date, so have a look at what the product is capable of doing and what it's not capable of. Quest is really transparent. 

Compare prices with other vendors' products. Keep in mind that the support from Quest is really good so you should include that when looking at the prices and costs. That's quite important. 

Most importantly—and here is the consultant in me speaking—if you're a Quest customer, don't use it on your own. Get somebody involved who has already used it to help you. It will work much better.