Quest On Demand Migration Reviews

We move M365 workloads. We migrate Teams chats. We migrate SharePoint data. We migrate OneDrive data, and we migrate people's mail.

It supports multiple workloads—such as Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive—all from one place. This is important for us. I would not use it otherwise. They have one or two competitors that I assume perform multiple workloads concurrently.

It provides data security for tenant-to-tenant migrations, but I do not deal with that. If they can do DCC, that is good enough for me. The only thing I am worried about is the security. They have got SOC 1 and SOC 2. They have got every single thing my customers ask for. They are transparent about their data processing. I am reasonably certain that I know where the data is going, and it is not sticking around, so I am not worried about that.

The fact that it is ISO-certified is not important to me, but it is important to my customers. They ask about this from time to time. For me, it is just a tool, like a toolbox, like a hammer or a saw. I know what it does, but every now and then, one out of ten customers—their lawyers or their compliance department—asks a bunch of questions. I just point them to all the certifications. They can decide whether they trust it or not. As far as I am concerned, they have got everything covered.

We could realize its benefits right after deployment. It moves pretty quickly. Once you get it connected to two things and you link the things, it is pretty obvious that it is going to do exactly what you want. I used the old product back when it required a SQL Server. It took a month to install, whereas now, I can start working in days or even hours if I have the right privileges and I am not fighting for the infrastructure and trying to get the customer to give me resources and install all the things in their environment and get connected to the Exchange Server. It is all SaaS now.

It supports the migration of Microsoft Teams, including Teams chats, when it comes to our customers’ collaboration. It is the most difficult thing for them to migrate. It does not come across as the cleanest, and I understand why. There is a limitation of the API, but it is an important functionality. It is a necessary evil. When customers want it, I have to deliver it, but I make every attempt to scope it down. They want all the chats for all the time, which is not practical, so I tell them that I can give them the last 15 days or 30 days, and then they can use some kind of archiving utility on the source side to capture everything for compliance reasons, but I cannot bring across everything. The tool is not made to bring across everything. So, it is important, but it needs to be used appropriately. It is not like mail where they can ask to give them absolutely everything. Quest On Demand Migration moves everything, but it is not always obvious where they are. That is the problem, but it is not their fault. They have done everything possible to bring things across. A common thing is that people are looking for recorded meetings, which are in the OneDrive store of the user who initiated the recording of the meeting. Before you migrate the data, you can go into a Teams chat and click on a meeting, and it will start playing the meeting no matter where you are and no matter which participant you are. Post-migration, when it is on the other side, you have to be the person who recorded the meeting because it comes across through the OneDrive migration, so it is hard for it to recreate the exact chat state with all its full feature functionality on the other side. I understand that there is a limitation of the API. For us, it is just about training the users. We tell them that if something is absolutely important, then back it up themselves. We tell them where to expect things because not everything comes across as clean as they might hope.

We have a 99.9% success rate with migrations. Everything comes through as we would expect. When it does not, we open a support case. It might indicate one giant file in somebody's email that did not come across because there is a 25 MB limitation. Everything is explainable. Every support case I have opened has explained if there is any throttling going on, if there is an outage, or if there is some type of problem. No support case that I have opened has gone into a black hole. They are pretty responsive. I am not worried about that. 

The users are aware of migrations because we do a lot of high touch. We are giving them a new laptop. We are moving the laptop from one domain to another, and it takes a while for their mail to download on the new Outlook client or a new profile. There is always some type of indicator. It is a matter of how disruptive it is or how much time it takes, and that is where we come in and try to make that as minimal as possible. We also handle more complex migrations where other products are involved, such as two-factor authentication, MFA, Duo, Okta, and things like that, and the authentication might not be purely on Azure. Whenever we do that, there is a lot more hand-holding or what we call a white glove type of service. So, they are never totally unaware, but we try to keep it minimal. If we can get them in and out in fifteen minutes, and they are working, that is awesome.

You can batch up large groups. You can tell it to move everything for 200 people, and then it just goes. Once you get things set and configured, it is pretty easy. I can hand it off to people more junior to me who are less trained on the product, and they can be successful.

It does what you think it would do in terms of the dashboard, but we are typically migrating a subset of the users, and it always shows us the macro view. If there was a way to scope it down to just the users that are in scope, that would be more useful. 

It would be more useful if I could scope the dashboard. I would like to be able to scope the users that I want to see to a much smaller list. When I am looking into a tenant with 35,000 accounts, and I am only moving 2,000 of them, I wish that the guys had been smarter about the discovery, and I could have only discovered those accounts, but there is not too much to complain about. They even have a button on the console saying Send An Idea, so it is hard to fault, but I wish they could do discovery through a pop-up dialogue.

I would like a drag-and-drop matching of accounts and mailboxes. I would like to be able to map multiple mailboxes from multiple sources to one mailbox.

I have been using their products on and off for 10 to 15 years. I have been using Quest On Demand for two years. It was six months after it started existing. It is a very new product for them.

It has not slowed us down. It happens every now and then. Most of it is throttling on the tenant or the customer side. A couple of times, I have seen some announcements of instability or problems, but fortunately, we were not doing migrations at that time. Coincidently, just an hour ago, they communicated that they are having stability problems with SharePoint migrations. They just sent out a worldwide announcement, but we are not doing SharePoint migrations, so I am not too worried about that. For mailboxes and everything else, it is pretty cool. It works very well.

We do not do tens of thousands, but I am confident if we needed to, we could do it. We are in the low thousands. I am comfortable with it. I see everything I would expect to see.

They are very responsive. Whether I open a case through support@quest.com or click on Generate Case in the tool, I get somebody who owns the case within minutes. Before I open a case, they recommend articles that fix the problem, so I do not even need to open a case. It is pretty good. I have also got a connection through our partner. I have never had service problems, but if I did, I know I would have the support I need.

I am using their regular support. Premier support would be something for which you need to pay, and I do not think any of my customers pay for that. They just buy regular licenses.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. They can always be slightly better, but I do not know what they can do better.

Positive

I tried to use another solution once, but I could not even get it to authorize, so I gave up. It was surprising. I have just used other Quest products that provided a similar service, but they are all end-of-life products. They were on-premises products. Other than scripting around it, I have not come across other products.

I do not use other solutions from Quest for auditing, recovery, group management, or license management. I am not on the infrastructure side. I do more security, but I know that other parts of my company do use other Quest products.

I have not used Microsoft native migration tools. I know they have got some things, but they are not viable at this point. 

The deployment is pretty easy. We have a more difficult time getting the customers to provide credentials. Quest requires certain privileges, and sometimes, it is just a matter of explaining to the customer why they have to give these privileges to the product. It is a strict requirement of the API from Microsoft. It has nothing to do with Quest. It just requires some education. There are pretty good guides from Quest explaining the security model.

For us, the migration environment is 50/50. Sometimes, we have to do AD migrations, which require the on-premise agent for AD sync, and sometimes, we just do the SaaS. We only do O365, so it is 50/50. We have on-premises and cloud migrations.

We are an integrator. We are consultants. We do it all on behalf of clients.

For deployment, you can have one person if that person knows what he or she is doing. We usually have two people for deployment and training. You have four eyes, and you can prevent mistakes.

It is more than fair for what you get.

We did not evaluate other options. We have got a partnership with them. The pricing is very transparent. I know who my partner manager is. I know some of the sales guys. I can get quotes and I can buy directly from the website, but that is not the only way it would work better. Sometimes, we need to talk to the sales guys. We are getting closer and closer to them, so it is getting easier and easier to turn things around.

My advice to new users would be to be patient. In the training material, one of the very first slides says to be patient. The price for SaaS is that some aspects of it are slower than the on-premises solution. In the on-premises solution, the Quest server is sitting right next to the infrastructure servers, so you can measure things in milliseconds or in seconds. If something takes longer than a minute, you are like, "What is going on?" With the SaaS solution, the default cycle time on something like an AD sync is about 15 minutes. The first time, you are not sure if it is ever going to end, but you need to understand what you have got to point it at, and you need to scope things as tightly as you can. After that, be patient. It will do exactly what you tell it to do. Take the training whether or not you think you need it.

I would rate Quest On Demand Migration a nine out of ten.

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.

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.