Welcome to 'The CollabTools' Blog

Initial posting by Erik Ashby, Lead Program Manger at Microsoft in Redmond Washington.

Since the initial release of the update Notes mail migration tools (here) last December (and more recently the announcements about the application tools) there have been a wave of questions from customers, partners, consultants, industry experts and others about the tools that we are offering to help customers move to the Microsoft Collaboration Suite. This is not surprising given the amount of interest that we have seen over the past year in this space, so it seemed justified (at least to me) that a blog focusing on these tools was in order.

So, now let me officially welcome you to ‘CollabTools’ the official blog location to discuss the tools used in moving to Microsoft’s collaboration software.

We are starting this blog with the intent to have an open, personal, and technical posting of information focusing on our move tools and related technology. The hope is to engage the community that uses our tools and to give them an insider’s view of our technology and insights to the tools that we are developing. To help keep the posts inline with this intent, everyone who posts blogs are on the development team and are personally responsible for the development of these tools. This is for a couple of reasons: First, to provide a direct mechanism for us (the development team of these tools) to share some of the internals of the work that we are doing those who are actually using the tools. Second: It is a personal way that we as the development team can provide feedback into the community around common questions or areas.

To be clear, these blogs are not about the overall value of the Microsoft collaboration platform. Given the content that is already available on this subject (here) we did not what to reiterate on that. This blog is intended to remain technical about the tools. (Plus it seems much more interesting anyway given that is what we work on.)

We wanted to keep this initial posting short, but expect many more postings to come. Already there is a queue of items/questions just waiting to be discussed about our tools. Now that we have released several tools (such as the messaging and directory tools) and have others in beta (like the Application Analyzer) or announced (like the Data Migrator) there will be much to discuss.

If you have any specific areas you would like discussed, please post send an e-mail to this blog to place on the queue. Anyway we are looking forward to sharing more about us, our team and our products.

Erik Ashby
Lead Program Manger at Microsoft in Redmond Washington