Microsoft and Binary Tree Partner for Simplified Migrations to Office 365

Migrating to Microsoft Office 365 is about to become a lot easier, at least for a certain segment of migrators. Today, Binary Tree announced that Microsoft will obtain a non-exclusive license to Binary Tree's migration and coexistence technology to help move users from Lotus Notes/Domino environments to Office 365. Microsoft's intent is to incorporate the Binary Tree technology with Office 365 to provide an integrated migration solution for Notes users.

Binary Tree is well-known for its migration products centered around Microsoft Exchange Server. Last year, the company's E2E Complete solution won the Best of Connections 2011 award in the messaging and unified communications (UC) category at the Fall Exchange Connections event. Binary Tree actually started in the Notes space, however, and has been working with data extraction and migration in Notes and Exchange Server environments for twenty years.

Microsoft will be licensing several Binary Tree products under this agreement. CMT Inspector analyzes your Notes environment to help you properly plan the migration. CMT for Exchange is the actual migration product for Lotus Notes/Domino to Exchange moves, including email, calendar, and contacts. CMT for Coexistence provides interoperability between Exchange and Notes/Domino during migrations, which should be particularly useful for larger environments that can't make the whole move in a weekend. Finally, if you've got custom applications tied to your Notes environment, CMT for SharePoint can help migrate data from those applications to SharePoint. Binary Tree's application remediation component of CMT for Coexistence, known as ZApp, isn't part of this deal and can continue to be purchased from Binary Tree or partners for customers needing to run email-enabled workflow applications in Lotus Notes when their users are on Microsoft Outlook.

This combination of products should provide what you need for almost any Notes to Exchange migration. Although Microsoft hasn't announced a specific timeline, they intend to provide an integrated solution for Office 365 moves, making it as easy and cost-effective as possible for people to move to this cloud service from Notes. This arrangement is non-exclusive and does not cover migration to on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange. Binary Tree will continue to offer all of these products through its normal channels to serve customers moving to Exchange on-premises or to hosted Exchange versions from other cloud providers.

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