An LMS is a big bit of distributed software that allows instructors to load up and track assignments, maintain grades and attendance, and provide a rudimentary online space for students to interact and collaborate. All of the UI for this huge sprawling system was provided in a web interface, which is great for 80 percent of the tasks I needed to complete. But that still left 20 percent of the tasks I wanted to complete that were made much more difficult and time consuming when the UI forced me into a workflow that didn’t make sense for me.

Specifically, I wanted a command line interface into the public APIs so I could do batch operations on grades and assignments. Emails to the LMS support folks came back with predictable, boilerplate apologies and pointers to existing documentation that showed me how to complete the task with the UI.

The frustration of dealing with this scenario is known to any engineer or IT person. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just email those support people and get a response that was not boilerplate? One that didn’t suggest a fist-pumping support person selecting a “ticket closed” flag after a tidy and useless reply?

How about this: what if the response was, “I think we might be able to get that working, let me get back to you”?

That’s fantasy, right?

Not here. At BitTitan, when we commit to a partner relationship, we take commitment seriously. If your issue is blocking you or otherwise causing a ridiculous workaround, we’ll not only help you solve the issue, but we’ll take direct feedback from your scenario and use it to improve our products. And in many cases, your blocking issue may be resolved with a new feature.

Here are three examples of seemingly little features of MigrationWiz that make a big difference. Each one is the result of unique partner scenarios. When implemented, these features saved our partners significant time and headaches. And because we own the entire IP stack of the technology that drives our migrations, these features were created, coded, tested, and deployed in a matter of weeks, not months.

Aligning the stars

Even with great software and thorough planning and testing, migrating a live production messaging environment can be a stressful process. One of our partners wanted the ability to view mailboxes according to a filtering system that they cared about. For example, they wanted to make sure the VIP mailboxes were always easy to track and to report upon. They also wanted a way to get a filtered view of the big picture, and to see the mailboxes that needed more attention, or those that were successfully migrated. Finally, the partner wanted to determine these status views based on their own criteria.

As a result, we built the “star system” into the MigrationWiz dashboard. With the star system you can batch up users according to three color stars and filter on any color. You get to decide what the colors mean and how you want to track them. We’ll filter and present the view you want.

For more information on the star system, see this article in our knowledge base.

Overflowing contacts

Microsoft Professional Services is one of our partners. They were using our tools to migrate a huge sales company from GoogleApps into Office 365. Like many power users, the sales force loaded up their contact items with layers of contact information. Not surprisingly, the specific contact property fields presented in the GoogleApps UI does not map to the contact property fields that are available in Exchange.

Migrating over the extra contact information was a critical requirement for this customer. Working with Microsoft Professional Services, our engineering team designed a feature addition to MigrationWiz that allows you to pipe the unmapped contact property fields into the “Notes” section of an Exchange contact object.

Learn more about how to use this feature in our Knowledge Base.

Below is a screenshot showing how this will look for end users:

Flowing “wrong” data types in public folder migrations

Todd Nelson at the Odytee blog has done a great job of giving us valuable feedback to work with.

Todd hit a wall during a public folder migration to Office 365. In a nutshell, only data types that match the public folder data type configuration would migrate over. So, if you or your customers put a mail item in a public folder that was created as a note container, then the mail items would not migrate in that case.

Todd was working with one of our PMs, Jethro, on this project. We’ll let Todd take it from here:

“I explained the scenario to Jethro and asked if I was missing something. He got back to me a bit later stating the lead developer was going to make an option available that will allow multiple item types from one folder to be migrated to the associated Office 365 folder. I felt like it was Christmas, to get that kind of attention. Apparently, there are advantages to owning the full product stack.”

We couldn’t have said it better!

To learn more about our Partner Program, click here.