To have a successful email migration, you need to determine the technology and the budget. You also need a well thought out, detailed plan that demonstrates you’ve considered all the challenges you might face when your users encounter a new email platform.
Not all migration solutions or companies are created equal. Indeed, there are many migration solutions available today and a lot of them entice clients by advertising a FREE migration service to get you onto their platform. In addition, there are also many Cloud based migration tools available.
- How do you choose?
- Should you save the company’s budget and try one of the free services?
- Do they really include everything you’ll need?
- What happens if you need support?
- And, who is going to explain what you might not understand?
- Can you afford a loss of data or more importantly to disrupt your users?
Given these challenges, it is important to identify who your allies will be in this transition and who can best support a flawless, successful email migration.
Questions to Determine Risk
Outlined below are the 7 questions you as an IT professional need to ask your potential vendor in evaluating the proposed migration process. The answers will tell you if you can expect a successful migration or if you will be at risk.
- If you will outsource the migration, is the work being done in the US or offshore? This could be relevant given the sensitivity of your data and the unknown content.
- What is the impact of the solution on my users? For example, do my users need to log out? Are there periods where they cannot use the system?
- What about personal archives? Does the proposed solution address the processing of personal archive data? If these volumes of emails are lost, historical and relevant data may not be recovered post migration, and this could indeed put the organization at risk.
More Questions - Will all the data be migrated? Not just email but also appointments, tasks, notes and contacts? Imagine having the conversation with the CEO that his key appointment was missed because it got lost from his calendar? Or the organization is in litigation and a key date for an event is missing in the historical calendar? The partner you choose should have historical success with these details.
- Can you filter out certain messages from migrating based on parameters such as date, content or message type? To avoid unnecessary data bloat, your vendor should be able to adapt their process to select and migrate only the data that is required. Additionally, they should be able to recommend policies for archival and retention. Enabling best practices here will provide for the best use of time, budget and storage.
- How long will it take and what internal resources do I need to commit to this project? There is a cost associated with maintaining, licensing and supporting separate platforms for extended periods and for disruptions and conflicts with other important projects. It is best to move quickly and decisively with minimal impact.
- What is the anticipated data loss? And do you provide forensics reporting to identify non-migrated messages? Having a vendor that can provide you with a statistical summary of their data loss track record is important. Also being able to identify data loss from forensic reports means that your vendor takes it seriously.
Fast and Secure
Messaging Architects, an eMazzanti Technologies company, is an experienced group of consulting engineers and project managers who use the right tools for the job. We analyze your requirements and provide email migration solutions tailored to your situation. Then we will migrate all your content or a portion of it. We can also screen that content and ensure that only the data you specify is transferred.
Messaging Architects offers a migration solution that protects your data from any type of security compromise and or loss. This can be in the form of an on-premise migration solution or cloud-based in Azure. That is easily tied to specific locations where you identify your data.
Our methodologies are designed to get you to the new platform as quickly as possible. We do that with minimal disruptions and loss of data, which is generally less than 0.05%. We conduct most of the work remotely and efficiently use your resources as well as ours.
Successful Email Migration Experts
At Messaging Architects, we have over 50 collective years of experience in email migrations from legacy Novell Groupwise platforms to Exchange, Gmail and now Office 365. Our job as your migration expert is to help you determine what you need to know to make sure your migration is completed on time, on budget and without disruption.
Messaging Architects addresses every migration whether its 100 users or 100,000 users with the same diligence and attention to detail. Our experienced and dedicated team of consultants walks you through the migration from start to finish. We provide guidance and status updates, to maintain consistency and predictability from start to finish.
