Like most organizations, you have probably considered migrating your company’s email at some point. Email migration can be a difficult process, but in the end it can make your organization better. And if management is requesting the change, you will make them happy too.
If you have never migrated email platforms, consider yourself lucky. There is, however, a good chance that you will change email systems at some point. Especially with many companies migrating to Office 365 or Gmail at the moment. If you are planning an email migration, here are some important things your company should consider:
- Costs – How much will the email migration and new email system cost your company?
- Data preservation – There could be a possibility that you lose data during the migration.
- How long will the email migration take? – Email migrations can be very time-consuming.
- Downtime – email system downtime when migrating
- Directory migration – when migrating email systems, you may need to migrate your directory
- Email archiving – Archiving helps ensure regulatory compliance, helps you better manage and protect your data, and can help in the migration process.
Finding the Right Email Migration Solution
In light of these issues and considerations, you will need to ensure that you make the right choice for your email migration. You will need to determine what needs to be migrated, and if you should implement a third-party solution to help you with that migration. When deciding on a migration solution, you need to look for a solution that:
- Is cost effective for your organization
- Migrates all your email data
- Can perform the email migration quickly
- Ensures minimal downtime
Email Archiving – Prepare for Future Email Migration
There are many solutions on the market that can migrate your email to Office 365, Gmail, Exchange, etc. However, most of them are one-time-use only migration tools, and because many organizations switch email systems multiple times, these solutions may not fit your needs. To ensure that your organization is ready for future migrations, you should consider deploying an email archiving solution to assist in the migration.
With an archiving solution like Retain by GWAVA in place, your company will archive your email messages for Office 365, Gmail, Exchange, or Groupwise, plus appointments and other data in a platform agnostic format. That way, if and when you decide to migrate your email system in the future, you will not need worry about migrating all of your data, because it will already be archived. And, because your email data is stored in a platform agnostic format, Retain makes migration quick and simple. If your organization decides to migrate to a new email platform, just implement your new email system, tie that system to Retain, and you are set! Retain will archive the new system alongside the old system data, allowing you to access all your email data, from one central archive.
Email Data Migration with Retain
Retain Unified Archiving supports archiving multi-platform email systems, including Exchange, Office 365, Gmail and GroupWise in one central archive. And because Retain archives email data in a platform agnostic format, migrating your email data with Retain is quick and simple.
Here are 5 simple steps for migrating email data with Retain:
- Implement a Retain server on-prem or in our Cloud.
- Tie your email system to the Retain Archive.
- Archive all existing email data in Retain, including email messages, appointments, files, attachments, folders, labels and calendar items.
- Once migrated, messages from the old email system in the archive, are accessible by end users and administrators through the email client plugin (available in Outlook, OWA, GroupWise and GroupWise Web Access) or web browser. The email plugin allows you to access the Retain archived directly from your email system, meaning that all archived email, whether it is from the new or the old system is easily available.
- Groupwise systems can then use GWAVA’s Migration toolkit to provision user accounts and migrate shared services (see the section “Email Migration with the Migration Toolkit” below for more information) Exchange, Office 365 or Gmail systems can be provisioned with other third party migration utility tools. Or you can contact one of our partners to help you.
Migrations with Retain are simple! Once your data is migrated to the archive, you will benefit from the Retain Unified Archive system, which provides multi-platform unified message archiving of all email, social media, instant messaging, web search and mobile communication data for case assessment, search, and eDiscovery. This enables your organization to quickly access, search, and audit archived communication data. Easily place litigation holds, print, forward, save, redact, and export your message data. Retain reduces cost, mitigates risk, and manages complexity on prem or in the cloud.
The Migration Toolkit by GWAVA – The Key to Simple GroupWise Migrations
If you are planning on moving from Micro Focus GroupWise to Exchange or Office 365, GWAVA offers the Migration Toolkit. The Migration Toolkit is the easiest, safest way to transfer data between email systems and to perform email migrations. It specializes in efficiently and thoroughly storing, extracting, indexing, searching, publishing and importing email and its associated data. In the email extraction process, the Toolkit copies existing email data into a platform-agnostic archive format. From there, the data can be easily migrated into Microsoft Exchange or Office 365. The toolkit uses sophisticated extraction technologies to remove all the common barriers to migrating archived data and so much more. We understand your concerns and deliver a migration experience that is easy, within budget and completed on schedule.
Once your email system is migrated, Retain Unified Archiving will archive your email, social media and mobile messaging in one unified location. Retain enables you to seamlessly archive a single- or mixed-messaging platform environment—in addition to social messaging and mobile communication—in one central location.
Osterman Research has a valuable whitepaper that expounds on some of the considerations of email migration. Download this FREE whitepaper is titled “Best Practices for Managing Email Archiving”.
