Digital communications are undoubtedly a critical part of any organisation. We no longer live in a world where email competes with traditional forms of contact, it's now the accepted norm. If the email server in a business goes down for a day and there is no backup system in place – there's often little to do but close up and go home.
Email is such a crucial element to doing business – and doing it well – that it surprises many email migration specialists to know business leaders and stakeholders are committing to a migration unprepared.
At Email Migrations, we've seen almost every scenario you can think of, which is why we're here to help. While there's no problem that can be undone, performing a migration without the proper tools, research and knowledge can put your business in temporary jeopardy. The most efficient way of avoiding problems in any email migration, however, is a discovery and design stage.
Designing a plan for success
The first thing we assess in this phase are the sizing metrics for the current system being used by the business.
This covers areas such as the number of total user mailboxes, the size of the mailboxes that each business has and the rate of growth. We factor in the rate of growth to determine what will be needed for the new server build. For example, we might check a mailbox and notice it's 50 gigabytes in size. Then we'll want to check what it was 12 months before and see whether it has grown, stayed the same or dropped.
We assess what the current email system is used for – typically just for normal user mailboxes – but above and beyond that, it could also used for shared mailboxes and meeting rooms, and as company application servers.
Application servers might use a mailbox to send out alerts or application-related system emails, which is vital to some businesses. Generating a design that incorporates these factors leads to greater consistency down the line, such as planning to tidy up the original server but leaving it to manage those business-unique critical applications.
The discovery phase of the current system involves interviewing key people in the business.
Discover the pain points for your migration
The discovery phase of the current system also involves interviewing key people in the business. This is to ensure we get a feel for what they use the email systems for, what they think of the email systems in terms of reliability, speed and other metrics, and what their pain points towards a new system are.
This helps us tune the migration plan towards the business perspective as well – instead of talking with just one technical person, it's better to get into the business and understand it as a whole.
Once the discovery phase is finished and we have all the information needed, we can then feed this into the migration assistant tools that allow us to create a design of the system.
If you'd like to know more about the design, discovery and migration process, follow our blog, or get in touch with the experts at Email Migrations today.
