MPM Q3FY20 - Office 365 and Email Migration: Eight Lessons Learned

LESSON 1. Careful planning is critical to success. Because email is a vital lifeline for nearly every For starters, you need to know exactly what organization today, careful planning of your users, mailboxes, distribution lists, groups, email migration project is essential. While get- public folders and data stores you have. Pay ting from one platform to another is the main special attention to potential challenges, such objective, it’s not your only goal. If your project as large attachments, public folders, archives is to be considered a success, you also need such as Enterprise Vault, and local offline PST to take proactive steps to minimize disruption, files scattered throughout the organization. loss of productivity and revenue impact along You also need to review your current policies TARGET the way, whether you’re undertaking an Office and procedures for handling these items and 365 migration or an Exchange migration. work with your colleagues across the business Exchange 2013 or an earlier ver- Accordingly, customers who’ve been in the to determine whether updates are in order. ECONOCOM GROUP MIGRATION DETAILS SOURCE IBM Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, Exchange sion, Office 365 TOOLS migration trenches advise taking the time to Of course, you’ll also want to assess other con- make a detailed pre-migration assessment of straints, such as migration timeline mandates the current environment. Since every organiza- and available bandwidth. Determine whether tion is different, there is no definitive checklist there is any flexibility concerning dates or to use, but do your level best to leave no budget for infrastructure improvements that stone unturned. could speed the migration. Every minute you SIZE invest in planning will help ensure a successful, More than 5,000 mailboxes worry-free migration with no surprises. Migration Manager for Exchange, Migrator for Notes to Exchange, Migrator for GroupWise, Coexistence Manager for Notes “Each customer is different so the migrations are different also. Any migration of Lotus to Exchange, Exchange to Exchange, or Exchange to O365 must be well prepared.” Tony Allamelou, IT Architect, Econocom Group (source: TechValidate, TVID: 9EC-411-5BE) 3 LESSON 2. Minimize the impact of the migration on your users. However, our customers hasten to point out Before you start any migration, carefully test that there is more to pre-migration planning both the move-forward plan and the back-out than just the technical details; it’s also critical plan. Thorough testing might seem like overkill, to consider how the migration will impact but rest assured you will uncover problems your business and operations. Ideally, your that you wouldn’t want to face once the actual migration will go so smoothly that your internal migrations begin. Despite your best efforts, customers won’t even know it happened. you might have overlooked a dependency, Many of the lessons in this e-book detail specific ways to minimize the impact of your email migration on users. Here, let’s focus just on logistics: scheduling and testing. Be sure to schedule your migrations to minimize the impact to the users in your organization. In particular, migrate users who work together simultaneously, and carefully time the migrations to minimize impact on each group. For example, you might avoid migrating the Finance department near the end of a quarter. SOURCE IBM Lotus Notes, Exchange TARGET a scheduling miscommunication could result Exchange 2016 in a group of users being migrated before they are ready. Also be sure to run one — or several — pilot migrations to validate your approach. Your goal is to test the procedures you have developed and discover gaps and challenges that could cause disruption for your users. That way, you have the opportunity to resolve them before you begin your production migrations. Customer Support Manager, large enterprise banking company 4 MIGRATION DETAILS connectivity may be lost during a migration, or “The goal is to have less customer support the day after the migration.” (source: TechValidate, TVID F92-036-560) LARGE ENTERPRISE BANKING COMPANY TOOLS Migration Manager for Exchange, Migrator for Notes to Exchange, Migration Manager for Email Archives, Coexistence Manager for Notes SIZE More than 10,000 mailboxes