Berenschot – Protecting the Future of Enterprise Email Records

Email is a vital business communication platform for Berenschot, and for many years it had been storing historic email records in a dedicated archive that worked alongside its Microsoft Exchange email service.

When the time came to upgrade its email service to Microsoft Exchange 2010, Berenschot discovered that its archive application, Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS, did not yet support this platform and that a product roadmap was unavailable.

Delaying its planned Exchange upgrade was not an option. This, combined with the fact that support for the EAS product was no longer considered adequate, led to the decision to switch to a brand new archive application.

EMC’s latest enterprise-level archiving platform, SourceOne was selected. Fully Exchange 2010-ready, SourceOne also offered Berenschot the secure retention and scalability that it had with EAS.

Manually Migrating Millions of Emails Wasn’t an Option

According to Lloyd Hopper, Project Manager at ZXFactory, the EMC partner and IT infrastructure experts called in to oversee the migration to SourceOne at Berenschot:

“Berenschot had over 7 million emails that needed to be moved out of EAS and into SourceOne, so we were keen to reduce the impact of moving on staff, and, at the same time, reduce the amount of labour involved. Although it would have been possible to move users manually a mailbox at a time, this would have cost us so much lead time that it wasn’t a viable option.”

Fully Automated, Fully Audited Migration

ZXFactory identified email archive migration specialists, Essential Computing, as a partner that could help with the data move. Working in conjunction with migration software from Transvault, Essential was able to automate the migration to SourceOne as well as provide a full audit of what data had been migrated, which was another vital requirement for Berenschot in order to preserve the integrity of its business records. The legacy data was moved in one step, directly from EAS and into SourceOne using an API connection. This approach eliminated the need for interim storage and multiple steps that can risk data loss and tampering as well as introduce the opportunity for human error. It also streamlined the migration process, although there were a number of hurdles along the way.

Find out more about migrating away from EMC SourceOne or get more details on SourceOne going end-of-life and what you need to do. 

Delivered With Expertise to Address the Challenges

According to Annie Holder, a support analyst at Essential:

“No migration is ever straightforward and there are often lots of complications that go beyond simply migrating archived data. For example, converting shortcuts in users’ mailboxes proved particularly challenging in this project, but we were able to come up with a suitable workaround that ensured a seamless transition for end users.”

Concluded Hopper:

“The Essential team had a flexible and realistic approach to the project, and when any problems arose they helped fix them in a timely manner. Their staff members were very knowledgeable and able to provide assistance with issues that were in fact ‘out of scope’ yet related to the migration project.”