Celebrating 15 years of Migration Success

This month is a good time for reflection, as it marks 15 years since the first installation of Transvault software in a customer environment. In that time, our Partners have delivered over 2,600 migrations in 43 countries. In doing so, they’ve massively reduced the lock-in inherent in archive systems and enabled their customers to benefit from platforms such as Microsoft 365.

We want to take some time to celebrate the milestones Transvault has achieved over that time. And offer a sincere thank you to the many talented individuals in our Partner and customer organisations, along with our colleagues past and present, for their roles in achieving this success.

A key focus of Transvault’s design had to be bullet-proof integrity and reporting for the largest and most complex migrations. We needed the capability to focus on the one message, out of millions, that was an anomaly. Building an algorithm to correct that specific issue, testing it, delivering it to a live project and implementing it, all without slowing the migration progress, and doing it for multiple projects out of the hundreds running at any one time, became an area of considerable expertise for Transvault.

From there, it was vital that changes were managed into the core product with correct process and quality assurance, so they’d be available for all future customers. Not many software vendors met such a continuous integration challenge in that decade!

In 2010, we built a connector to send email into Microsoft’s BPOS Cloud platform (later renamed to a more encompassing ‘Office 365’). This destination was growing fast in popularity and ten years later would represent over 70% of the archive migration requirements. However, in 2014 when our 834th customer presented their needs we found a new challenge.

This customer, a principal UK supermarket, had an Exchange Journal in their archive (an enormous set of mailboxes containing a copy of every email message send to, from or within an organisation). They needed to move the content into Office 365 so they could use the new eDiscovery features that Microsoft was delivering.

Unlike other systems, Office 365 with its flexible, scalable, and load-balanced architecture could not support a fixed large mail store where a copy of everything had to be sent. As an alternative, Microsoft had developed a new secondary mailbox paradigm that they called the Microsoft In-Place Archive. Every user needed to have one to store their retained email. In many ways a reinvention of the concept of email archiving!

Many late nights were worked as the team at Transvault collaborated with the Archiving and eDiscovery Product Team at Microsoft. They eventually pulled together a new migration methodology, from one to many – exploding a single journal email record into copies for the In-Place archives for every recipient of the original email – senders, CCs and BCCs. The solution designed with Microsoft was named Compliance Time Machine (CTM), because it was like going back in time to get all the original copies and put them in the future Office 365 in a way that looked like they had always been there for the customer.

CTM still leads the market in its flexibility and performance. It is particularly good when a customer leaves an alternate Cloud archive and is handed a huge bucket of unstructured emails. CTM brings order to chaos to ensure that the items are stored in the right places for their owners and discoverable as though they had been there since creation. It also permits granular analysis of the emails, enabling those users or groups of users outside current governance rules to have their email treated differently – perhaps skipped or output to an alternate data store.

It’s this continual innovation and type of feature that drove Transvault product selection for projects at so many complex regulated corporates.

Born from an organisation that had operated as a value-added distributor during the start-up years of the email archiving industry, Transvault naturally decided the best way to grow internationally would be in a channel-only strategy. Our vision was to continue to grow the range of archive solutions supported by our products. Therefore, we needed to work with experts in many different vendor camps and their expert resellers.

The requirements for migrations came slowly at first, but by the end of the second year we had signed 20 Partner relationships with consulting companies and there had been 17 projects started. From there the opportunities grew fast and we were delighted when all the top three archive vendors adopted our software for use by their own consulting teams as well as recommending it to their customers and resellers.

Our focus on developing our Partner network has meant we now have a broad spread of service Partners all over the world. The most active of these partners have delivered over 200 projects each with our software. Along the way, we developed product and methodology training and certification, a Partner Portal linked to our licensing database systems and a product support service that has received a continuing stream of highly positive feedback. In 2016, we also introduced our Global Migration Services, designed specially to support our Partners either with archive platforms where they didn’t have experience, or to provide additional resource to their existing teams.

All that’s left to say is thank you to all of our Partners for your continued support from everyone at Transvault.