How to plan a Microsoft Office 365 email migration

There are many reasons why businesses migrate their email and archives to Microsoft Office 365. It might be for improved business resilience, better collaboration and communication between colleagues or the ever-growing security capabilities of Microsoft’s Cloud. Now that our businesses are driven by new ways of working, Office 365 adoption has become key for business continuity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Read more on why you need to make the move to the cloud.

Office 365 license plans are a significant investment for most organizations but the benefits of migrating to Office 365 are numerous:

• Removing the need for hefty legacy email and archive infrastructure and costs
• Better budgeting for your business due to the ability to control costs post migration
• Users have access to all their email in a single location
• Finance teams can precisely calculate how much the platform will cost annually as Microsoft 365 is licensed on an individual or per user basis.
• Complete flexible working for your employees
• One-stop-shop for eDiscovery, business compliance and data security
• Users have larger mailbox storage capabilities and online archiving
• Access to new features/software and Microsoft upgrades

To help you plan your migration, I will start by sharing our experience of the most common types of Office 365 email migrations as outlined by Microsoft, the key benefits for your company and its users, and finally explain how to avoid any of the common pitfalls during your migration to Microsoft’s Cloud. Along the way I’ll answer some of your questions you may not know to ask.

Whether you decide that a Hybrid, Stage or Cutover is the best migration method for you, the good news is, Transvault and our Partners are here to support you. This is because our solutions support both direct and API migrations from the widest array of email archive sources and versions into Microsoft Office 365. Transvault Migrator can also orchestrate the entire email archive migration process to Microsoft Office 365.

You can view our full supported platforms list here.

Email archives get overlooked all too often during the initial migration plan. If you have an email archive (such as Veritas Enterprise Vault, EMC SourceOne, or Quest Archive Manager), it’s vitally important that you include this in your planned move to Office 365. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Remove the costs of maintaining a separate archiving solution, both in terms of license costs and keeping your staff trained up on the archive.
• All your email data will be in one place providing access anywhere for your team.
• eDiscovery can be performed quickly and easily in Microsoft 365 across all workloads.
• Improved business resilience and continuity through working in the Cloud.

We’ve taken a deeper dive into why it’s important that you migrate your email archive as part of your Office 365 migration project in a previous blog.

So, you know the migration types, the associated benefits, and the common pitfalls to avoid when migrating your email to Office 365, but now to the important stuff. It’s time to decipher the best migration plan to get your organization to Microsoft’s Cloud.

Precise planning of a Microsoft Office 365 migration is critical to the overall outcome and success. This is where working with an experienced IT vendor, such as Transvault and our network of specialist Partners, really shows its benefits. This is because, we have answers to the questions you didn’t even know you had to ask! For example:

• Understanding the limitations of the Microsoft subscription models – Critical when planning primary mailbox moves with third party archives.
• What happens when you enable an online archive with an on-premises mailbox – What prompts and policies you can expect.
• The difference between shortcut and non-shortcut items – this covers email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and journals.

That’s just to name a few, but this is why it’s critical to involve your IT partner early in the planning stage.

So, your Office 365 migration plan is coming together, and you now know exactly what you need to move. The next point to consider is how to best prepare for your migration from an organizational point of view.

There are the logistical aspects that need ironing out with your IT Partner. For example, is your data all stored in one place? Is the migration taking place across multiple geographical locations? If yes, how much data is in these respective environments? How is the engineer going to access your environment? VPN or virtual desktop and is there now a greater security impact or concern that needs addressing now that the data is being accessed from multiple locations.

Other factors that will help you prepare for your Office 365 migration is the current state of your source environment. Is it in good health? I’ll go into detail a little later about how the health of your source environment has a direct impact on the overall speed and performance of your migration to Office 365. However, ensuring your source environment is in the best possible state pre-migration, removes any potential complications that are caused by environmental factors to come to light during the migration process.

And finally, timelines. Does the partner believe the migration plan is feasible? If not, what alterations can they suggest to maximize the migration performance and the requirements you’ve set out or that have been set out for you are achievable.

A question I often get asked is, “when is the best time to migrate to Office 365?”. In the current climate, most people would answer this by saying “right now” and “there’s never been a better time to migrate to the cloud”. However, there are some key factors that could help you decide when’s the best time to migrate your organization to Office 365.

Renewal Date

One is around the renewal date of your current platforms. If you’ve just paid for another years’ worth of support and maintenance for your current archiving platform, there’s no reason not to start planning your migration to Office 365 but consider riding out your contract. Where this logic doesn’t work is if your current platform has been deemed end-of-life, now you’re up against the clock. If that clock is ticking, you could see this as a positive as it dictates what timelines you’ve got to work with.

The magic question, and normally the first thing I get asked as a project is being planned, and I fully understand why. As part of your migration plan, of course you’re going to be considering timeframes. No doubt your corporate team will breathing down your neck asking, “how long is this going to take?”. Microsoft Office 365 is a huge investment for most companies, so getting to the cloud quickly will ensure the return on investment is realized at a much faster rate.

I could just sit here and tell you that Transvault software can achieve migration speeds to Microsoft Office 365 of up to 6.7TBs a day, and I wouldn’t be lying to you. If you don’t believe me you can read about our migration speeds in our case study for Shire Pharmaceutical. You shouldn’t however be basing your entire Office 365 migration performance purely on migration speed. If your vendor uses speed as their main selling point, you should be concerned.

Email migrations are not a simple copy and move operation. At Transvault we like to coin the phrase “Intelligent Migrations” when referring to the migration of email. This is because our migration software validates every single message and item as it moves from your on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Office 365. This ensures that the migrated data is usable further ensuring no end user impacts.

This brings the plan full circle, as I started the migration plan section talking about the benefits associated with working with an IT Partner and how you can leverage their expertise during your Office 365 migration project. However, I started this entire blog stating that Office 365 migrations are not easy, so why would you treat your migration as an experiment? By working with an expert migration IT Partner, your project is not experimental but instead built on the experiences of multiple prior successes.

I can only speak for Transvault and our network of specialist migration Partners, but we pride ourselves on delivering the highest quality customer service to ensure you get the best outcome. Our world class migration solutions ensure you get the migration results you want, first time, with maximum ROI when it comes to your new Microsoft Office 365 environment.

There we have it; I hope this has been a useful article in helping you understand what is involved in a Microsoft Office 365 email migration and the steps and decisions you’ll need to consider. Transvault and our network of specialist migration partners are here to help, here are some of the reasons you can trust in Transvault.

Reasons to trust Transvault and our Partners with your migration project:

• World’s first email archive migration solution with 15+ years migration experience
• Successfully delivered over 2500 migration projects worldwide
• Fast and efficient migrations – up to 6.7TBs per day
• Broadest range of supported archiving platforms to Office 365
• Support for journal, shortcut management and shared mailbox migrations
• Integrated workflow-driven mailbox and archive migrations
• Full chain-of-custody and message auditing for future eDiscovery
• Microsoft certified Partners and engineers
• Industry-leading, outcome-focused support and customer service to ensure successful migrations

If you have a Microsoft Office 365 email migration project that you’re interested in discussing with us, please get in touch.