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Email Migration Tips

Top 6 Tips for Migrating from any email provider to Google Apps

Email Migration

Emails are the heart of current business communication and they play a vital role in day to day conversations among employees and customers Emails hold critical business data and are enablers of your business conversations.

Need for Email Migration

The need for upgrading/changing email providers is due to multiple reasons. Many organizations tend to upgrade its current email systems to a different email service provider, which has better versatile features. Different reasons for email migration are shown in the following figure.

Challenges of Email Migration

For better connectivity and business continuity, there is high demand for an effective email migration tool, which offers quick and accurate transfer of the mailboxes to your destination domain without downtime of both source and destination email systems. However, email migration from any domain to Google Apps domain is not an easy task, since you are going to move all your IT data assets from your current email service provider to another provider without any modification/data loss. The figure given below depicts the issues faced during email migration.

A seamless email migration process is necessary to overcome the above challenges, and for better data retention and security, since your mailboxes hold your entire business critical conversations.

Many tools offer email migration from different service providers such as; yahoo, Gmail, go daddy and so on to Google Apps. However, to choose an appropriate email migration tool, it is necessary to consider certain features such as no need to install software, security, customized options for migration according to the requirement, time taken for migration and so on.

There are specific features to be considered before planning an email migration process. Below mentioned are few tips that can help you in choosing the appropriate email migration tool.

Tip #1

Fully Automated Online Email Migration

Every aspect of business is getting automated. For flawless email migration, choosing a fully automated email migration tool is essential to have streamlined transfer of your mailboxes to the destination domain. Email migration via cloud based online solution would be ultimately the best option for a robust migration process; since it eliminates the operational hassles of having to install an on premise email migration software. Thus, your business critical emails are migrated in a quick, accurate and secure manner.

Tip # 2

Full Account Transfer

Most of the organizations are hesitant to perform email migration due to the issues including; business interruption and erroneous transfer of email contents. Erroneous email transfer may result in email content duplication, non-synchronized transfer of emails causing errors in display of old /new emails (erroneous display of “read” mails as “unread” and vice-versa) and end-user chaos. In order to eliminate the above mentioned issues, you must choose an effective tool, which does full account transfer of your emails with high degree of accuracy. Such an effective email migration tool must possess the following features.

Smooth Migration of bulk users in parallel

Selecting multiple users and enabling email migration of all the selected users in parallel will help in rapid execution of email migration. For such bulk migration, availability of the option to upload the bulk user lists via CSV files will assure better accuracy. Precise replication of all the users’ email contents is essential during bulk user migration. With an online cloud email migration solution, you can reduce the complexity of erroneous email transfer and accelerate the performance. Choosing a migration tool, with above mentioned characteristics will result in quick and cost-effective migration process.

Migrate unlimited user accounts and domains

Choosing a migration tool that has the provision to select unlimited number of domains and user accounts will enable you to perform accelerated email migration for multiple users. And thus, the problem of business downtime is eliminated.

You control and decide the users for email migration

Pick a migration tool that has the option to select/reject user accounts as per your requirement thus allowing you to carry out email migration process in a customized manner.

ETA Of Email Migration

Migration at a faster rate is one of the key factors to have your email systems up and ready in the new platform without any kind of business interruption. To carry out an accelerated migration process, you need to select an email migration tool with a capability of migrating at least 30,000 emails of a single user account in a day.

Tip #3

Zero Business Downtime

While planning for Email migration, you should be ensured that the migration process does not cause business downtime. Therefore, choose a tool, which has an additional feature to keep your source email and destination email systems available and working even when the migration is under process. This can be accomplished, when a copy of your source emails are transferred and merged to the destination domain, thus providing business continuity with near zero downtime.

Tip #4

Secure Email Migration from any IMAP or POP 3 provider to Google Apps

To have your source emails transferred securely to Google Apps from any email service provider and to eliminate the data loss, email duplication and hacking issues; opt for a tool that has the provision to support IMAP and POP3 protocols, thus enabling smooth, accurate and continuous transfer of email contents via strong encryption channels.

Tip #5

Map Users to Different User Name

It is reliable to use a migration, which has the ability to map, support and transfer multiple user accounts between source and destination domains. To meet such requirements, you should go for a migration tool, which has the feature to group users under particular domain intuitively, along with the option to map your user accounts to a different username as per your needs to simplify the migration process.

Tip #6

Change your mx records for email migration

You should change your MX records when you set up your new destination email system and this will help to receive emails quickly and eliminate email loss during an outage. First, login to your respective domain registrar; change your DNS settings and MX records. For an effective email migration process, prefer a tool that has the option to transfer your source data to the destination email system according to the changes made in the MX Records.

Conclusion

Staying updated according to the needs and technology advancements has made multiple organizations to move to Google Apps; thus acquiring the smart features of Google Apps to enhance their business performance. Complete transfer of your source email system to Google Apps demands error-free migration process, along with data retention and scalability to migrate vast data items precisely.

When your requirement of availing a migration tool, matches with the above mentioned features, then it will result in successful migration process due to the following reasons;

• Overhead administration costs gets mitigated
• Exact replication of your email contents without any duplication or data loss
• Single infrastructure to handle the entire migration process instantly without any manual monitoring
• Strong encryption channels and migration in cloud ensures high class security

Thus, to have effective business continuity with zero downtime, a comprehensive migration tool is essential to protect your business critical data, which is impossible to be replaced

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