Know what it takes to have an effective GroupWise to Office 365 Migration

by Fletcher B. SEO

Research shows every other organization that are using Novell^® GroupWise^® is making important decision related to the future of their messaging and collaboration platform and those that have chosen a hosted platform like Microsoft^®Office 365^®, are witnessing significant changes.

What exactly is Microsoft^®Office 365?

Well, Office 365 is nothing more than a subscription-based online office and software plus services suite that facilitates its user with an access to a variety of services and software built around the Microsoft Office platform. You cannot consider it similar to Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite, as it has got a desktop productivity suite, Office Professional Plus, something that was not present in BPOS. Adding to that while BPOS was meant for smaller businesses, Office 365 has been designed for organizations of all sizes. In fact, Office 365 evidently represents Microsoft’s push into the large-enterprise market for cloud-based applications. Office 365 also includes different enhancements and the most prominent among them is the Service Connector that has helped in simplifying desktop management, administer updates and patches, and manage the by and large login process.

Why GroupWise to Office 365 migration

A migration from GroupWise to Office 365 could enable its user have an easy access to email, voicemail, calendars or even contacts virtually from any location using virtually any device with Microsoft Exchange. Besides this, the other key advantage of using Office 365 is the creation of common journaling rules and data retention policies. Office 365 provides one point of access into the entire mail system, and so allows its user to have a single archiving and legal hold system in place.

Moreover, Office 365 also facilitates effective security and availability to meet or surpass the requirements of any organization. In fact, as a user you can very well create a messaging solution that could also meet your current security and availability needs allowing you to further meet the future needs.

Migration to Office 365 Needs Some Careful Considerations

During migration, most of the time organizations encounter various risks and so careful planning is required. There are a lot of areas to consider, especially when you want to establish coexistence between the two mail platforms. You may want the migration to be as fast, but at the same time you also need to minimize the business risk. However, here are few aspects that you can look out while planning for effective migration.

Preserving important archived email - Migration plans must look out for archives, including those stored locally on user workstations. These archives are responsible for holding a bulk of information migrated in terms of both number of items and the size of the data. Therefore, a planning need to done while accepting the fact that a significant fraction of the time and effort is spent migrating archived email.
Ensuring the fidelity of migrated data – The fidelity of the messages and contacts is yet another important aspect for a successful migration. Any items that seem to be not migrated always represent a big risk, especially after the GroupWise infrastructure is deprecated.
Email routing – Email routing need to be planned cautiously because a single bit of negligence could have an adverse impact on the handling of attachments. This has crucial implications for message delivery times and the amount of storage required in the network.
Accurate reporting – While you perform migration, a proper insight into the migration progress is essential. With accurate reporting, it is possible to measure the advancement and the ultimate success of the migration.

Apart from this, it’s also essential that a migration to Office 365 consists of all the calendar data that users require, such as recurring meetings and all calendar history.

Try to perform a pre-migration assessment

It is very essential for you to grab a clear understanding of the involvement and criteria that you will use to measure success right before you start migration process. In fact, be practical and the reason is very oblivious as many might suggest you not to expect 100 percent of your data to migrate successfully. But by implementing a right approach and tracking results could be the key to a successful migration, and that’s possible only if you start with a pre-migration assessment.

Take help of third party email migration tool

With the proper usage of third party email migration tool like Kernel Office 365 Migrator for GroupWise you can very well migrate the GroupWise mailboxes to cloud environment without wasting any time. The tool facilitates you with an option to migrate a single or all mailboxes from GroupWise to Office 365. Adding to that, using this tool you can always overcome all the complications that are generally involved in GroupWise to Office 365 migration.

for more information:-

http://www.migrategroupwisetooffice365.net