Enterprise Email Migration In A Box

With Dashworks, you are in control of email migration from the beginning to the end.

If you are about to approach an enterprise email migration project, you know that a complicated journey lies ahead. You will need to plan meticulously every aspect of project delivery, coordinate multiple resources across multiple teams, align with your business goals, communicate with your end-users and ensure that thousands of logistical tasks are completed according to schedule.

It’s no wonder that so many email migration projects run over time and budget.

This is why you need a central command and control tool from which to coordinate your efforts. With Dashworks you get everything an email migration project manager could need in one box:

1) Gather & Organize All Crucial Information In One Central Location

Dashworks seamlessly connects to your existing repositories for your critical project data. Using our certified Active Directory and Exchange connectors and connectors to other tools like these, your information is collated in minutes and aggregated into the central data warehouse.

Additional data is gleaned from email archive systems, mobile device inventory, PC software inventory (e.g. installed Outlook version) and even Notes/SharePoint applications. Organizational data is then layered on to add locations and departments. Finally, custom fields are applied so that a full set of project baseline data is available. Where connectors are used, this data will refresh on the schedule you define (usually nightly).

2) Validate, Rationalize, and Model Your Data Set

Once we have your data, the next step is to check for quality and remove the things you don’t care about. This means identifying mailboxes that are not applicable to users. From here, we can hook into tools like Dell Migration Manager, Binary Tree and Archive 360 to understand what should be in and out of scope, and where the biggest migration hurdles may surface.

3) Create Your Project

Now you tell Dashworks how you want to manage your Email migration project, for example:

• Create your migration paths (e.g. shared mailboxes vs. personal mailboxes),
• The tasks you want to track,
• Your groups and deployment teams,
• The emails you want to send, and
• The configuration of the self-service portal.

This project configuration is your blueprint for managing Email migration.

4) Onboard Your In-Scope Users, Mailboxes, and Applications

This step moves the project into action. Your mailboxes inherit the default readiness status, and groups can be analyzed for delegation, size of migration, mobile device impact, and archive impact. 

Schedulers can begin their work, and reports extracted to initiate key activities such as availability of new infrastructure, synchronization status of mailbox and calendar content and readiness of any associated applications. It is here that your Email project workload begins to take shape.

5) Readiness & Scheduling

Your project resources are now moving things forward to get the mailboxes and users to a green status. Emails are triggered to your end-users, and further data is validated and rationalized through the self-service portal including public folder and delegation requirements. Dashboards display real-time progress and what is holding up the most migrations. At this point, your project engine is pumping, and you are in complete control.

6) Email Migration

As your readiness items complete, and your mailboxes turn green for migration, it is time to lock in the schedule. Your final emails are sent, and the logistics activities are set in motion. Dashworks triggers the migration activity through tools like Microsoft’s own PowerShell scripts, Dell Migration Manager, and Binary Tree, and reports back on deployment success.

7) Post-Migration & Reporting

Of course, your project does not finish with the migration activity. There are post-migration clean-up tasks that need tracking before you can truly claim success. Mailbox validation, re-establishing the archives, user acceptance and deletion of the old mailbox are all activities that may need tracking. Generating your project status report is done at the click of a button, and you can relax in the knowledge of an Email migration well done.