Email Migration Best Practices: Ensuring a Seamless Transition

It is highly likely that your IT team needs in-depth clarity on planning your company’s upcoming email migration project.

The key to a smooth transfer of emails from one service provider to another is to follow email migration best practices that can level up the entire process and minimize risks.

Check out some of the best practices that your IT team can follow to accomplish a successful email migration for your organization.

1. Communicate With End-Users and Train Them

Before your team initiates the email migration, communicate the plan with your employees well ahead of the process. It helps prepare the users to face organizational changes and understand how the differences impact their work.

Train them on the new email platform with demos of its interface to experience it in real-time and get familiar with it.

2. Plan and Strategize

Devising an elaborate email migration plan and appropriate strategies to carry out the email transfer is essential to avoid misinterpretations and failure during the migration.

Identify the migration requirements precisely. For example, along with emails, what entities (calendars, events, distribution lists, attachments, tasks, etc.) do your migration team plan to move?

Get clarity on the desired migration outcomes and focus on addressing the gaps in reaching the expected result. Also, determine the anticipated email migration timeline so your company can plan accordingly and keep the associated stakeholders informed. In addition, identifying the hardware and software prerequisites is one of the vital email migration best practices to follow.

Create an exhaustive email migration checklist, so your IT team does not miss out on any essential steps or conditions for a successful migration.

3. Check the Email Migration Tool’s Compatibility

Before your company finalizes an email migration tool, check whether it is compatible with the source and destination email platforms.

Also, determine if the email migration tool is capable of handling one-time and incremental migration and whether it can scale on demand.

This ensures no roadblocks to the migration process and results in a seamless data transfer.

4. Prioritize What to Migrate

Randomly migrating emails from source to destination platforms can be quite confusing and end up being disorganized. Instead, filter unwanted emails and prioritize which data to transfer first and which goes later based on the business impact.

By prioritizing migration data, companies can prevent disruptions to ongoing business processes and avoid any adverse effects.

5. Know How to Handle Downtime

The prime reason to follow email migration best practices is to minimize downtime and errors. However, if your team encounters any of it despite following best practices, know how to handle such scenarios.

The email migration service provider must back up the entire source data and devise a robust data recovery strategy to protect the data in case of any migration issues.

6. Verify Security Settings

Organizational emails contain sensitive and confidential information. Hence, the company must never compromise on data security. Your IT team must cross-verify whether the email migration team enables all the security settings in the tool.

For example, your team must verify if the migration tool encrypts the migration process and authenticates both the source and the destination email platforms through token-based approaches, such as Oauth 2.0. Also, make sure that the migration tool complies with all the industry-standard security regulations.

7. Execute a Pilot Run

Email migration experts strongly recommend executing a pilot run before finalizing the tool to ensure the migration tool transfers the emails and the associated properties as desired from the source to the destination email service platform.

Planning and performing a pilot run helps your team assess the way the migration tool’s various features work. For example, your team can test whether the tool migrates emails of a particular date accurately.

Also, in a plot run, verify whether the tool can perform a delta migration to transfer the new emails received in the source email platform during the one-time migration.

8. Validate the Migration

Once your team migrates the entire mailboxes from the source email platform to the destination, validate the results with the help of email migration reports. Compare the outcome with the expected results and see if they match. Lastly, address the gaps in the final output and work towards resolving any potential errors.

CloudFuze is a leading email migration service provider that makes it seamless for your team to migrate emails across various platforms, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

In addition to email migration, we also provide links migration and cloud-to-cloud data migration services (like Dropbox to SharePoint, Box to Google Drive, etc).

Get in touch with our email migration experts to assess our email migration tool for your organization’s requirements.