Making a success of your professional email migration to Zimbra
You've chosen the messaging or production suite that meets all your company's needs. The POCs (Proof Of Concept) have been a real success with the management team. Now all that's left to do is migrate all the data (email, calendar, contacts, notes, etc.) so you can take advantage of it. How can you avoid the project turning into a nightmare? In this corporate messaging tutorial, we take you through the steps involved in this change, using the example of the Zimbra collaborative suite, offered by French hosting provider Ovea.
Studying the existing system
This first stage is crucial for analysing requirements and anticipating any technical constraints. Today's online messaging systems do more than just send messages. Diaries, contacts and sometimes even notes are linked to make managing your exchanges easier. As a result, the migration to be carried out will have to cover the whole range.
The challenge is to anticipate problems so as to avoid slowing down the process and meet deadlines. In simple cases, only the messaging system needs to be migrated. In more complex cases, from MS Exchange Online, Google Apps for Work, Office 365 or Lotus Notes, you need to migrate all your accounts, including calendars, contacts, notes, etc., as well as gigabytes of email.
The biggest job in email migration is preparation. Using Ovea to migrate your business email to Zimbra is a guarantee of security and ongoing service for your business. The guarantee that you won't lose any data is essential, especially now that emails have real legal value.
Account creation and pre-migration
Before carrying out the migration, the POC was validated by the technical team, then the commercial proposal was validated by the management team. The existing system has been fully studied and all the stages are planned. The next step is to carry out a full-scale test, called pre-migration by Ovea. This will enable us to validate the entire process and content so that the customer can see how it will work before extending it to the whole company.
Once the process, tested on a few people, has been validated, all the data needs to be consolidated to create the user accounts: user names, addresses and possibly passwords and information concerning access to particular functions (different volumes, synchronisation on several media, etc.).
The Ovea hosting provider adapts to each customer. It will migrate incoming emails to another server for the duration of the migration. Setting up an infrastructure like this is only possible with experts like Ovea. Calling in specialists with a thorough understanding of the complex data migration process guarantees that all data is protected.
Email is the most critical data in the transfer of collaborative messaging. Contacts, diaries and notes can be exported from the old messaging system and then easily imported into the new one, thanks to their format, which is compatible with all messaging systems. The problem with this technique is the sheer volume involved: it's easy to do this manually for a dozen or so employees, but beyond that you need to turn to professionals to automate the process.
Final migration
The pre-migration is validated, all the accounts are created and the emails are managed on a separate server to ensure that all the data is retained. Now it's time to get down to business!
After a whole series of additional tests, the MX (Mail eXchanger) fields in the DNS (Domain Name System) are changed to direct new incoming mail to your new Zimbra mailbox.
The final migration must be as short as possible. This is why Ovea offers its customers the option of migrating their mailboxes over the weekend so that everything is available to employees on Monday morning. In the case of migrations for large organisations, these are carried out in several batches of 1,000 users, for example.
Migrating an email system can be a key stage in your company's development. So it's not something to be taken lightly. The preparation stage is crucial, so it's important to enlist the support of email experts like Ovea. They provide assistance, training and customer support so that you and your teams can get to grips with the tool without difficulty. Complete data reversibility and email account transfer are possible at any time if you wish. Once your data has been fully migrated to your new Zimbra email system, all you have to do is personalise your email signature!
Article translated from French