Successfully migrate your professional messaging system 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 to migrate all your data (e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes, etc.) so that you can take advantage of it. How do you prevent the project from turning into a nightmare? In this corporate messaging tutorial, we'll take you through the steps involved, using the example of the Zimbra collaborative suite from French hosting provider Ovea.
Studying the existing system
This first stage is crucial for analyzing needs and anticipating any technical constraints. Today's online messaging systems do more than just send messages. Calendars, contacts and sometimes even notes are linked to make your exchanges more fluid. As a result, the migration to be carried out will have to encompass the whole.
The challenge is to anticipate problems to avoid any slowdown in the process, so as to 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 accounts, including calendars, contacts, notes... in addition to gigabytes of mail.
The hardest part of a mail migration is the preparation. Using Ovea to migrate your business e-mail to Zimbra is a guarantee of security and ongoing service for your company. The guarantee that you won't lose any data is essential, especially as today's emails have real legal value.
Account creation and pre-migration
Prior to migration, the POC was validated by the technical team, followed by validation of the sales proposal by the management team. The existing situation has been fully studied and all the stages are planned. Now it's time for a full-scale test, called pre-migration by Ovea. This will 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, it is necessary to consolidate all data to create user accounts: user names, addresses and, if necessary, passwords and information concerning access to particular functionalities (different volumes, synchronization 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 on specialists who are fully conversant with the complex data migration process ensures that your data is protected in its entirety.
E-mail is the most critical data in the transfer of collaborative messaging. Contacts, calendars and notes can be exported from the old messaging system, 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 possible 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 accounts are created and e-mails are managed on a separate server to guarantee the preservation of all data. Now it's time to get down to business!
After a 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. That's 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 organizations, these are carried out in several batches of 1,000 users, for example.
E-mail migration can be a key stage in your company's development. So it's not to be taken lightly. The preparation stage is crucial, so it's important to enlist the support of messaging experts like Ovea. They provide assistance, training and customer support to help you and your teams get to grips with the tool without difficulty. Full data reversibility and e-mail account transfer are possible at any time if you wish. With your data fully migrated to your new Zimbra mailbox, all that's left to do is personalize your email signature!
Article translated from French