Whether you are a hosting provider who needs to onboard customers onto your platform, or a consulting company who needs to migrate users to a new e-mail system, you need a migration solution that is fast, easy and robust. If you’ve considered implementing your own migration suite, here are five reasons you should use MigrationWiz instead.
1) Converting email content:
You may have heard of the infamous TNEF format (“winmail.dat”). The short story is that Exchange and Outlook encode emails using a proprietary binary encoding format so that additional properties can be transmitted. If you’re considering migrating emails to your own non-Exchange system, you’ll need to decode and convert TNEF content. Not only will you need to parse TNEF data, you will also need to take care of things such as converting compressed RTF to HTML, assembling MIME body parts, etc.
2) Migrating calendars and contacts:
Exchange calendars or contacts have hundreds of properties, most of which should be migrated to ensure full fidelity. For example, migrating a property called “CleanGlobalObjectId” (with a tag of 6ED8DA90-450B-101B-98DA-00AA003F1305 / 0×0023) is required to ensure correlation of meeting responses to corresponding appointments. We spent years fine-tuning the list of properties to migrate, and it’s an ugly business. Similarly, Gmail appointment and contact properties must be mapped to Exchange properties, recurring appointments can have exceptions, etc.
3) Connecting to multiple systems:
To implement a migration solution that is complete, you’ll need the ability to connect to a variety of systems such as Gmail, Yahoo mail, Exchange, IMAP, POP, etc. Each protocol has its one idiosyncrasies which must be taken care of. Want to migrate from Gmail? Better make sure you don’t retrieve emails too quickly or the account will be locked down. Want to migrate from Yahoo mail? Better send a secret IMAP command or you won’t be able to authenticate. Want to migrate from Exchange? Better select the right API depending on the version.
4) Making it scale:
To offer a performant migration solution, you’ll need to optimize for each protocol. For example, to efficiently read email from IMAP, you should probably use the fetch commands to batch-retrieve emails. And to write emails to IMAP, you should probably pipeline commands or use special IMAP extensions such as MULTIAPPEND. To handle large-scale migrations, you might need to distribute workload acrosss hundreds of machines. Our data center is specifically designed to handle this type of scenario: is yours?
5) Integrating it:
After spending months (years!) implementing a robust migration solution, you’ll need to integrate it with your systems. This will definitely require a good API. Not only should this API be very secure, it should also be powerful enough to support complex tasks such as monitoring migration (“find all migrations that failed in the last 4 hours”), providing statistics (“report the rate at which data is being migrated”), or retrying errors without creating duplicates.
Unless your migration needs are very specific, implementing your own migration solution can prove a costly endeavor. As a provider of cloud-based migration solutions, we’ve had a unique opportunity to battle-test and constantly improve our system. Whether you want to use our web interface or migration SOAP API, it can all be yours without you having to install anything!
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