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I’ve been talking to many Microsoft Office 365 Partners asking them why they almost always avoid the companion email archive migration project. One of the most common answers is: "we just don't have the knowledge of the many email archives and their particular idiosyncrasies; let alone attempt to migrate one of them." This answer baffled me since an archive migration can generate 3-5x the revenue of a single project not to mention, if done correctly, can generate a 90% profit. You may be asking yourself how….? Well, let me explain.
Reality
Archiving solutions are usually relatively complex containing emails for active users, inactive users, journaled content, and lots of PSTs. To dissect and understand all this, an Office 365 deployment partner must have some level of archiving knowledge… which, let's be honest, is usually in short supply. On top of that, the current customer's IT personnel no doubt inherited the legacy archiving system and really have no idea how the whole thing was pieced together; so they prefer not to breath on it. So many archive migration vendors will sell "white glove" service and take it off the partner's hands since it's "complex" …. Or SO THEY SAY!
Keep it simple solution (KISS)
Archive360’s Archive2Anywhere is based on Microsoft PowerShell which removes all previous complexities. The software provides a handful of cmdlets that are very intuitive to an experienced Exchange Administrator performing an Exchange migration to Office365. Let's take a look at a couple of these cmdlets:
Get-A2AUser > lists every user IN the archive with SAMaccount, SMTP and size of the respective archive.
New-A2AJob > starts the migration at user level for any type of archive data; such as active, inactive, stubs, PSTs, journal, public folders.
Get-A2AJob > provides the current status of all pending, running and complete migration jobs, including percentage complete.
Conclusion
With PowerShell's three (3) cmdlets, one can easily migrate the email archive data to Office 365 or to another Exchange, with ZERO knowledge of archiving systems. In addition, if your IT staff is capable of scripting PowerShell, they can easily integrate the Archive2Anywhere cmdlets and create custom workflow scripts tailored to the need of the customer. This will allow a migration partner to pretty much pocket all the revenue realized from the archive migration.
Is there a safety net from system screw-ups? Yes, Archive2Anywhere has READ ONLY access to the archive in addition to ZERO hardware footprint on the archive hardware. So, yeah…we don't even breath on it.
In the coming weeks I will post some partner and customer quotes regarding the "no experience required" claim.
