Problem
We have been using NearPoint for our email archiving for over 10 years and with a planned move to Office 365 it was no longer a viable solution. Since all of our employee’s mailboxes (approximately 2,400) were on an 18-month litigation hold it was imperative that we could extract this data from NearPoint and export it to Office 365, with a high level of confidence.
We researched the migration methods available and quickly realized that the native tools built into NearPoint were not a viable way to export all data to Office 365. This led us to Archive360’s Archive2Anywhere (A2A) email migration tool.
The Solution
With the help of the Archive 360 technical staff we were able to install the A2A software very quickly and after migrating several mailboxes we had enough knowledge to begin exporting of all mailboxes to Office 365.
First, we ran batch jobs, based on functional units, migrating the active mailbox to Office 365 using PowerShell and the tools providing by Office 365, and cutting over to the online mailbox. Next, we migrated the email archive data to the Office 365 archive mailbox using the A2A application. These jobs would run for several days with no impact to the customer.
Our assigned support professional from Archive 360 would log in remotely periodically and check the logs and adjust server and application settings to fine tune the migration performance. Any time I had questions or concerns, support was just a quick email or phone call away. I always dealt with the same person that was assigned to this migration.
The software provided excellent logging so it is easy to zero in on any issues and re-run jobs if need be. At the end of the project, an excellent report detailing any exceptions provided assurance that we had captured the data as well as possible.
Migration Challenges and Benefits
With everyone’s time allocated to numerous projects our big concern was how much time this migration was going to take. In the end the majority of time and issues that we dealt with was migrating the active mailbox to Office 365 rather than the archive migration.
A2A allowed us to meet our migration schedule target and take command of what seemed like an impossible task. The automation allowed us to run batch jobs over the weekend and with little or no monitoring or intervention. We would just queue up all the mailboxes we wanted to export on Friday afternoon and upon returning to work on Monday, the majority of the jobs had completed successfully. A2A is an excellent migration tool.
System Administrator
County Government
