Each year companies allocate budgets for upgrades and new equipment. As part of that budgeting process is the consideration of new servers and sometimes specifically email servers. If you’re one of the companies who have allocated budget for an email server upgrade then you’re also going to have to factor in the costs of migration.

There are many migration options and tools available in the marketplace to help ease the migration from like-to-like email servers and from unlike-to-unlike email servers. This article will discuss the features and considerations to look for when considering which email migration tools to choose.

1. Conversion options should include email systems such as: Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novel GroupWise, Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, AOL, POP, IMAP and others.If your source or target destination email system is not supported by a particular migration tool vendor then it is best to continue your migration tool search until you find your email system on a list of email systems supported by a migration software vendor. You might be tempted to contact an email migration tools vendor to check on any upcoming support but it is best not to be the first customer of a version 1.0 product as bugs are still being worked out of any new release of software particularly the first release.
2. Conversion options should include email data such as: messages and folders, attachments, address books, calendars and tasks.There are many conversion tools available. Some tools are free but most are products which must be purchased. The different formats that are supported include: Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, HTML and many others. Other email address books and scheduling applications provided by well known Internet Service Providers, web browser and operating system vendors are also supported such as from: AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Hotmail, Microsoft Windows and many others.You’ll want to verify with the migration tool vendor that your email address books and scheduling applications are supported as both target and source databases.And if you’re using earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook you’ll be able to export the address books as CSV (comma separated values) text files. Most commercial applications support the ability to import information from external programs. Check with your vendor first to confirm this feature is available for all versions that will be involved in your migration process.
   
3. Complementary tools should also be available to accommodate your migrations. Such tools would also help migrate any moves, adds or changes to directory applications such as Active Directory. If you are managing your users with a directory application then you may need to create or manipulate your user accounts prior to migrating them. Companies that have a high user account turnover rate can also benefit from such a complementary tool.
4. Migration in progress checkpoints is another useful feature to look for in an email migration tool. While the migration is in progress administrators would like to be able to see the status display showing migration information for each email message such as the original sender, recipient, and date of the migrated email message.
5. Folder structures of existing mailboxes need to be preserved. Users have spent much time in organizing their email messages into folder structures that are most meaningful and understandable to them.
6. Another consideration to look for is to check on any limitations or unsupported features that are part of the migration tool package. Knowing the limitations before you start your migration process can help to avoid costly mistakes and any unnecessarily wasted time.Therefore, careful planning of the migration process should incorporate the known limits and unsupported features of a migration tool. Such limits might include: Messages larger than twenty-five megabytes (including attachments) and any messages prevented from being transferred which have been identified as possibly containing viruses.Other limitations might include large folder thresholds such as user accounts which contain more than two-thousand folders or some other numerical limit. In those cases, user accounts may be prohibited from being transferred. Instead, they will be skipped during the migration process so that the scheduled transfer can continue uninterrupted.Examples of other limitations can include folders with certain characters such as folder names with slash characters (“/”). Some migration tools will not perform migration of those folders. Such folder names will require a name change for the transfer to occur.

Finally, before starting a corporate-wide migration it is good practice to migrate a small number of accounts as a test transfer before migration of all users. And, if you have a large user base, consider performing mail migration during after-hours as batch jobs or on the weekends so as to be the least disruptive to email day-to-day operations as possible.