Before performing email migration, important questions must be raised

Contributed by Frederic Bourget (Montag, 21 Juni 2010) | Category : Email platform migrations

or any company considering implementing new technology or shifting IT responsibilities toward a new product, the issue of migration remains important. A recent article from TMCNet states that companies must ask themselves several questions before following through with any move, but specifically with email migration.

An industry executive recently stated "IT professionals know that email systems are complex, layered applications and users' important data can easily be altered, tangled or completely left behind in a migration," according to TMCNet. Thus, these professionals must be careful to ensure a migration is the right move.

First, as the article states, IT professionals need to understand that successful complex migrations require experience. Companies must determine if they have staff capable of performing a move before attempting it and potentially losing valuable information. Also, the report states, a company can determine experience with migration based upon the number of accounts and mailboxes it actually migrates on a monthly basis.

The second of the two important steps is determining how historical email data will be transferred. This step is incredibly important as any email data lost could end up costing a company for failing to comply with regulated retention schedules.

Email retention has been an important issue as of late, as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority recently fined investment bank Piper Jaffray $700,000 for failing to retain 4.3 million emails from November 2002 through December 2008.