Since we want our partners and customers to have the best possible experience, we’ve taken steps to ensure MigrationWiz provides the three aforementioned migration strategies in a clear, detailed fashion. When you start a migration, you will now see a drop-down menu with additional options:

We added the Pre-Stage migration as an integrated part of the interface, because in most cases, this is the best strategy. In the Pre-Stage phase, MigrationWiz only moves the mail older than a certain date, so we made sure that the user interface functions accordingly. This eliminates the chance for errors and improves the migration experience. We’ve also provided a drop-down list where you can chose to migrate mail older than 30, 60, or 90 days. You also have the option to define a custom date outside of these values.

After the pre-staging process, we complete the migration with the cut-over of the MX records and a follow-up migration to take the last information that wasn’t migrated during the pre-stage. To finalize your migration, click the Full Migration option. Since we never migrate any data more than once, thereby eliminating the concern of getting any duplicate files, the final pass doesn’t take very long.

Now that we’ve gone over that, here’s a quick breakdown of each migration type, as well as some pros and cons of each.

Our Migration Strategies

Big Bang Migration:

This is a single pass migration strategy that will move the entire mailbox in one pass after MX records are cut over.

A typical scenario consists of cutting over on a Friday evening and migrating during the weekend.

Pros:

• Cost-effective.
• Simple to implement.

Cons:

• Migration may potentially not complete in time provided (one weekend) for various reasons.
• Users accessing the new system may not have access to all their data when work resume.
• Any items created during or after the migration may be missed by a single pass.
• Downtime may occur for some users if migration fails or takes too long.

Pre-Stage:

A multi-pass migration that consists of pre-staging the majority of the data prior to cut-over, and performing a delta pass after cut-over.

Pros:

• Majority of data is available at time of cut-over.
• Mitigate migration risks in which majority of data will be available regardless of availability of source server at time of cut-over.

Cons:

• Will not propagate updates, and can delete or move the items previously migrated in the first migration pass.

Quick-Switch Migration

A quick-switch migration consists of pre-staging only the newest emails. New emails are accessible immediately at time of cut-over by users and the remaining data is back-filled over time.

Pros:

• Initial migration is quick.
• Time between cut-over and data availability is short.

Cons:

• Not all data is available at time of cut-over for end users.