The 10 Commandments of Transforming Enterprise Messaging Environments

Enterprises today face a transformed messaging and collaboration environment, which not so long ago was considered as a back end application. Messaging today is the pulse of the organization. Similarly messaging service SLA’s have moved into the five 9’s category and thus the design and architecture of the messaging platform and developing service management frameworks demands cutting edge skill and thorough diligence.

The global economy too has a direct impact on the organizations messaging strategy, one that translates into a distributed architecture and expansion of its messaging environment. This demands enterprises to look at “non-functional” aspects and “design goals” such as high availability, site level resiliency, and fault tolerance in their messaging platforms. The economy is also forcing the enterprise to evaluate “IT as a Service” and messaging is no exception and hence a large number of organizations are looking at “E-mail as a Service” while wanting to move towards total outsourcing of messaging platforms.

With Microsoft’s recent launches such as BPOS and Office 365 being offered as public and semi-private options and several other options in the market place, cloud based messaging services is a now a reality more than ever.

While the future beckons a migration to a newer messaging platform, there are pitfalls to be avoided. Having migrated around a million mail boxes with zero disruption in various business critical environments – Microland brings a “mashup of sorts” best of both worlds – the technology and process based messaging migration philosophy. Based on this experience we would like to putforth, the 10 commandments for enterprises that plan to undertake the messaging migration journey. These are the practical aspects that one would not find in a book … or a tablet for that matter.

1. Thou shalt define the migration goals. Articulating the problem statement and business drivers at the outset clearly sets the expectations right from a messaging environment transformation initiative and also forms the guiding principles in defining the platform migration strategy.

2. Thou shalt understand the messaging ecosystem. Messaging environments in enterprises have several interdependencies with various systems and migrating to a new messaging platform needs a thorough understanding of the existing collaboration ecosystem starting from the hardware to all value added services

3. Thou shalt meticulously explain every feature of the new messaging platform to your stakeholders and the potential benefits in the short term and long term

4. Thou shalt build business drivers and cost benefits analysis matrix based on the feature set to tangibly justify the migration efforts, costs and timelines

5. Thou shalt build a What You See Is What You Get( WYSIWYG) Lab post the design and architecture phase to demonstrate any feature of the solution in a simulated environment

6. Thou shalt not try any migration step that has not been tested and tried in the Lab under a simulated production environment condition. This is completely forbidden.

7. Thou shalt be the custodian of the Bible for Migration,” The Migration Process Document”, which contains documentation on all migration specifications, SOP’s, test cases and processes. Updates to this document shall be undertaken only post successful testing in the lab.

8. Thou shalt not forget all the scenarios of “co-existence”, server level, client level, archival, backup, disaster recovery during migration. Messaging Migration is not a one time mouse click activity but is a gradual transition. This if not planned right has the potential to bring the migration process to a grinding halt.

9. Thou shalt ensure a zero data loss migration. Given the importance of the messaging platform in an organization, its extremely critical to manage and transfer mailbox data between platforms without any errors

10. Thou shalt make your end users happy, very happy by enabling a zero disruption migration, strictly adhering to migration timelines and managing end user experience

Pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile, so investing in solutions that provide reliability and choice is critical. While there are significant advantages to gravitate towards a better messaging environment, a disciplined migration strategy holds the key in unleashing the true value of the transformation.

Tags: Email Migration, Exchange 2010 Migration

	Author: Murthy MLN Vice President - Solutions
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