How to Choose an Email Transfer Service

There are some things in life that are inevitable and when you’re working at a company then there is something that’s not only inevitable but also very unfun to deal with. Email transfers will never be easy, but there are of course things that can be done to make them less painful. One of the things that you can do to make them as easy as possible is to choose a good service. If you choose a bad one you’re just shooting yourself in the foot and possibly doubling the amount of effort and work you’ll need for the transfer to go through smoothly, so why do that when you can just find a good one? Let’s go over some of the things that you should be looking for.

Active directory migration – what is it?

Let’s cover just what Active Directory migration is in case some of the readers might not know already. Active Directory migration, also known as AD migration is an event where all the users, groups, and everything else a company has made in their domain is transferred to a new one, with everything being intact and the option for edits to be made in between.

It sounds pretty simple, right? Well, sadly it really isn’t. You not only need to move a massive number of users, trees, and other things over in one piece but you also need to keep in mind that every object that’s being moved has a bunch of finely tuned and hand-crafted characteristics attached to it that also need to make it over in one piece. It’s a massive amount of information that needs to travel undisturbed while also possibly being edited along the way if there are changes that need to be made. It’s by no means a simple job and it takes a lot of prep work to get done properly.

Plan the transfer first

Before you actually get to choose a program it’s important to lay out a plan and figure out what exactly you’re looking for. To do that you’ll need to actually check with all the departments that will have their info transferred and see if they have any specific needs that need to be covered in the new domain so that you can make sure they are all possible with the software that will be used or at least manage their expectations of it isn’t an option that’s feasible.

A solid plan will allow you to know exactly what you need so that you can immediately write off any software or service which doesn’t have those things and only focus on ones that can actually work for your specific situation.

A few other things

At the end of the day, even those with experience will want a program that’s simpler to use when undertaking large and stressful projects such as this. Thus if you’re stuck between a couple of similar programs and can’t decide it would be a good idea to compare them based on ease of use and UX (user experience). The more quality-of-life features there are the higher up it should be on the list as well, and of course, a good customer support team in case something goes wrong is always good to have in case you need to rely on them.

A good feature to have

We’d like to cover one specific feature that is very commonly used and incredibly useful to have in your software. Luckily most have it but it’s good to check so you don’t accidentally go for one of the few that doesn’t and end up getting burnt as a result. We are of course talking about the ability of users and groups to communicate during the transfer between the two domains.

This is an invaluable feature and is 100% needed if you’re doing the migration in segments for productivity due to the needs of the company or because it’s simply not an option given the situation that you are in. Phased migrations have become more and more popular as it means that the company isn’t completely down temporarily and it allows the migration team to give 100% of their focus to the groups being currently transferred and make sure their needs are met instead of needing to go back later.