Tony Lam: Nathan, how are you doing today?

Nathan Frank: Really good, Tony. Good to see you. How are you?

TL: I’m very good, thank you sir. We’re here today to have a chat about your experience migrating emails. How’s that been for you?

NF: Recently, it’s something that we’ve been very busy with. But it’s actually really simple and easy. We’ve got BitTitan in there, we’ve been using it since 2013. It’s one of those ones, when you asked me if I wanted to sit down and catch up with you around it, it’s a bit of a secret that’s been in our tool chest for quite some time. It’s an amazing tool that allows us to migrate quickly and easily.

TL: So if we step back a bit and have a look at how you did it prior to 2013 and MigrationWiz, what did that process look like “back in the good old days?”

NF: So back in the good old days when we first started going up to BPOS, we had to extract PST files, send the mailboxes up, import the PST files, then try and hunt for all the data that was missing because PSTs had certain size limitations, format limitations, and they just really like to get corrupted. So, it was really a nightmare. It was a long process, and I believe we did only two or three migrations into Microsoft BPOS before we had to find a better way.

What made us certain that BitTitan was for us is that when we first connected it, it was simple and easy. Connect to Exchange Server. Connect to BPOS or Office 365. The documentation we found when we needed has always been really good as well, and then we hit go. And it would do a sync load and start migrating the data for us and we could continue doing other jobs and other tasks while it set off and loaded. And now that we can actually use the desktop-side migration, it does Outlook for you as well. We deploy it with our RMM, and we walk away. The job is done all via MigrationWiz.

TL: That sounds too easy, man.

NF: It is too easy, that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it.

TL: It’s quite interesting because when you first load it up, it takes inventory of all the email assets that you have from items you have to calendar items – and ok, I’m going to be moving, let’s say 3,000 items – and it does each item separately and logs it for you so you’re not scared you’ll miss something.

NF: We’ve never missed anything we’re aware of. And it is fully logged, so we do know what’s going on and often we find clients will tell us on the other side something is missing, and it could be their cache, could be the fact it’s not in the folder they thought it was, but we can go into MigrationWiz and check that out. And if we really need to, we can press play again and just do a whole migration or whatever is missing over. We don’t find that we’ve got missing data. We find that we’ve got a really nice process to get it connected, sync the initial data, reconnect the end-users, and then just see what might have happened while DNS was propagating.

Truly seamless. The client goes home, they come back the next day, they open up Outlook, and they don’t even know they’ve been moved.

And with COVID and what’s happening there, we’ve been seeing a lot of Exchange servers and we’ve actually seen a lot of old SBS servers getting decommissioned really quickly. People who have hung onto these projects and not gone to the cloud, suddenly are really interested in the cloud.

MigrationWiz has meant that we can take on more projects because we are able to just connect to these servers, begin the migration, and move onto the next job.

TL: The best thing about it, I think, is that you can schedule when the uploads happen so you don’t have to take the time away from the business if you don’t want to do it in the daytime because people are in the offices or the location, you can do it after hours for a set duration of time.

NF: 100 percent. When you’re taking it offsite, you might have someone with ADSL or lower speed NBN and they are getting rid of that old server, even an old SBS server. We were doing a migration only a week or two ago and the server couldn’t handle the load and the speed at which MigrationWiz was trying to pull the data off. So we were able to throttle it and set it up to run nice, and allow it to just migrate when they weren’t working and not have any business impact but not have any impact to my team either.

TL: Talking about all the other components of MigrationWiz can actually migrate, I believe they also do SharePoint and OneDrive. Have you used those components?

NF: We have, and recently we’ve even used tenant-to-tenant migrations. So it’s really nice when you have two companies merging together and a client acquired another Office 365 tenant, we’re able to migrate and merge the tenant data in SharePoint and OneDrive. Again, it’s really just set it up, connect, map it to the other side, and hit go. All your scheduling sits there, all your auditing sits there. Again, my team can take more work on, actually do the engaging work, the interesting work, and not have to just manually migrate data or check that the data that has migrated has come through.

Not familiar with BitTitan? Learn about the basics in this short on-demand webinar covering email migrations to Office 365!