Microsoft Exchange Migrations

As your data is moved, Transvault carries out a series of integrity checks to ensure your email records will be viable post-migration.  Any items that fail to migrate are automatically re-processed a specified number of times and/or at a different time of day.

Failures to migrate an item may be temporary, owing to environmental issues such as poor network bandwidth or high loading on the legacy archive.

‘Permanent’ failures tend to be low – typically .001% of the overall email quantity.  They are usually attributable to pre-existing problems in the source archive (i.e. not caused by the migration process).  As such, it is likely that these items would NOT have been picked up by any audit or eDiscovery exercise.   

In the event of a permanent failure, a full log of the item(s) in question is produced to enable investigation.  You can attempt a manual retrieval of any failed messages directly from the log, a feature which massively reduces troubleshooting overheads.

If your organisation requires further investigative work to be carried out on failed items, data remediation services are available to help and where possible, fix the problem to the satisfaction of your legal team.

For example, in one project it was discovered that some emails only had the email ‘shell’ intact – the actual body of the email and any attachments were missing. The customer’s legal team requested for all the retrievable header data (i.e. Subject, To, From, Date) to be preserved and migrated along with explanatory text into the email body to explain to a future eDiscovery operator that the original message was broken prior to the migration. Transvault’s remediation service was able to meet this request.

NB – If your organisation requires further investigative work and data remediation to be carried out in the event of a corrupted item, this should be discussed with your chosen Transvault service provider in advance.

Transvault delivers rapid and comprehensive migrations from SourceOne back into Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft 365 and other archive platforms such as Enterprise Vault.

• One Step – Communicating directly with the SourceOne storage, the data is migrated in a single, synchronous step, requiring no interim stage or interim storage.
• Transparent to users – Users can access their data whilst it is being moved – there is no need to disable access to the archive.  Shortcuts are seamlessly converted to point to the new archive store, ensuring the upgrade process is completely transparent to end users.
• Ensures Compliance – Throughout the migration process Transvault maintains a full audit trail to maintain chain-of-custody – this is an important consideration for compliant retention.
• Automatic Failover & Logging – Transvault keeps a complete error log, with the ability to automatically resume a migration task that fails for any reason (e.g. owing to a network outage or a corrupted item).
• Notes to Exchange Conversion – If you’ve been using EmailXtender or SourceOne for Notes, and you want to migrate to Exchange, Transvault delivers on-the-fly, high fidelity Notes to Exchange conversion.
• Advanced Features –  Transvault enables high flexibility, including the ability to perform email address re-writes to address the needs of a company restructuring, etc.

Migration speeds have been measured in excess of 2TB a day.

As well as running multiple threads on a single server and across single mailboxes, multiple 

Transvault servers can be configured to operate in parallel and:

• Extract from multiple mailboxes and multiple file stores at once from your current archiving environment
• Migrate to many mailboxes simultaneously
• Have multiple migration tasks operating simultaneously on individual extra large mailboxes

However, achieving best performance is dependent on many factors such as:

• Available network bandwidth
• Loading on the legacy email archive and your Exchange servers
• The speed of the storage subsystem on which the legacy archive sits
• Your chosen archive migration partner can establish a proof of concept (POC) to establish likely throughput rates in your specific environment.

Transvault provides a comprehensive shortcut management service that ensures users have a seamless experience when they migrate.

When moving archived emails back into Exchange, legacy shortcuts are replaced (rehydrated) with the original item.  You can also set policies that determine whether items are moved into Primary mailboxes or In-Place Archives.  For example, you could move items older than 2 years into archives, and keep everything ‘younger’ in the Primary mailbox.

This activity can take place whilst users are online – there’s no need for any downtime or for users to log out.

Another key feature designed to ensure a great user experience is that Transvault synchronises with the current status of users’ shortcuts as they exist in their mailbox at the time of the migration. For example, where users have re-foldered their shortcuts ‘post-archiving’, Transvault ensures the corresponding items end up in the right folders post-migration.

Similarly, where users have deleted their shortcuts, you can configure Transvault not to migrate the corresponding item, as this is confusing and causes concern for end users when deleted items reappear.

Some archiving solutions do a good job of synchronizing the location of shortcuts, however there are some scenarios where deletions might not be picked up. An example is where users drag their shortcuts into the Outlook deleted items folder, rather than highlighting them and using the delete option that links with the archiving system.

Yes.  You can move EV journal archives back into Exchange, however they will need to be reconstructed from the proprietary format in which EV stores them so that they are in the correct ‘Envelope Journal Format’.

Transvault provides this service.  It also offers many other capabilities that will ease your move back into Exchange, including the ability to split journals (and other large mailboxes) into a number of separately handled virtual mailboxes of a user-defined size.  This allows multiple processing threads to be applied to the migration of a single journal mailbox, significantly speeding up the migration task.

You also get full chain-of-custody and detailed audit tracks that meet the most demanding compliance needs.