Migrating from Third Party Vendors to Enterprise Vault

[Maverik]

Migrating from a third party vendor to Enterprise Vault, you may consider hard and too risky, but to be honest in a huge amount of cases it is not.

I have assisted with Projects such as these in the past so wanted to share my expereinces of these. Companies that I have dealt with have switched to Enterprise Vault because simply they have not received the flexibility, supportability,integration and most importantly end user expereince that other products provide. Enterprise Vault is the market leader in archiving quite simply.

Almost all third party archiving solutions have a mechanisim for restoring the data back to the users mailbox or file system and the only issue here can be storage. Planned properly this can easily be done in stages with groups of users or files. Planning and Project Management is of course the key here for a smooth transition, but this is not technically difficult just apply some common sense and a touch of expereince!! Technically this is simply restore and re-archive under the new product, it could not be simpler.

However there are occasions that the above, is simply not an option, perhaps due to time contraints or space etc etc. Again not a problem, there is organizations that are Symantec Partners and specilize in these sort of things. One of these companies that I have come across is Procedo and Transvault, though there are others. Data can be exported from the old solution straight into the new. Simple.

Things to consider when planning and to assist with formulating a project plan.

1: How much data needs to be migrated?

2: Impact on end users?

3: Third Part Archiving Product Restore Mechinisim? Involve third party company such as Transvault or Procedo?

4: Estimate how long 1GB for example will take to recover and re-archive?

5: Roll out of Enterprise Vault Client and removal of any third party?

6: Can Symantec offer any pre-Sales Technical assistance?

7: Times export and Import can take placer? Possible during business hours etc? Alot of this will depend on current archivng strategy in place and when outage can take place? For example if you are only archiving data over six months old then mostly working during business hours is not an issue for end users.

8: What additional hardware will be required for Enterprise Vault and if so has this been sized properly? (get it right first time!!)

9: Ensure you test a migration as a proof of concept or pilot? Resolve any issues before they occur!!!!

10: Any time contraints? The job has to be completed by...................

11: You have this new product (EV) make sure it is configured right for your organization before migrating anybody!

12: Training of staff on EV before roll out? Save yourself some pain, you would not buy a car and not learn to drive. Get the most out of it.

13: Select the right support package for you with Symantec. As I have said its a great product but nothing is ever perfect.

14: Do you have the skills inhouse for the above or simply dont have the time. Get the RIGHT consultants into assist. SYMC themselves do have a Professional Services division . They can also simply assist at the beginnging or help with the set up. Flexibility and peace of mind.

Generally speaking my experience is that smaller organizations (1000 seats) will ten to go for the restore and re-archive approach. Larger organization (20000 Seats) will go for the specialist assistance and apps to assist with the migration.

In terms of data it is possible to move 10/15GB a day without too much issue. With the third party apps I have seen upto 1TB every 11 days or so of data, along with full reporting and validation of the data.