E-Mail Migration

[dawks]

Not the exact forum for this, but its not Windows or Mac specific...

I'm thinking of switching email providers.. Now lets assume my users are clueless on computer technology, so in order to complete the switch over, I'd have to go to each computer (120 or so) at 6 different sites, and reconfigure their settings (possibly ports, username, password etc.. might even switch over to IMAP eventually). And theres only me that can do it..

The best option I can think of is some sort of dual delivery system, where email is sent to a server, that then sends the mail to the old server and new server. So things continue to run as normal for everyone, and I can switch one user at a time to the new server.

Does anyone know of a service that does this? Google Apps has it if you're migrating to their paid version of the service... But thats not where we're going.

Any suggestions?

 

[gmaster456]

Instead of sitting down at one computer at a time, why don't you use remote access software and do it all at once? I know windows intune lets you do such a thing.

 

[Lifted]

I'd honestly suggest asking the company you are moving to if they would find a solution for you. Without knowing what type of service you are going to there's no way to give you a 100% accurate answer.

The cheapest way would be to create new email accounts (i.e. email address) for each user on the new system, and forward mail from the old account/server to the new account/server as they are moved. This way you can take your time. You should also have their real email address on the new server as well, set as their primary, but the new address would be used for forwarding mail to the new server until the migration is completed and you can update the DNS. i.e. the "migration" address would be something like 'bob@migration.domain.com'.

If time is of any concern, you could probably find a person or 2 to help you with this for $15 or $20/hr and bang it out in a single weekend assuming you have remote access to all of the computers.

There is also software available (sorry can't remember the name of the package we used) that will route mail to different servers for different users. You point your DNS to this server, and route mail from there to the different servers the users accounts are actually hosted on. We used this for a migration as well, but it was much more involved then what you are doing. The issue with such as solution is you will probably spend more time setting that up than the actual migration would take, and you also introduce another point of failure and confusion if mail delivery starts having issues.

 

[imagoon]

If you are using Outlook you can use AD to push out mail settings. If your in a mismash environment then you are looking at touch each one at some point.