The growth and volume of business messaging data across a variety of different platforms make it difficult for businesses to effectively manage their messaging and communications environments. Businesses should improve their messaging management skills to improve their agility and take advantage of new functionality, says business messaging company Soarsoft Africa director Chris Hathaway.

Migration to new email and messaging platforms from legacy platforms can cause a lot of disruption and can take a while for staff to get used to. However, companies should begin to have a continuous migration mindset, where their systems are set up in anticipation of future migration, he explains.

“The management of customer and staff expectations is the most critical part of email and messaging migration. Developing a solid methodology to manage migrations, including knowing where all your resources are, how messaging systems will work during migrations and the effects on stability of new systems, will mean that future migrations can be done quickly and easily, enabling the business’ communications to meet industry standards, while improving corporate agility.”

Further, it is also important for companies to follow expert advice to manage their migrations. Companies should expect migrations to happen regularly on all messaging platforms, says Microsoft messaging platforms migration software company Binary Tree partner alliance manager Fabrice Barbier.

The migration of business messaging to a new platform is based on a well-defined business case and the aim of the migration must be defined, whether it is a basic need or mission critical, says Barbier.

“The difficulties and complexities that occur during migration compel companies to seek a reliable partner that has proven methods and technologies to help them create a specific methodology for that business, which will enable the business to do future migrations. Often, the aim is to create a methodology for continuous migration, owing to the scope of messaging and varying functions across different parts of the business,” he explains.

During a tutorial presented by Binary Tree and Soarsoft Africa in April, IT managers were guided in the migration of email and messaging from legacy systems, such as Lotus Notes, to global software company Microsoft Exchange and cloud-service Microsoft Office 365.

Soarsoft Africa registration manager Warren Marks highlights that, at the start of a migration project, companies must analyse their resources, content, user behaviour and business workflows to determine how to migrate what and when to reduce disruption and, if well managed, to elimi- nate disruption.

“Using the methods developed by Binary Tree and Soarsoft Africa, a good migration can even maintain messaging functionality between old and new platforms. Sometimes users will not even know that they had been migrated, but companies must also educate users to gain the full benefit of messaging platforms,” he enthuses.

The two companies foresee continuous demand for migration services and technologies, as there are more than 25-million users still using Microsoft Exchange 2003 that will have to be migrated within the year because the product is at the end of its life cycle and will not receive further updates from Microsoft.

Soarsoft Africa has established itself through 13 years of engaging with customers on email migration and business messaging management.