Forwarding address

10 February 2006

Email is the communications lifeblood of almost every organisation. So migration to a new email system can be a traumatic affair.

King's College London (KCL) is one of the UK's leading higher education institutions. Part of the University of London, it is responsible for the education of over 19,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and is among the country's top five universities in terms of attracting research funding, with income from grants and contracts that has risen to more than £93 million and an annual turnover of £320 million.

But by 2003, one of the pillars of that expansion, KCL's organisation-wide email system, was buckling under the strain of the college's success - and the demands of its 35,000 users. Major expansion and a series of mergers during recent years did little to help the situation, says Mark Cox, acting school support services manager within KCL's department of Information Services and Systems.

Email migration economics

In late 2003, US-based IT analyst company Ferris Research set out to estimate the true costs of email migration projects. Its main findings:

Migrations cost between $125 and $500 per mailbox to migrate.
In-place migrations are least expensive. Where organisations can simply upgrade server software and don't have to make any changes to user workstations, migrations can cost as little as $50 per mailbox.
Hardware and software represent the greatest cost, followed by physical implementation (see graph)
Good economies of scale are key. The more seats an organisation migrates, the less expensive it is per seat. For example, a typical migration for 1,000 seats is likely to cost about $350 per seat. The same sort of migration, but for 50,000 seats, is likely to cost about $200 to $250 per seat.
Third-party migration tools typically cost $5 to $15 per seat and they can save $20 to $30 per seat by reducing implementation time.
End-user training is hard to justify financially. If a new email client is deployed, the total cost of training is likely to be $25 to $35 per user, including curriculum development and the time of instructors and students.
Laptop migrations cost from $25 to as much as $2,000 per mailbox. Laptops present a particular problem, in that even if their client software is not being upgraded, their offline stores will often need to be resynchronised with the device. That means users will need to return laptops to the office for a few days and having the initial synchronisation performed while the machines are connected to the local area network - with all the loss of productivity and disruption that results from that.

Typical migration costs

Ferris Research

"The extra load on the email system was taken up through stretching the existing systems - to the extent that these were working at the edge of their limits," he says.

Added to that were concerns in the information systems department about meeting user requirements for performance improvements, raising the general resilience of the email service and the need to reduce operational overheads, says Cox.

The conclusion: KCL needed a completely new email system. Many organisations have faced the same dilemma - how to migrate thousands of users to a different email system without causing major operational disruption and incurring huge project costs?

The issue is not always the quest for better scalability. In some cases, the need to migrate is part of a technology standardisation effort that follows a merger or acquisition. "If you've got to manage a complex, heterogeneous email environment populated by different systems from different vendors, then you're going to a need a lot of people with a lot of different skills and experience. And that won't be cheap," says Derek Roberts, business executive for IBM Lotus.

At yet other companies, the need derives from problems with using aging or bespoke systems where concerns over scalability and reliability are exacerbated by the lack of support for third-party add-ons, such as anti-virus, anti-spam and message archiving tools.

"Eventually, an older system is going to hit a brick wall," observes Steve Gaines, technical director at Novell.

Some organisations, moreover, face end user demand for enhanced collaboration features such as instant messaging, team workspaces, document and application sharing, and workflow. Or end users want support for remote, mobile and offline use and integration with desktop tools (most frequently, Microsoft Office) and line-of-business applications in areas such as document and project management.

"It's very rare these days that these projects are only looking at email migration. More frequently, a new email system is part of a wider collaboration or mobility project," says Allister Frost, a product solutions marketing manager at Microsoft UK.

Email addicts

It is a fact that, as the importance of email as a key medium of corporate communications has grown, most managers have found that their employees are unable to perform their roles without it. "For most companies, the email system going down is like the electricity going off. Most employees will argue that they might as well go home," says Eileen Brown, messaging technology specialist at Microsoft UK.

In some cases, ensuring that does not happen means a radical shift. In order to tackle the problems created by its overburdened email systems, KCL embarked on a major email migration programme in mid-2003. And like most managers charged with a project of that scale, Cox stresses the importance of in-depth planning.

Key, he says, is to consider the needs of the end user right from the start of the project: "As we've found, one seemingly small decision made on technical grounds can have far reaching implications for the user community." Another important consideration is to make sure that support staff are equipped to deal with the ramifications of the migration. "A dozen users left unsupported after migration can give the project a bad name, notwithstanding 35,000 successful account moves," he says.

Erica Rugullies, an analyst with IT market research company Forrester, concurs. She recently conducted research into success factors in email migration projects at a number of companies, and found that adequate planning - in terms of budget, schedule and data incompatibility issues -- is a prerequisite for a successful migration.

In practice: Accenture

WHEN it comes to email migration projects, Frank Modruson, chief information officer at global systems integration company Accenture, has a simple piece of advice: "Once you've started down that road, move as fast as you can and don't look back!"

He is speaking from a position of authority. During 2003, IT staff at Accenture migrated 75,000 mailboxes of employees in over 40 countries worldwide from IBM's Lotus Notes groupware package to Microsoft Exchange Server and Office Outlook. At some stages of the project, they were moving as many as 4,000 users per week.

The key justification for the upheaval? To implement email technology that would enable Accenture employees to collaborate closer with colleagues, clients and partners, regardless of location and preferred email access device.

Mobility is extremely important to a company with such a highly distributed workforce. Some 80% of Accenture's 90,000 employees spend more than three-quarters of their time outside the office, and on any given day, 10% work in a country other than their own.

"We were a long-term Lotus Notes user but when faced with the decision to either upgrade or change to a new email system, we found that the costs were roughly comparable," says Modruson.

Microsoft technology, in particular, was attractive, he explains, for the classic reason: it would integrate well with the other Microsoft tools that Accenture employees use on their desktops - Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations -- as well as calendaring functions on their PDAs.

The results of the project have been dramatic, says Modruson. For example, the company reduced the number of sites that support messaging servers from more than 40 to four and reduced the number of mail servers from more than 250 to 120.

The lessons Accenture's CIO learned from the project:

Run a rock-solid pilot

"We first performed a five-month pilot where we moved around 10% of the workforce - including the entire IT team - to the new Microsoft system. Once we were confident we had the processes right, we then converted the balance of the 68,000 employees over four months to the new system."

Use executive buy-in to drive the project forwards

"The first employee groups to be migrated included members of senior management. When leaders are saying that the migration was painless and not disruptive, others are likely to follow without complaint."

Avoid migrating legacy emails to the new system

"We decided to archive each employees' existing emails on their desktop - so they had access to them but we didn't have to undergo a huge conversion exercise. That had several major benefits. It enabled them to take a look at their past email behaviour, and many resolved to manage their emails more effectively. In fact, many employees said that it was a liberating experience to start fresh with a clear in-box."

Use training to overcome employees' fears

"After each employee had been migrated, they were sent 'technology tips' by email, up to two or three a week. These were very well received. From the start, they gave employees the confidence to use the system and learn new email management techniques."

"Underestimating data migration time could result in unplanned downtime. Underestimating the horsepower required to keep gateway interconnects up and running under stress, or the power of the machines doing the data migration, can also cause delays and downtime," she says.

Insufficient financial resources are another common factor in problematic email migration projects. "Under-budgeting mistakes correlate with over-optimism," she says. Cost overruns most commonly derive from a whole host of factors: unexpected desktop hardware upgrades; the personnel time required to upgrade each desktop where client software is to be replaced; database upgrades (for example, if Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is implemented and requires an SQL Server back end for enterprise-class rollout); network bandwidth upgrades to support remote users after data centre consolidation; user training (especially if users must learn new client software), and greater-than-expected needs for outside consulting (see box, 'Email migration economics').

Finally, warns Rugullies, "Don't skip the prototype." Running and testing a new email system in a pilot environment and running minor migration projects on it will show up any data incompatibilities that exist between the old and new systems.

Calendar data migration is a common problem. Because of a lack of standards across various email packages, such data does not move fluidly between one system and another. Directory synchronisation, also, is "difficult to set up and must be tested rigorously", she says. The danger posed by these issues is glaring: that users may lose a record of their future and historical appointments (of critical importance when dealing with corporate governance) as well as information on their key contacts.

Big bang

In many cases, however, it is not the type but the volume of data that causes IT teams the most challenging problem. According to Rugullies, the organisations she has surveyed have opted for one of three choices: to migrate all live mail boxes; migrate mail from a limited period such as the previous 90 days or one year; or to migrate all email that fits within the mailbox quota of the new system.

She advises: "Have users clean out their mailboxes prior to the migration. Organisations usually migrate all contacts and global distributions lists but personal lists are often manually recreated. Shared folders are typically migrated but calendars are not."

Most managers who have overseen a successful, large-scale migration projects would agree with Rugullies on one major point: the importance of a reliable pilot project. Take, for example, Frank Modruson, global chief information officer for IT services giant Accenture, who recently headed up a 75,000-user migration at the company (see box, 'In practice: Accenture'): "Piloting and testing is essential, so that what you roll out is rock solid. If it isn't, how do you expect to get users to welcome the new system?" he says.

That rollout process can be made considerably easier by using utilities that come with the target application, specialist email migration software from niche vendors such as CompuSven and Wingra Technologies or bespoke tools brought in by migration consultants.

Companies also need to decide between a 'big bang' migration and a phased rollout (where the old and new systems co-exist and users are gradually migrated between the two). A single-stage migration is the best option for companies where fewer than 1,000 end-users are involved, according to Forrester's Rugullies.

When thousands of users are being shifted and many gigabytes (or even terabytes) of data must be moved, there will need to be a period of parallel running during which both the source and the target systems are maintained. Typically, says Rugullies, data is extracted from the old system, translated into a neutral format via a gateway, and then imported into the new system. Because of the coexistence of the two systems, some messages will continue to come into the old system after the new one is live, and users will need to be able to access these old mailboxes.

Even with all these preparations, the success of any new email system depends on just one thing: the willingness of end users to embrace it. Training and support is paramount and, in many cases, successful projects have combined formal teaching sessions or web conferencing with the establishment of an intranet help site containing tips and advice.

One company, Mirapoint, has developed a product that enables companies to get round the problem of forcing new email client software on end users. It sells dedicated email servers that enable users to access and send emails via the standards-based client of their choice, such as Microsoft Outlook or a web browser, and to update their own directory profile so that they can manage account activities in the way that suits them best.

"Minimum interference with the end user is the best approach," says Jamie Cowper, channel manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Mirapoint.

The price of failing to recognise the importance of communicating effectively with end users is high, says Rugullies of Forrester: "It results in higher-than-expected support costs, low user satisfaction and lower-than-expected end-user adoption rates," she says - the very issues that the whole challenge of email migration sets out to address.

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