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In the current economic climate, it's not surprising that all IT departments are looking to save on costs.  If you're presently looking at migrating a GroupWise or older Exchange system to Exchange 2007, you may be concerned with the time and resource cost of performing the migration and getting everything right.  Over the last several months, I've had customers express this very concern.  They want to convert/migrate to Exchange 2007, however, they just want it to be low cost, simple, and not a lot of user impact.  Which is typically easier said than done when you look at the task of moving gigabytes of email from older legacy systems to Exchange 2007.  Not only is the mailbox size a factor, but there are also GroupWise archives and/or Outlook .PST files to consider.

If you're migrating from GroupWise to Exchange 2007, chances are, you are already looking at using Quest Software's GroupWise Migrator for Exchange.  It is pretty much the defacto GroupWise migration tool.  If you're looking into an Exchange to Exchange migration (either intra-forest or inter-forest) you may have been looking at Quest Migration Manager for Exchange.

If you are using one of these tools, by adding Quest Archive Manager into the mix, you can greatly reduce the time and cost of your migration effort.   And, even if you're not using these tools, you can still use Quest Archive Manager to reduce your migration costs.

The methodology use for this approach is called "Archive before you Migrate" and is becoming one of the more popular migration scenarios.  To perform a migration using this method, you configure Archive Manager to use the existing legacy email system (GroupWise or Exchange 2003/2000) and being archiving all of your mail and import all applicable GroupWise archives and/or Outlook PST files.  Essentially, you want to pick a date and time to archive up to.  A good target example is 90-120 days and older email is placed into the archive.

Once all the older email is in the archive, you perform a standard migration, but filtered by date.  The big difference here is that you only migrate 90-120 days worth of email into Exchange 2007, rather than all the email that has been stored on your legacy system.  The older email is retained in Quest Archive Manager, and as mailboxes are migrated a process is done to reconnect the Archive Manager mailbox to the new Exchange 2007 mailbox.  Thus, instantly bringing all the legacy email content from the old system to the new system nearly instantaneously. 

The cost savings from doing this method can be quite significant, as Quest Archive Manager allows for the following:

• Single instance storage across the Enterprise.  Messages in archive manager are only stored once per Archive Manager instance.
• Ability to use low cost storage solutions for attachment data.  Archive Manager function extremely well on SATA drives and NAS solutions, as opposed to expensive Exchange 2007 SAN storage solutions
• No client is required to access Archive Manager, as it is a web based application.  Therefore, a costly rollout to clients is not required.

This is just a short list that does not cover all Quest Archive Manager features, but simply highlights the big cost saving features for doing an "Archive before You Migrate" solution.  More information about Quest Archive Manager can be obtained from the Quest Software website at http://www.quest.com/archive-manager.