A British software company has claimed a world first for a tool capable of doing large-scale migrations of email data from traditional company-owned groupware systems, such as Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange, into either Google or Microsoft cloud services.
Manchester-based Cloud Technology Solutions which specialises in helping companies convert to the Google Apps platform, said that it has already used the tool, called Cloud Migrator, for many thousands of user migrations, and that it has reduced migration times by 35 percent.
Along with moving email, contacts and calendars to Google Apps or Microsoft's recently launched Office 365 service, Cloud Migrator can also move email to Google's Postini email archiving and security service, said CTS chief executive Steve Kaye. And as well as pulling data from GroupWise and Exchange, it can backup Google Apps accounts and migrate email from the Linux-based Scalix groupware system.
"When organisations decide to move email to the cloud, our Cloud Migrator tool can help them do it painlessly without any loss of data and with a full audit trail so that information surrounding historic data isn’t lost on transfer," Kaye said.
He added: “It is always possible to migrate many users simultaneously, but if a large source system is to be migrated then it is possible to scale up the migration process to run multiple instances of the migration tool to ensure efficient transfer of data into the cloud.”
Cloud Migrator covers more target platforms than most, but CTS is of course not the only company to offer migration-to-online services. For example, Quest Software recently announced it can now migrate data from Sharepoint and Active Directory to Microsoft Office 365, as well as data from Exchange, Gmail, GroupWise and Lotus Notes.
