Companies looking at changing their email service often feel ‘locked-in’ and forced to carry on with their existing infrastructure due to the complexities and time involved for moving existing data to a new service.

It’s essential for organisations to maintain existing emails, along with contact and calendar information. However moving this data between systems has traditionally been labour-intensive and a resource-heavy process, creating the feeling being trapped, and unable to change.

“When we looked into the work-hours required to migrate an existing email infrastructure we quickly realised that for most organisations it’s a massive undertaking.”

said Simply Mail Solutions CTO Keith Pritchard.

“Firstly the IT department need to create archives of the existing data, usually with Microsoft Outlook; which can be especially tricky with mobile workers as you need to get access to their computer. Then begins the slow process of uploading all that data to the new email service over the company’s broadband.”

Based on the average UK business broadband upload speed, a single email account would take more than two-hours to upload onto a new email service. For a company with 10 employees this could mean interrupting two work-days of email service whilst the migration takes place.

“Losing so much productivity time to migrating data isn’t ideal.”

said Keith Pritchard

“We wanted to find a way of speeding up the process, freeing up the IT department’s time, and make it easy for companies to switch email providers.”

The result is a new automated migration service. Information can be migrated whilst employees continue working, with no downtime, and the service uses Simply Mail Solutions own direct network connections, eliminating the bottle-neck caused by the customer’s slower broadband speeds.

To make the service possible, Simply Mail Solutions turned to the US-based email migration experts, BitTitan, creators of MigrationWiz. Working in partnership, the two companies have made it simple for companies to swap between email providers, or retire an old in-house email server, without losing any information and without the IT department losing working hours on the process of moving data.

No organisations should feel trapped into carrying on with their existing email service and the new Simply Mail Solutions migration service frees companies to swap providers without worrying about downtime, loss of existing data, or taking up valuable IT resources.