Powerful E-mail Archive Migration Solution

Migration of unlimited data volumes without compromising its integrity
Support for over 25 different archives, formats and storage platforms
Unmatched processing rates: extracting, converting and writing data at speeds over 1.5 GB per minute

Expertise

Business Intelligence

Verticals

ISV

Our Customer faced the need for migrating the existing legacy mail records into a new system. Iflexion brought the company through the process painlessly.

Duration

Years

Team

People

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies

Context

Our Customer, one of the world’s leading vendors specializing in e-mail archives and PST content management, was striving to retain its leadership in the market by launching a next-gen e-mail archive migration software with versatile platform support and near-zero risk of data loss or tampering for both premium and mid-segment clients. Inflexion’s technical expertise backed by a proven track record in successfully delivered data migration solutions and a clear vision of the project’s scope secured a successful bid.

Solution

The solution is based on a client-server model and represents a Windows-based platform which provides for secure migration of legacy e-mail archive contents to alternative archives and messaging platforms. The solution enables seamless, selective and audited transportation of data from/to 25+ archive systems without compromising its integrity and ensuring that it remains seamlessly accessible during migration.

Functionality

The delivered platform provides for direct migration of e-mail archive data and supports the majority of e-mail archive platforms, both on-site and cloud. The solution envisages userspecific functionality providing different users only with the tools relevant for their tasks and ensuring proper workload distribution:

System administrators set up migration properties, monitor progress, perform troubleshooting and contact our Customer’s technical support upon necessity.
Managers monitor detailed audit reports generated by the system to meet business and operational needs of the company.
Our Customer’s staff assists end users with migration by licensing their products, setting up migration environment and consulting them on data migration specificity depending on their goals.

Fast Processing Rates

The solution automates e-mail archive migration with a high-performance engine that creates a direct pipeline between virtually any third-party archive and Exchange and/or Office 365 using the powerful Exchange Web Services API. The multi-threaded engine delivers an unmatched processing rate, extracting, converting and writing data at speeds over 1.5 GB per minute. The multi-server nature provides for parallel operation of platform’s servers, ensuring flawless performance of Customer’s services and unhindered migration duration.

High Data Fidelity

The scalability of the platform’s engine enables migration of large data volumes without compromising data integrity. All migrated items are checked and transferred in a stepwise manner, eliminating data loss or tampering risks. Besides, each of the items gets audited, thus, complying with the needs of end users related to secure e-mail records retention. Though the probability of item migration failure is highly unlikely, the solution provides users with reporting and analytical tools for detecting and troubleshooting potential issues.

Flexible Migration

The solution offers intelligent data transfer by allowing users to analyze e-mail archive contents, profile them and perform selective record migration. Users are able to define retention policies in line with their needs, thus managing the lifecycle of their e-mail records. In particular, users are able to remove duplicate data and filter out obsolete data by specifying its age, senders/recipients and presence/absence of shortcuts/attachments. The platform also provides users with tools for legacy shortcut clean-up as well as generates detailed reports for data traceability.

Zero User Impact

Maintaining user access to source e-mail archives during migration is crucial as to ensure the continuity of the company’s workflow. Bearing that in mind Inflexion team empowered the solution to read archive databases during migration without altering their data or restricting user access, thus ensuring zero impact on user experience. Migration and conversion are carried out ‘on-the-go’ without stopping the source archive service since data gathering, analysis and migration are run in a read-only mode. However, users are still able to change shortcut preferences or delete unnecessary shortcuts. Moreover, the solution also provides for an ability to schedule migration and limit bandwidth usage as to ensure workflow persistence despite network and system capacities. Users maintain access to shared items post-migration whereas shortcuts are automatically converted to work with the new archive service.

Versatile Platform Support

The delivered solution offers a series of connectors that support migration between and within different versions of industry-leading archive formats, as well as the migration of data held in systems that are maturing or declining in popularity into newer, more capable environments. Up-to-date the platform supports data migration and shortcut management for over 25 different archives, formats and storage platforms.

Development Process

Inflexion team’s software engineering skills and technology competence were test-driven during the rescue of the Customer’s existing shortcut management tool. The latter was quite instable due to poor coding and had technical inefficiencies which were to be addressed by our dedicated team. Inflexion specialists revamped the legacy tool as to fix the flaws, thus, allowing it to work seamlessly with the supported environments. Deeply comfortable with the results and expertise of our dedicated team the Customer and Inflexion went on with the full-scale project implementation.

Inflexion’s dedicated team has been working together with the Customer for over 8 years. Initiated back in 2006 as a result of the tender won by Inflexion, our cooperation led the initially delivered migration solution to become one of the best platforms in the market capable of powering the most demanding and complex e-mail archive and mailbox migration projects.

Initially, Inflexion specialists met with the Customer as to identify core project requirements, technical design and features which, in turn, resulted in the approval and adoption of the modular architecture spiced up by a set of innovative shortcut conversion algorithms and an intuitively clear and friendly user interface. The dedicated team then proceeded with iterative development of the platform.

Up-to-date we’ve been actively sharing updates on progress and quality metrics with the Customer. Adhering to Scrum methodology widely used in agile development, Inflexion’s dedicated team holds frequent standup and backlog meetings with the use of burn down charts, retrospectives, and team estimates, which all prove to be highly effective given requirement fluctuations and new project development iterations. Our team runs a set of automated performance tests and utilizes a previously developed supplemental visual performance reporting tool which provides for a swift forecast and further management of the impact of new functionality on performance indicators. A wide range of Extreme Programming practices such as unit tests, continuous integration, pair code review and performance tests are applied, which, in turn, provides for further achievement of Customer’s business goals and results in the latter’s utmost satisfaction with the quality of the delivered solution.

Technologies

The solution utilizes .NET as the main technology framework along with .NET Remoting API for inter-process communication. The client UIs are built using .NET WinForms and WCF, based on Infragistics components. The database layer is built on Microsoft SQL Server.

The reporting module is based on DevExpress, a powerful suite which provided for the creation of complex and detailed migration reports. Application development process was notably simplified by utilizing the Apache log4net logging library. The solution has been integrated with the following archive systems: Symantec EV API, HP Riss Query API, EMC S1 API, EAS API, Exchange Web Services and Centera.