Plan your SourceOne Migration

Here at Bluesource, we talk to hundreds of customers who want to move their legacy archive data to Office 365. One of the most popular legacy archive platforms is SourceOne from EMC (now Dell).

Whether you’re using SourceOne for Exchange or for Lotus Domino/Notes, we can help you get the data that’s most important to you to where you need it most. Here are the top 5 things to think about when planning your SourceOne to Office 365 migration.

1. How do I know how much data I have?

Common to many archiving platforms, looking at the size of the data estate on disk is often misleading. SourceOne is no exception.

Depending on what kind of archiving has been done, where you’d like to move the data, and to whom will have access, sizing SourceOne can be done differently.

Fortunately, Bluesource can assess your situation, provide you a proper SQL query to run, and get your migration sized correctly. We can even filter out custodians and date ranges, which is important for the next topic:

2. Do I need all of the data?

When considering an archive migration to Office 365, it’s a perfect time to do some housecleaning. Do I need every custodian’s data set? Do only need data going back the last five years?

Bluesource has the ability to filter migrations, and we encourage this whenever possible. Leaving data behind and decommissioning systems as a whole is much faster and cheaper than moving data you won’t end up needing. Expiring data individually, message by message, can be time consuming and difficult to manage.

Our software allows the migration to be filtered to your data governance requirements.

What if I’m Journaling?

As you might have found out, Office 365 doesn’t have journaling in the traditional sense. Mail and other important items are held in place across each archive, with governance policies. Moving journal data to Office 365 has particular steps involved, so working with a partner like Bluesource who can navigate those waters for you is essential.

4. What is the end user experience like?

For SourceOne customers utilizing mailbox archiving, your users are likely used to seeing stubs in their mailbox and accessing old messages. How will this change in Office 365?

Bluesource’s software can tailor the user experience to what is least impacting. If you don’t currently use stubs at all, it likely makes sense to move archived items directly to the Office 365 online archive, so they are out of view until needed. If you do use stubs, those stubs can be replaced with the original message, allowing users to access them right where they were before. Finally, Bluesource can split the migration, placing items with stubs in the regular mailbox, and those without in the archive.

5. What about Chain of Custody?

Arguably the most important aspect of any data migration, Chain of Custody is at the core of our data migrations practice. We provide full chain of custody reporting, with message-level tracking of all items. Metadata such as subject, dates, times, and message IDs are included in the report. For any messages that couldn’t be migrated for whatever reason, an exceptions report provides all data available and attempted resolution.

To talk to us about your migration needs, send us an email, or use the chat below to get started.

Get the most out of your E3 and E5 Investment

1. Take an inventory

One of the most important aspects of eDiscovery is knowing what the potential sources of data are in your matter. Part of this means knowing which workloads in Office 365 are in use, such as Teams, Yammer, OneDrive for Business, and more.

If your organization would like to employ these tools, it is imperative you know how to search through and collect those records for discovery in a matter.

Are you aware of all of the sources of data your organization potentially has? Remember, this can also include Shadow IT.

2. Set information governance policies

In order to reduce risk and potential exposure, information governance policies should be in place on electronic records within the organization.

A simple retention policy should be adopted that your employees are trained on regularly. It should be integrated into the tools your employees use regularly, such as Microsoft Outlook or OneDrive for Business.

Records should be maintained for their required period of time, and disposed of afterwards. Bluesource has helped many organizations get comfortable with the capabilities of information governance policies so that automatic expiry of data can finally be turned on.

With advanced data governance from Office 365, we can even help deploy policies that actually classify data automatically, without any interaction from your employees.

This allows your information governance policy to be put in place, with minimal reliance upon your staff.

3. Make sure auditing is enabled

Auditing, especially eDiscovery activities, is super important. Due to the sensitive nature of content searching and eDiscovery work, you’ll want a detailed log of all activities performed within the Security & Compliance center.

Now is a good time to check and make sure it is enabled in your tenant, and to review some of the logs.

You can even set up alerts, so that when specific activities are performed, such as a search being run, designated parties receive an alert.

4. Learn KQL

KQL, or Keyword Query Language, is Office 365’s filtering language for content searches, in-place legal holds, and eDiscovery searches within the Security & Compliance center.

While the most common filters are exposed in the search interface, there are many more than aren’t. This article is a good reference page to add to your bookmarks, as it has all the available search keywords.

5. Add Non-Office 365 Data

As comprehensive as Office 365 is, it will never represent the entire landscape of your data. Using Office 365’s Advanced eDiscovery, you can upload data outside of your tenant, such as files collected from local file shares, laptop or desktop data, or evidence from opposing or outside counsel.

Bluesource can also provide a full-service migration of your legacy data, especially from archive products such as SourceOne, EmailXtender, PSTs, and many others.

If you would like more information on Microsoft Office 365 eDiscovery training or migration services, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.