It’s incredibly interesting to watch how large OEMs are pivoting into the world of Office 365. Such is the case with Dell’s diversified portfolio strategy to provide solutions, tools and services in addition to hardware. With roots back to its Quest acquisition, Dell has a migration solution that can be used with Office 365. To learn more about Dell’s migration play in Office 365, I sat down with Chad Lindley, Senior Product Manager, Office 365 Migration, Dell.
“The On Demand Migration for Email is really about ‘many to Microsoft’ platform mapping.” Lindley offered. “Based on Microsoft Azure, there are only a handful of screens that need to be completed to run the migration tool.” I then asked Lindley how the solution is being positioned. “So the solution set has a broad audience, depending on the solution itself. The one we are speaking about today was designed specifically for SMB market. Quest software has had a lot of migration tools, and we were trying to fill the hole in the SMB market.”
The conversation then shifted to dealing with large attachments in an e-mail migration. Understand, my bias was to discuss this matter in the context of Office 365, but the Dell On Demand Migration for Exchange isn’t not just a one trick pony (learn more about its full capabilities here. “Everyone is asking how can I transfer large amounts of data with respect to e-mail attachments in an Office 365 migration scenario.” Lindley shared. “There is a pain point around errors with large attachments and trying to figure out how to remove them.”
So the large attachment feature is very simple. It moves the large attachments to OneDrive for Business instead and puts a link in the e-mail. Lindley shared that, to his knowledge, this solution is the only one doing this attachment migration interaction with what is essentially SharePoint. Dell has started to patent the process.
Released in December 2014, the On Demand Migration for Email is now gaining momentum which maps to our own experience with the popularity of Office 365.
Pricing:
- Per mailbox
- Two models:No additional cost for large attachments functionality.
- List price on site as well. Billed at end of migration.
- Discounts available for larger migrations, via sales reps.
- You can also do a combination.
Bottom line. As IT Pros in an Office 365 world, be sure to educate yourself on the full range of migration solutions in the market. Dell’s play is worth a serious look.
