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Seamless Email Migration: Empowering Balton CP LTD with Google Workspace

About the Client

Balton CP LTD, based in Watford UK has a strong commercial presence across Sub-Saharan Africa. The parent company, 1991, CP Holdings Ltd., a British corporation with a global reach, made its first foray into business in Africa by acquiring the majority stake in the Israeli multinational Koor Industries which then later translated to acquiring the remaining shares of the business.

Balton CP drives regional business development and growth through professionally managed subsidiaries established in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Ghana, and Nigeria. With an individual presence in each country and over 50 years of history, Balton enjoys an enviable reputation for reliability and delivery.

The Challenges

  • Over 12TB of data migration.
  • Migrate emails, contacts, and calendars.
  • Low physical resources namely CPU, disk speed, memory, and network on the Exchange server.
  • Low physical resources namely CPU, disk speed, memory, and network on the client machines.
  • Network speed between Exchange server and Google cloud.
  • The density of traffic outside of the client’s network.
  • Individual configuration to be done in client PCs.
  • Network outrages.
  • Data fidelity.
  • Zero downtime.

Solutions

  • AlignMinds already had a good relationship with the company, having worked with them on other projects.
  • We started with analysing the existing infrastructure and evaluating available workarounds within the client’s budget. We recommended Google Workspace for its easy migration, flexibility, and robustness, and also due to its cost-effectiveness.
    • Key Technologies

    • Active Directory

    • Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange (GAMME)

    • DNS: MX, DMARC, SPF

  • The Process

  • AlignMinds provided a full service from planning to implementation with our dedicated team overseeing the project from concept, licensing, and migration. Our technicians then managed the data migration and reconfiguration of PCs and phones. The completed project was delivered without any problems in 4 weeks.

  • We divided the process into three phases.

  • Phase 1: Plan

    • Defined the topology, a single instance of GWMME to transfer the data

    • Prepare users, communicate, and train for the upcoming transition.

    • Organize the data, clean up, exclude folders, junk emails, etc

  • Phase 2: Test

    • How many users can a single client machine process at one time?

    • Capacity of physical resources.

    • Expected time of migration when the resources are running at an optimal rate.

    • Find the average message migration rate (migration rate) and the number of migrated messages for those users (total mail messages migrated).

    • Calculate the average migration time for a user (= total messages migrated / total users migrated) / migration rate).

    • Run a pilot deployment.

  • Phase 2: Migration

    We divided 250 users into three phases and migrated and switched users based on it. This plan helped educated the IT team about the new features of Google Workspace, so they can work together with us when configuring services. This is in addition to the earlier training given.

    The three phases of migration we created were.

    • Core IT

    • Early Adopters

    • Users with higher email box size

Results

  • Consistency, and reliability in communication.
  • Less IT management hassles and overheads.
  • Enabling device management policy allowed the internal IT team to control Gmail setup accounts.
  • Unlimited space on Google Drive and Google Takeout helps administrators to back up and delete user data when a user leaves.
  • Google Workspace Reports alerts and reporting helped IT guys to manage the domain security.
  • Employees now regularly use Google Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, document collaboration, etc.
  • Solid data backup through Google Drive.
  • Easy sharing of the document.
  • Ease of taking individual user backups, all synched into the drive.

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