Moving your email and files without losing any.
Migrations go wrong in predictable places, and almost never in the place people worry about. The mail itself copies fine. What breaks is the shared mailbox nobody mentioned, the calendar the receptionist manages, and the folder permissions that took eight years to accumulate.
Small enough that one person can hold the whole picture in their head, which is the point.
Evening or weekend, with a rehearsal first. Nobody loses a working day to it.
Nothing is deleted at the other end until you have signed off that everything arrived.
Most of the work happens before anything moves.
A migration is ninety percent inventory and ten percent copying. If the inventory is right, the copy is boring. If the inventory is wrong, you find out at nine on Monday morning when someone cannot get into the shared sales inbox.
So the first thing I do is build a full picture of what exists — including the things nobody thinks to mention.
- 01Inventory. Every mailbox and its size, every shared mailbox, every alias, every distribution list, every calendar with delegate access, every forwarding rule, every mail-enabled contact. The forwarding rules are worth calling out: they are frequently where an old compromise is quietly still sitting.
- 02The bits that don't migrate. Shared mailbox membership, calendar delegation and folder permissions are not attached to the mail data — they are rebuilt on the far side. Anyone who tells you a tool moves all of it has not done many of these. I document them beforehand so they can be recreated exactly.
- 03Files and permissions. Moving the bytes is easy. Mapping a decade of ad-hoc share permissions from a NAS or Google Drive onto SharePoint's model is the actual job, and it is usually the moment a business discovers that everyone has always had access to payroll.
- 04A rehearsal. A test batch of real mailboxes runs first, so the surprises happen on a Tuesday afternoon with two accounts rather than on cutover night with forty.
- 05The cutover. DNS time-to-live dropped a day ahead, a sync of everything new since the last pass, MX records switched, mail queues watched until they drain. Out of hours, with the old system still live behind it.
- 06The morning after. This is the part people skip and then regret. Outlook profiles rebuilt, phones re-authenticated, signatures redeployed, shared mailboxes re-added, and me on the end of the phone while thirty people all open Outlook at once.
Everything where it was, only somewhere better.
The measure of a good migration is that a week later nobody can remember it happening. That means no missing mail, no lost calendar invites, and no one quietly emailing from their personal account because their Outlook never worked again.
- —Every mailbox, calendar, contact list and folder structure moved and verified against the original.
- —Shared mailboxes, delegation and distribution lists rebuilt to match what you had.
- —Files in SharePoint or OneDrive with permissions reviewed rather than blindly copied.
- —Mail authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) correct on the new platform, so deliverability does not fall off a cliff.
- —The old platform still intact until you confirm you are happy, then a written decommission plan.
The worries that come up every single time.
- Will we lose any email?
- Not if it is planned properly. The old system stays running and receiving throughout, the copy runs in passes with a final catch-up sync at cutover, and nothing is deleted at the source until you have confirmed everything arrived. If something does go missing, it is still sitting in the old platform.
- How long does it take?
- For a small business, usually one to three weeks end to end — but most of that is planning and copying in the background while everyone carries on working normally. The bit that affects your staff is a single evening.
- Can people keep working during it?
- Yes. Right up until the cutover everyone stays on the existing system. The only visible day is the changeover, and that is deliberately put somewhere it does not cost you trading hours.
- What about our old PST files and archives?
- They can come too. Loose PSTs on people's desktops are one of the most common things I find, and a migration is the right moment to pull them into the tenant where they get backed up and searched properly instead of living on one laptop.
- We're moving away from another IT provider. Is that awkward?
- Sometimes, and it is worth being honest about. If they hold your domain or your tenant's admin credentials, getting those released can be the slowest part of the whole job. I have done it enough times to know what to ask for and in what order.
Remote first. On site when it needs hands.
Almost all of this is done remotely, so where you are rarely matters. When something genuinely needs someone in the room — a cabinet, a cable, a machine that will not boot — these are the places I cover in person.
Tell me what's going wrong.
A couple of lines is plenty — you don't need the right technical words for it. I'll come back within one working day with a sensible first step, and I'll tell you if you don't actually need me.