Corporate Migration

A company was moving from one parent to a new one, we were involved in migrating the Internet services. We had to create a solid solution for success.

The company was moving from one parent to another. We were tasked with ensuring Internet communications kept flowing during the migration process. Users had to be able to send and receive emails using the new parent company’s domain, but still receive emails on their old domain.

The main communications was email, plus we had to look into how the Internet access was to be provided.

We wanted to have something that was simple to administer and robust. The company had its own email service and needed to have the domain name of the new parent added. However, this would have meant this email service would never retrieve email on this domain, and neither will they be able to send emails on the domain because it would get rejected by spam filters.

What we designed was to have any email sent out of the server to be directed to the new parent company’s email service, where it would be turned around and sent out their gateways. This would overcome any spam filter issues.

For incoming mail, the new parent’s email service would check the recipient to determine if it was intended for the new parent. If the name cannot be found, it was forwarded to the child company. Any spam was ditched before it reached the Internet gateway.

The solution was tested until the configuration was reliable enough to put into production. It proved to be very robust and performed adequately.

Users were now able to send emails using the new domain, and receive on both domains. It gave the users breathing space to let their customers and suppliers know their new email address.

Migrating the users was done on a site by site basis. Mailboxes for migrated users were created in the new parent email service. Mailboxes exported and imported to the new mailboxes. Now the user had an identity in the new parent email servers, the forwarding service would no longer send the emails to the old email server.

With the last user migrated to the new parent, the forwarding service was turned off, together with the old email servers.

Using a configuration and simple scripts made it easy to direct emails to the right place.

Any problems could be found and fixed quickly.

The providers services were geared up to cope with the forwarding processes.

Being a configuration, we were able to remove it once the migration was complete.