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Migration

What to do with email journals (when you’re in Microsoft 365)

Don’t let Microsoft 365 leave your legacy email journals ‘marooned’…

If you are journaling in Microsoft 365, where are you writing your email journals to?

This is what Microsoft says on the subject of journalling in Microsoft 365: 

You can’t designate an Exchange Online mailbox as a journaling mailbox. You can deliver journal reports to an on-premises archiving system or a third-party archiving service.

On-premises? These days, using any system that’s sitting in your physical office is not a great option. Without IT staff on site every day to maintain and backup servers and storage, your records could be at risk.

In the cloud? If you’re using a hosted service like Mimecast or Proofpoint*, switching to Microsoft 365 for the protection of email (and a lot more besides) could save you a lot of money.

So what can you do to improve the situation?

There’s a school of thought that the features available in Microsoft 365 make the need to a run separate email journal unnecessary.

We produced this amusing ‘pirate video’ a while back to explain how Microsoft (arguably) replaces the role of a conventional journal, and why it’s important to carefully consider how legacy journals are migrated into the Microsoft 365 way of doing things.

Understand your options for tackling existing journals

Whether you want to switch entirely to Microsoft 365 for your journaling – or look elsewhere to stash your email records – we can help you work out the best options.

In the first instance we’ll help you assess whether conventional journaling is still required for your business and compliance needs, and talk you through the detail of how you can meet your compliance remit with the various settings and facilities available in Microsoft 365.

When it comes to deciding what to do with your legacy archives, there’s quite a few options open to you, including:

  • Let your legacy journals ‘age in place’ (bury them somewhere safe ;-) )
  • Migrate just the legacy journals you need into Microsoft 365
  • Switch to a cloud based journaling service and move your legacy journals there**

*If you feel like you’re being held captive by your current hosted journaling service, we can help you jump ship and save lots of swag.  Sorry – getting too caught up in the pirate theme!

** Beware – it might be free to upload your old journals into a cloud-based archive, but check what’s involved in getting your data back out again later down the track.

Email Journal Migration

Get in touch to discover your journal migration options arggghhh, Jim lad.