Skykick Automates Microsoft Office 365 Migration Process

While there is a lot of interest these days in making the move to Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud, actually making that migration is a time-consuming process. The end result is that organizations often wind up in situations where one part of the business has made the shift while other parts continue to run Microsoft Office on traditional desktops for many months.

Looking to help accelerate that migration process, Skykick has come up with a set of tools that automate the move by eliminating the need for end users to actually be involved.

Known as the “hands-free” feature of the Skykick SMB and Enterprise Migration Suite, Skykick co-CEO Evan Richman said Skykick is making use of “Source-Side Impersonation” (SSI) to access mailboxes and Public Folders; thereby eliminating the need to gather individual end user credentials.

In addition, the SkyKick’s Outlook Assistant can now be remotely installed. Once installed, Outlook Assistant will automatically check the PCs readiness, auto-patch Outlook if required, create a new profile, move required local data and settings, and connect Outlook running on premise to Office 365.

Once started, Richman said the Skykick migration tools can now cut the process down to several hours; as opposed to the several days that a migration might require today.

While not every organization is in a rush to make the shift to Microsoft Office 365, Richman noted that many organizations wind up be daunted by an extended migration process. Because they can’t make the move quickly the natural forces of inertia often result in the migration not being made at all, said Richman.

Naturally, there are probably more than a few solution providers charging by the hour to shepherd a Microsoft Office 365 migration, so automating that process may not have a lot of initial appeal. But given the volume of customers that expected to make the migration to Microsoft Office 365 in the months and years ahead most solution providers don’t have enough staff to keep up with the workload. If they can’t take on the job most IT organizations will simply look elsewhere for someone who can. As a result, it’s in the best interest of solution providers to facilitate as many Microsoft Office 365 migrations as they can while the opportunity still exists.

After all, Microsoft is going to push as many of its customers into the cloud as soon as it can. In the meantime for as long as this opportunity exists, solution providers should be focusing how to monetize as much as it as quickly as IT automation might allow.

Correction: An earlier version of the story attributed comment to Skykick co-CEO Todd Schwartz instead of co-CEO Evan Richman.