What Is Exchange Migration?

What Is Exchange Migration?

If you’ve come across this term and wondered what exactly it meant, you’re not the only one. “Migration” is defined easily enough as “movement from one locality to another” whether it be people, wildebeests or lemming. “Exchange,” on the other hand, is neither a verb here, nor a noun meaning a place like stock exchange. Instead “exchange” refers to a popular Microsoft product, Microsoft Exchange Server.

It is, as you will see, a very apt term.

Microsoft’s Exchange Server has been used my companies big and small to handle their email, calendaring, and other data intensive tasks since 1996. Over the years Microsoft has put out several new editions of the program, including the most recent as of this article in 2010. For those companies that wanted to stay up to date with the most recent edition of Exchange Server this required that they take the data from the old edition and add it to the new. Just as with the people and animals mentioned above, this requires the movement of a great many individuals. Hence, the term Exchange migration.

As with all migrations, people, wildebeests or lemming, some of the individuals involved in the movement are lost in transit. Wildebeests are eaten by crocodiles as shown on Animal Planet and Lemming disappear by the thousands into the sea. “Individuals,” in the case of Exchange migration, being bits of data like critical emails and lists of various important entities such as customers and suppliers. A whole industry now exists around trying to stem and replace those losses.

Exchange migration is one of those terms that one sees all over the Internet. Many want to know, “What is Exchange migration?” It is simply the movement of data from one version of Microsoft Exchange Server to another.