SkyKick Offers Partner Tool for Office 365 Data-Only Migrations
    SkyKick, the partner-focused Office 365 migration tools vendor,  launched an individual component of its suite this week for times when  customers only need their data migrated, as opposed to the usual  start-to-finish migration project SkyKick's original tool was designed around.
The Seattle-area company's core product is SkyKick  Application Suite, which started as a way for partners to automate and  shorten what SkyKick positions as a 40-hour-process for partners to complete an  SMB customer migration to an Office 365 environment from legacy  platforms like Exchange, Windows Small Business Server, Google, IMAP or POP3.  SkyKick also offers an Enterprise  Migration Suite for more complex migrations. 
The new release is called the SkyKick Data-Only application, and  Co-Founder and Co-CEO Todd Schwartz described it as something existing partners  asked for to help with a subset of their customers. 
"Maybe 10 percent of customer migration scenarios are data-only,"  Schwartz estimated. Asked for examples, he provided three: "One is the  deskless worker or kiosk worker, somebody who doesn't actually have Outlook and  all that desktop setup. Another scenario is where sometimes customers have an  IT staff and they want to do the project work themselves, but it's hard to move  the data and they call the partner and ask them for help. Then there are always  fringe scenarios -- maybe a customer has a lot of Macintoshes and project  automation doesn't make sense."
Those data migration processes take up about 20 percent -- or eight  hours -- of SkyKick's idealized 40-hour project. To rip out that component and  package it as a separate offering, SkyKick had to make a few changes. For  example, the standard migration suite uses a list of the old mailboxes to  create new Office 365 user accounts. But the new data-only tool has to go back  and match the customer-created Office 365 accounts with the old mailboxes, so  SkyKick created a new engine for that purpose. 
	
     [Click on image for larger view.]	
		The SkyKick Data-Only application automatically matches old mailboxes to new Office 365 accounts, helping partners avoid the time-consuming process of mapping relationships between systems.
    
	
		[Click on image for larger view.]	
		The SkyKick Data-Only application automatically matches old mailboxes to new Office 365 accounts, helping partners avoid the time-consuming process of mapping relationships between systems.
	
Other features of the Web-based  e-mail migration product include Server Synch for full-fidelity replication,  automated management of the migration and a Migration Manager for real-time  reporting and management of the process.
One practical application of the automation is the ability to see that  both sides of the migration are up and responsive before you start, explained  Co-Founder and Co-CEO Evan Richman. "You don't want to start moving the  data on a Friday night and realize on Monday morning that mailboxes were not  synching. This makes it very, very easy for the partner to make sure it's  connected on both sides," Richman said.
The tool also prompts the partner in advance for necessary passwords,  such as those needed to migrate public folders, and allows for provisioning new  users on the fly if the data migration process turns up users that the customer  accidentally missed in the pre-data stage of the migration.
The pricing for the data-only tool  is $12 per mailbox retail with discounts available from distributors. It's not  clear how that compares to the main suite's cost because SkyKick keeps that  price under wraps. Schwartz did say that billing for the data-only package,  like the main suite, only occurs upon completion of the project.
Also this month, SkyKick and Ingram Micro U.K. Ltd. announced the  addition of SkyKick to the U.K. Ingram Micro Cloud Portfolio. The move into the  United Kingdom follows SkyKick's recent  hiring of Eric Jewett from Microsoft to head up an international expansion.
Ed's Note: This  article has been updated to clarify that SkyKick doesn't publicly disclose the  price of the SkyKick Application Suite. 
 
	Posted by Scott Bekker on November 19, 2014