When there are so many email providers out there to choose from, it becomes very confusing to choose the right one for your business. Remember, that there is no ideal solution but the best one that suits your needs and is a question of trade-off among the features. Every organization is normally focused on major aspects like scalability, collaboration, security, accessibility and reliability. Factors like these may compel migration of data from one mail service to another.
The major difference between IMAP and Exchange server is that IMAP is a protocol that will take care of the synchronization of email messages between mail clients and the remote email servers. If you are wondering, what IMAP is, there is already a detailed blog post about it. IMAP migration is helpful to move the mailboxes from non-Exchange server platforms such as Zimbra, Icewrap, Hotmail, and Yahoo, G-suite, etc to Office 365 or Exchange.
Exchange is basically a Microsoft product and uses MAPI protocol to connect to the clients. Services such as Office 365 are based on an Exchange email server that works with desktop mail clients like Microsoft Outlook. It not only handles the synchronization of email messages but also contacts, calendar, tasks, notes data, etc. Exchange comes in many varieties like Hosted Exchange, On-Premises Exchange Server, Exchange Online etc.
Why are companies migrating data to Exchange Online?
Microsoft Exchange Online is a cloud-based platform that provides lots of businesses with email services, calendar software, contacts, and task management capabilities. It provides Office 365 subscription that includes Microsoft Office, SharePoint, etc. Exchange Online comes as a stand alone or bundled with Office 365 when you purchase the license.
- Cost savings
- Flexibility and scalability
- Reduce the risk of data loss
- Accessible from anywhere
- Shared calendar
- User-friendly interface
- Shared Mailboxes
- Saves money
- Data loss prevention
- One stop place for all your data
- Stores contacts
- Stores user photos
The main goal of business is making decent profits. With Exchange services, it is possible to reduce the amount of money spent on the business expenses like software and hardware requirements. Exchange online has advanced features to avoid data loss.
In the Exchange admin account, an admin can manage all the activities like adding, removing the user etc. It has an easy-to-use web-based interface. Let’s consider one scenario where the company decides to hire some of the interns to work on a particular project. In this scenario, company needs to create an email account for them. After the completion of the work, the company should deactivate their accounts. This can be easily taken care in the Exchange admin center. Based on the requirements, the user accounts can be managed in the Admin center.
The entire suite of Microsoft Office 365 has enterprise-level security protection features to keep the user’s data in a secured manner. This does not mean that IMAP based services are any less secure. It just means that Microsoft manages your data in the cloud in a better manner and has continuous fail-safes ensuring that your emails, contacts, and calendar appointments are available at all times. Microsoft is moreover aligned keeping in mind the business needs.
Some of the benefits of Exchange
Whether you are using Outlook desktop app, Outlook web app, or app on your smartphone, all your data stays in sync. Exchange ensures that you don’t miss any email. For Teams working in collaboration, this is just the perfect service.
You can share your calendar with your colleagues, other users, and also with your colleagues so that they can see when you are available.
Emails are organized in such a way that you can find them easily. You can just click on the name in an email to get that person’s information like their address, contact number, and calendar information.
A shared mailbox is a container which can be accessed by multiple members in an organization. Instead of creating new mailboxes for every member, a shared box performs a very convenient function in that multiple people can send and receive mails from a common address. Like for example, a marketing team which needs to collaborate with a common mailbox. This is a very handy feature of Exchange and the data like emails, calendar items, folders, and all other contents can be accessed by the members of the shared mailbox.
Integrating Exchange with Microsoft Outlook and bundled with Office 365 License per user per month allows complete control of costs and it is flexible to increase or decrease the number of users any-time.
It keeps your organization safe from employees sending information to unauthorized people as it supports Anti-spam and Anti-Malware protection along with email encryption service.
You can keep all your important data in one place like. OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams make the function easier.
Microsoft Exchange enables you to maintain all your contacts in one single place without duplicate entries. The contacts are also available online for immediate access.
Allows you to store high-resolution photos and it can be managed using Outlook web app, SharePoint, etc.
Know the differences between IMAP and Exchange
| | |
| It is a message access protocol. | It is a mail server and uses MAPI protocol to connect to end user clients. |
| It stores sent items locally on desktop and inbox emails on the server, also you can download emails for offline access | It stores both inbox and sent items on the server and it can be accessed through email clients. |
| It includes only email management. | It includes email, calendar, and contact management. |
| Supported devices are laptops, mobiles, tablets, systems, etc. | Supported devices are Androids, iPhone mobiles, tablets, etc. |
| Supported email clients are Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Notes, Zoho Mail, Yahoo Mail, Notes, Outlook.com, Office 365, etc. | Supports Microsoft Outlook for Mac, Microsoft Outlook for Windows, Outlook Web Access, Outlook app for iOS and Android |
| Emails that are deleted or moved on the server gets automatically modified from the respective client and vice versa. | Modified content on configured email clients gets updated on the server as well. |
IMAP Live Exchange migration using EdbMails
EdbMails is one of the best softwares to perform IMAP to Live Exchange migration. It allows you to migrate non-exchange server mailboxes to Exchange. It supports selective items migration and also you can apply filters such as After Date, Before Date, From Address, To Address, Subject, Attachments name, Cc Address, Bcc Address, etc.
The application supports true incremental migration. However, the initial migration is always a full migration. Consecutive migrations to the same location on the same computer will be incremental migration. Here only new items will be migrated to the target mailbox to avoid duplicate items.
This utility supports automatic mailbox mapping between the source and target server. You can also map the mailboxes manually if you wish to. You will get a detailed migration report after the completion of the migration process and EdbMails ensures 100% safety of user’s mail data.
For more information about IMAP migration, please visit https://www.edbmails.com/pages/imap-migration-tool.html
Visit the below link, to see the step-by-step procedure to perform IMAP to Exchange migration.