Here are several essential tips to avoid users having problems after migrating users’ mail to SmartCloud and to avoid having problems during the migration.

1.  First, make an initial pass with the Onboarding Planning Tool (OPT) as early in the migration planning process as possible.  You will want to get a jumpstart on fixing all the errors it is going to find that you never knew you had.  This will also help to identify all those orphaned accounts no longer in use so you can get a more accurate count of how many licenses you need.

2. Look at the mail files on your server with the admin client.  Sort them by size. If you have any over 5 GB, then open each and see how many documents are in the inbox.  If you have a lot of these, make an agent to scan them all and create a report.  For any that have more than about 1000 messages in the inbox you should have the owner clean it up before they are migrated. This is a performance issue.

3. Identify all mail files that have more than 400 folders.  These will need to be reduced to under 400.  Again, it is a performance issue and can also cause errors. Finding these isn’t as easy.  If you are a glutton for punishment, you can do it manually.  Open the server log, go to the view Usage – By Size. Open the document for one of the mail databases and you will find a list of all the folders.  An easy way to count them is to copy the list and paste it into a spreadsheet or into an editor that will display line numbers, like Notepad++, a great, free editor.  I recommend creating an agent or using a 3rd party tool like Ytria tools instead. (Contact me and I can get you a discount.)

In case you’re wondering, I’ve already asked IBM to add processing counting the inbox documents and the number of folders to the OPT. It is more likely to happen sooner if others request it too.

4. If you aren’t already using local mail replicas and managing them with MMR, then you are best off getting this setup on all users before you start migrating.  You can do it after the migration as well, but creating the replicas will take longer because it is pulling it down from the Internet instead of from servers in your data center.  Do NOT try to do it at the same time you migrate users. You will inevitably have problems and it will give the impression the migration was the cause.  For users with excessively large mail files or with a high document count in their inbox, create the local replica first and have them do their clean up work locally.  If you use the MMR settings on the Mail tab of the Desktop Policy settings, you can also tell it to create the full text index automatically too. Your users will be thankful.  Be sure to teach them how to use it too!

These tips aren’t documented in the IBM SmartCloud Wiki.
But there are many good lessons to learn there if you are considering making the move.  Check out the Learning Center pages on the SmartCloud wiki