That old Saturday Night Live skit about the dessert topping/floor wax was made for people like me. Ever since I was kid, I was a sucker for tips and tricks on how to multitask the things you already own, making them perform tasks you could never dream of on your own. My friends might have considered me too loosely wired when I roasted an ear of corn on my car engine's exhaust manifold while driving down the highway, or when I poached a trout using the rinse and wash cycles while running a load in the dishwasher. But I still get a kick out of those kinds of ideas.

So when C2C published a white paper on using an e-mail archiving system to help with an Exchange server migration, I was interested.If you are still using Microsoft's Exchange 5.5 servers and looking to update or migrate to something else before Microsoft stops supporting the product on December 31, C2C has some helpful advice.

Any migration project requires careful planning and preparation, but your e-mail archiving system can help reduce the headaches. If you are using C2C's or any e-mail archiving product, for that matter, those products usually impose housekeeping rules that can smooth the migration process. Not to mention the fact that policy- and capacity-based archiving can drastically reduce those oversized mailboxes and lessen the load of messages and folders that need to be migrated.

And come to think of it, what better time to implement an e-mail archiving system if you haven't already. If you have to perform a migration, why bring all the errors and compliance risks forward onto the new server?

The Exchange experts at C2C have penned a free white paper that provides some preparation tips for a smooth migration.

For instance, migrations are notorious for highlighting all your "zombie accounts" of users that should no longer be in the system, and users with outdated permissions profiles. Cleaning those up ahead of time makes the migration easier.

An archiving system can also compress attachments, which can reduce your migration time and improve the performance of the messaging system.