SkyKick Launches Hands-Free Feature for Microsoft Office 365 Migrations

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Apr 21, 2015) - SkyKick (www.skykick.com), the easiest way to Office 365, today launched their "Hands-Free" migration feature, which provides partners and their customers a way to completely remove end-user involvement for Office 365 migrations. The patented Hands-Free technology is now available in SkyKick's SMB and Enterprise Migration Suites, which have been used by thousands of IT solution providers to move tens of thousands of businesses worldwide to Microsoft Office 365.

With the release of this new Hands-Free feature, partners are now able to automatically plan, manage, migrate and set up Outlook for an entire company without end-users having to provide email password information or install any software. The new Hands-Free feature automates this process completely, which makes for an even more seamless migration experience for partners and their customers. Prior to the release of this new Hands-Free feature, SkyKick's award-winning Migration Suites have been successfully used to help automate tens of thousands of migration projects, which required light end-user involvement. By completely removing end-user interaction and providing additional project automation, the Hands-Free feature provides even faster and more seamless migration projects.

"Over the last two years since the launch of our Migration Suites, our partners have given us a 96 percent satisfaction rating for the time savings and efficiency that our solutions provide," said SkyKick Director of Product Management Bernard Clark. "But as a partner-only company, we are always pushing ourselves to do more to help them. So over the last couple years we have been on a quest to solve one of the biggest challenges in cutover and staged migrations -- removing all effort and touch points for the end-user. Today I'm proud to announce that we've achieved the 'holy grail' of migrations with our new Hands-Free feature."

"The Hands-Free migration feature is a game-changer for the industry," said Todd Schamberger, Lead Network Engineer at IT solution provider Afinety, Inc. "Our customers are going to love it."

"SkyKick's new Hands-Free migration feature will eliminate the effort that partners and customers currently face in completing the steps required to migrate users," said President of computer training company CenterPoint Solution Melanie Gass. "SkyKick has revolutionized the migration process yet again to seem invisible to the customers of all sizes!"

Additionally the Hands-Free feature offers a real alternative to hybrid migrations, which is a capability of 2010 or 2013 on-premise Exchange servers. Traditionally, a key benefit of a hybrid migration was that a partner could perform a migration without any end-user involvement. However, hybrid migrations can be costly and complex to configure, often requiring additional hardware and software to be installed. With the Hands-Free feature partners get the key benefit of a hybrid migration with less cost, faster deployment times and support for a wider set of customer environments. The Hands-Free feature provides a hybrid-like experience for cutover (moving everyone at once) and staged (moving everyone in stages) migrations for Google, and hosted and on-premise Exchange environments of any size.

Additional details about the key benefits of the Hands-Free migration feature include:

• No end-user credentials required -- "Source-Side Impersonation" (SSI) is used to access all of the necessary mailboxes and Public Folders rather than needing to gather an end-user's credentials separately in order to facilitate the migration.
• No manual Outlook setup needed -- SkyKick's Outlook Assistant can now be remotely installed via MSI deployment technology such as Group Policy Once installed, Outlook will automatically check the PCs readiness, auto-patch Outlook if required, create a new profile, move required local data and settings, and connect an end-users Outlook to Office 365.
  
  

More details about the Hands-Free feature can be found in the SkyKick Partner Learning Center. Go to skykick.com to learn more.

About SkyKick

SkyKick makes it fast, safe and easy for IT solution providers to move businesses to Microsoft Office 365. The company's award-winning migration products help partners manage migration projects including the sales, planning, migration, management and on-site phases of their customer's move to Office 365. SkyKick is a Microsoft Partner of the Year and is headquartered in Seattle. For more information visit www.skykick.com.