This project will consolidate all our email systems onto Microsoft Office365. Like most other companies that grow via acquisition, PMC has accumulated some inefficient IT infrastructure, specifically we inherited a different email server for every brand that we acquired over a decade.  Some of you use Gmail, others use Microsoft Office365. This separation is the reason that we don’t have a unified user email directory, and can’t see each others’ calendars across brands to easily coordinate meetings. The Email Migration Project will finally bring  consistency and stability and will open the door to easier communication and collaboration across all our employees.

Every employee  will be impacted by this project!  Depending on your email address your mailbox will fall into one of two groups:

1. Migrating
2. Staying in the “home system”

Mailboxes that are  migrating  include the following email domains: pmc.com,artinamericamag.com (incl. artinamericamagazine.com), artnews.com, deadline.com, hollywoodlife.com, goldderby.com, robbreport.com, shemedia.com (incl. blogher.com, sheknows.com, soaps.com, stylecaster.com), indiewire.com, rollingstone.com (incl. wennermedia.com), tvline.com, variety.com, varietyinsight.com.

Mailboxes that are  staying in the “home system”  will be impacted much less than those that are migrating. This includes the following email domains: wwd.com, fairchildfashion.com, fashinvest.com, footwearnews.com, sourcingjournal.com, spy.com, dirt.com, sportico.com.

User’s whose mailboxes are in the home system will need to update your password later in the project, but none of your data will be moving. All other mailboxes will be migrated and the staff using those mailboxes will have to go through the migration steps. We will explain what needs to be done and when. Please keep reading to help prepare yourself for the process we are all about to go through.

Soon! The IT team is still working through the extensive preparation required for the migration. This is why we have been asking questions about things like shared mailboxes and some of you have been contacted directly to provide information about your teams. This preparation phase will last through mid August.

The actual migrations will take place during August and September. We will stagger our migrations and migrate different brands on different dates. Every mailbox within a brand will migrate at the same time. 

PMC IT will be in touch with all staff for each brand ahead of your migration window to let you know the exact timing as well as provide instructions on what to expect and what actions everyone will need to take.

When it is your brand’s turn to migrate, this is what to expect:

We will send detailed instructions just before your migration explaining how you access your new email account.

Microsoft O365 mail is accessible via the Outlook webmail interface (similar to Gmail) or via the Outlook desktop application.  We advise that everyone uses Outlook webmail (in your browser) initially. As we all currently work from home it’s impossible for our Helpdesk staff to ‘visit’ every user and help configure your Outlook desktop software for the new email account, so using the Outlook browser app will ensure that you can access email and send / receive immediately.

We will share instructions for both Outlook webmail and Outlook desktop application. The support team will be on hand after the migration to help any users that are unable to follow the instructions. Immediately after migration we will prioritize supporting users who are unable to access webmail, over users requesting help with Outlook desktop configuration.

You will use your primary email address as your login. For example, if you are a member of TVline and your email address is jdoe@tvline.com you will use jdoe@tvline.com to log in.

As part of the set-up of the new email system, we are introducing password synchronization between “Active Directory” (the password most people use to log into their computer) and email. Good news: this will mean one less password to remember. After your migration, the password you’ll use when you log into your new email account will be the same as your Active Directory password. We will explain how to identify your Active Directory password closer to your migration.

Yes.  For example, if you have a RobbReport.com email account AND a PMC.com email account, your RobbReport mailbox will migrate when the RobbReport brand’s migration happens and your PMC mailbox will migrate when the PMC brand’s migration happens.  

This scenario does not affect very many employees, but a few of you will encounter this.  This will mean in-between migrations you could be straddling old and new email systems. Additionally, once your email accounts are migrated, you will initially have a separate login for each account.

Once we have finished all the migrations we will circle back and consolidate accounts together for users. This means you will eventually only have one login and will access all your email accounts without having to log out and back in again.

PMC is consolidating all staff onto the Microsoft Office 365 platform and will be migrating all Google Docs (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides etc) and anything else saved in a PMC Google Drive file-- EVERYTHING-- into Office docs on the Microsoft OneDrive platform. The online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. allow users to collaborate in real-time in a very similar manner to Google Sheets and Google Docs.

The mass migration tools that we are using will attempt to migrate all of your Google Drive files and put them in your new, individual OneDrive.  Google Sheets, Docs and Slides will automatically convert to the Microsoft equivalent Excel, Word and PowerPoint files. This process of converting, migrating and transforming is complex and it’s likely to have some imperfections. For example-- and this is a big one!-- the tool will not be able to copy sharing permissions so you will have to re-share any documents that you collaborate on with your team; or, you may find an error in your spreadsheet because the formula you were using was a Google Sheets specific formula that couldn’t be translated to Excel; or, in extreme cases, perhaps the file became corrupted during the migration process.

With hundreds of thousands of files, it is impossible for IT to know if there are any issues or missing data, so we will be asking YOU to proactively check your own Google Drive files after your migration is completed. There will be detailed instructions on what to check and how to recover missing items if needed. You will need to complete these steps yourself. After your migration, you will be able to access your old Google Drive for 30 days. After this time we will shut down the old account and you will lose access. There will be no further opportunity to retrieve Google Docs or Google Drive files after this.

If you checked for the ‘little green cog’ and you still don’t have it, please log a helpdesk ticket at helpdesk.pmc.com. In the portal please select “ Email Migration Project issue or request ” so we can automatically route the ticket to properly assist you.

If IT has already told you it’s ok that ConnectWise is not installed on your computer, you do not need to worry.

Immediately after migration, nothing will change. Since we are providing a 30 day window of continued access to allow everyone to confirm that your data migrated successfully, you will still be able to use your old GSuite account to log into these services.

Our plan is to continue to provide a company managed Google account for access purposes only (no Gmail or Google Drive services) using Google Cloud Identity. We’ll share further instructions closer to the time on how this will work.