Forum Discussion
Google Apps to O365 migration
The migration was from Google Apps (Gmail, Drive, Sites and Vault) for over 7000 users.
We helped our customer with the Identity, Change Management and Schedule for the migrations.
We used FastTrack services for mailboxes less than 40 GB. FastTrack uses the DELL tool that has limitations and we also identified some bugs that later got fixed but had to run delta passes for migrations as it did not move attachments prior to the bug being fixed. The tool had its limitation and could migrate about 2.5GB per day per user. For any mailboxes over 40GB we used BitTitan MigWiz and it did not have the throttling limitation as the DELL tool did.
For Google Sites to SharePoint Online we used Metalogix Content Migration tool for Google Apps (they no longer sell this tool). The tool was very limited in what it can do and based on numerous calls with the vendor. They mentioned its hard to keep up with the Google API changes which breaks functionality of the tool thus they are not planning any new development on the tool. Most of the Google Sites had data embeded into the sites which was pointing to users Google Drive and most content was also pointing to users Google Drive. We used ShareGate for this part of the migration and it worked out pretty good. We had a couple of hickups but ShareGate support was very prompt on helping us resolve the issues.
For Vault migration we used BitTitan as well and it was great both the product and support we recieved from the BitTitan team.
Hi Faiza
That's a very impressive transition.
Can I ask did you go big-bang transition to Office 365, or incremental? If big-bang, how did you support the transition for so many users? If incremental, what order did you deploy the Office 365 solutions?
How did you 'sell' the change to the users? I guess that many would have been reluctant to switch away from Google Mail, Calendar and Drive?
Thanks,
Luke
Hi Luke,
We did not take the big-bang approach as I don't think that was the most effective way especially with over 7000 users and they were in different parts of the world. We started with the identity piece and did due dilligiance work when it came to thier network, bandwith, firewalls and user expiernece. We ran 2 pilots, the first was the a small group of IT folks and then got about 70-80 users from various departments, regions of the company. We did mail first with a 2 step\pass migration process. Migrating 30 days of mail, all contacts, All calendar (upto a year) and in the 2nd pass migrated the remaining mail. The duration varied based on the size of the mailbox. We encourged the client to migrate users in group that were tied to particular sites and business units as they were sharing info via Google Drive and Sites. We ran mail migrations for about 10 days before we started Sites and Drive migration. We could only start Vault migrations for users once they had completed thier mail migrations or else they had the risk of duplicate data in thier Archive or Mailbox.
Thanks Faiza, that's incredibly helpful.
How did you mitigate the issue that you would have had periods of time when some users were using Google Calendar, while others where using Outlook Calendar?
It sure was a challenge during migration but as I mentioned we tried to group the sites and departments together. We also had a master list that we posted on who got migrated when so anyone from the team can check thier status.