Forum Discussion
Google Apps to O365 migration
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.
Thanks Faiza