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jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
jcgonzalezmartin
MVP
Sep 06, 2016

Migration from Google Apps: any hints, tips, recommendations?

Hi all, A new customer of mine has asked to help him on migrating from Google Apps to Office 365 and I would like to take this opportunity to define a migration approach so I would like to know any ...
exchange
office 365
Molly Allen's avatar
Molly Allen
Copper Contributor
Sep 07, 2016

SkyKick has a great Migration Suite for migration from Google to O365. Login to partner center at http://www.skykick.com with your MPN ID.  You can model the migration and create a migration plan for free.

    • Brent Ellis's avatar
      Brent Ellis
      Silver Contributor
      Sep 08, 2016

      We successfully used MigrationWiz for both Mail/Calendar/Contacts and Drive (about 2.5 years ago now) - for around 2500 accounts.

       

      We scheduled weekly migrations based on global regions.

       

      We started out by creating our user accounts in O365, created mail accounts, and set up MX/forwarders so that technically all mail was coming to Exchange and being forwarded through to Google.  As we completed a regional migration, we just "turned off" the forwarders for those users.  

       

      We did a pre-migration of content a week or so before the actual cutover (all mail minus 1 month).  Then on the night of the cutover (Sunday night each week locally), we did a delta migration (all mail, calendar, contacts, drive).

       

      Heres my quick and dirty list, in no particular order:

      • Global whitelists/blacklists versus individual whitelists/blacklists
      • Dealing with pre-existing room/equipment resource meetings
      • Legal stuff - ediscovery, long term legal hold after terminates
      • Transport rules for spam, clutter, disclaimers
      • Licensed accounts into Shared accounts (no license required)
      • Dealing with offline psts (eliminate, upload, prevent new psts)
      • Leverage online archive versus not online archiving
      • AD Schema updates
      • Standards for naming room/equipment resources, email addresses, etc
      • Standardization of Outlook clients (getting everyone to latest version)
      • O365 Groups (turn off or leave on)
      • Services and apps that poll mailboxes
      • Email enabled devices and equipment
      • Message sizes, blocking attachments, outside of the norm
      • Email rules (client application versus inside of Google)
      • Restricted characters in OD4B for files from Google Drive
      • How to handle "labels", and "categories"
      • How to handle users that follow techniques like "Getting Things Done"
      • Testing "add-ins" if using Outlook currently
      • Impacts to SharePoint (if already using) - things like Connect to Outlook
      • Manually provision or auto provision Outlook
      • Instructions for setting up mobile app (and which mobile app to use) - Outlook, built-in, Gmail for Exchange
      • Email signatures (from Outlook and Google web)
      • Uninstalling Google Apps Sync if using
      • Training for OneDrive versus OneDrive for Business
      • Processes for new hires, terminates, name changes, etc
      • Uploading user photos into profiles (if kept somewhere)
      • Setting up Meeting Room Groups
      • Setting up permissions for who can directly manage meeting rooms
      • Settings for spam, quarantine, add-in features like Advanced Threat Protection
      • Delegated accounts , boss/admin managing email and calendars

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