Forum Discussion
Migration from Google Apps: any hints, tips, recommendations?
Thak you very much for the tip! Molly Allen
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
Thaks for sharing Brent Ellis awesome stuff!!
I am also working with a customer to move the GDrive to OdfB. There is about 2 TB of data in there right now for all users. Things that I noticed:
- GDrive allows for file sizes up to 5 TB (documents like Word, Excel are smaller) but files such as large videos may become a complication. OdfB allows a maximum of 2 GB.
- GDrive allows OdfB restricted characters, so these must be checked and adapted.
- GDrive does not seem to have a limited file name (URL) length (OdfB has limitation in URL of 250 char).
General question to MigrationWiz/Sharegate/SkyKick users:
How do these tools handle these restrictions? Are there features that help overcome these restrictions or do you need to manage these restrictions manually?
