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

[Juan Carlos González Martín]

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 hints, tips, recommendations you could have about this topic. For instance, I would like to know what information do you consider key to ask the customer in order to define an accurate project plan and right timing to do the project. To my mind comes typical questions such as:

• Google Apps service being used by the customer: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Sites, etc.
• The number of Gmail mailboxes to be moved and the total size of these mailboxes.
• All the details about how e-mail is configured: aliases defined, distribution lists created, etc.
• The volume of the GDrive information to be migrated / moved to SharePoint Online / OneDrive for Business and how this information is used and accessed by users.
• …

I would also appreciate your recommendation in regards of migration approach:

• For instance, to migrate GDrive files to SPO / ODFB use Sharegate.
• To migrate Gmail Inboxes, you can rely on the IMAP approach or just use a third party tool such as MigrationWiz.
• …

Thanks in advance

[#2]

Hi Juan Carlos,

if you are going to use tools Migrationwiz is your tool for the mail etc and i use ShareGate for the google drive. I think a piece of adoption is going to be important as they are used to use Labels in mail instead of folders. 

They will get a richer environment but need to know what and how. expecially the Onedrive/SharePoint/Groups is like starting from scratch ask them how they work and suggest a governance document.

hope it helps.

KR,

Paul

[#3]

Thanks Paul!

[#4]

For the record - we used Dell ODME with good experiences for our customers.

Regards,

Robin

[#5]

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

[#6]

Thak you very much for the tip! @Molly Allen

[#7]

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

[#8]

Thaks for sharing @Brent Ellis awesome stuff!!

[#9]

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?

[#10]

I just completed over 7000 Google Apps (Mail, Vault, Drive and Sites) to Office 365 for one of our clients.

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.

Let me know if you have any questions happy to help.

[#11]

The trothling issues are tackled by Dell and you can use multiple service accounts now :)

[#12]

Hi Faiza, 

We are considering using BitTitan to migrate data from Google Vault to O365, just concerned about Google Throttle limitations, did you have any problems downloading the matters to the Google Vault Extractor VM? Can you remember how much data in average per day were you able to extract from Vault?

Thank yu so much

[#13]

You will not have Google Throttle limitations, because BitTitan will manage that. You can ask directly to BitTitan that concerns, they will help you.

[#14]

Mmm...what do you mean by BitTitan will manage that? As far as I know, in Google as happens in Office 365, there is no way to override throthling settings...so if there is a limit in the number of requiest you can do agains Google, you will not be able to change it

[#15]

@Juan Carlos González Martín, Nuno is correct BitTitan's tool has a way to bypass the throttling limitations from Google. If you purchase the BitTitan licences thier services for assissting you for the migration comes with it.

[#16]

If by Bypass / manage you mean not to override, I would agree ;)

[#17]

Hi @Juan Carlos González Martín. My name is Antonio Vargas I work for Bittitan. We do have processes to avoid (maybe it's the correct word) throttling both in the Google and the 365 side. That applies to all workloads, including drive, mail and Vault. i.e for Google we use multiple projects, date ranges and automation to migrate much faster than any other tool and avoid the throttling.

Also FYI if you want to stage the migration we provide free/busy calendar lookups between Google and 365 and that's free for 3 months if you buy the migrationwiz mailbox licenses. Finally we have a free assessment that you can use to get a detailed report with mailbox and drive size for all users.

Ping me if you want to discuss details. always glad to help.

[#18]

Much better word :-)...and don't worry, I know your tools event the free/buys one that looks great...I was simply trying to clarify some words that could drive to wrong ideas about what can be done or not in both Google and Office 365 sides

[#19]

Great. Always glad to help if needed.

[#20]

I can totally vouch for @Antonio Maciel De Vargas I have personally worked him on projects :)