Businesses planning to scale their operations and expand their reach often migrate from Google Workspace to Office 365. They usually do this to access better data security, smooth real-time collaboration, and efficient content management. However, the migration objective is fulfilled only when it’s done the right way. Any errors or loopholes in the process may cost you the crucial business data you’ve collected over the years.
To complete the Google Workspace migration to Office 365 with accuracy, you need a well-drafted strategy explaining each step precisely. Do not hurry, take a step back, and simply follow this guide before rushing into the data transition.
How to migrate from G Suite to Microsoft 365?
We all understand that moving from Google Workspace comes with a lot of benefits, such as:
- Easy scalability
- Advanced collaboration tools
- High-end data security
- Data loss prevention
Microsoft ecosystems include components like Power BI and SharePoint, which support higher efficiency within the teams. The process to migrate data between the G Suite and M365 environments includes setting up user accounts, mailboxes, & licenses, establishing an API connection, transferring Google Drive content, and even more.
Stage 1: Prepare, plan, and perform
Follow the pre-migration activities mentioned below in the source environment to make sure that what you migrate includes only the relevant users and data.
Verify ownership of your domains
This step requires you to verify the ownership of your domain in the Google Workspace accounts. Domain verification is required to set up Microsoft 365. In this process, you get a TXT record to add to your domain hosting provider.
Add users
Once the domain is verified, you need to add users to the Microsoft 365 tenant. Whether you add a single user or multiple users simultaneously, licenses are also required to be assigned to them. Assign them the mailboxes before you migrate Gmail emails.
Identify Gmail mailboxes to migrate
Now, you need to create a file with the list of all the Gmail mailboxes you want to migrate. You can use an Excel file to create this list, and for this, you must be the administrator with the passwords of all the intended Gmail mailboxes you wish to migrate. The file can have 50,000 mailboxes and be as large as 10MB. Make sure not to migrate all the mailboxes at once but rather create batches to migrate conveniently.
Stage 2: Start with your data migration
Before proceeding, don’t forget to save an absolute backup of the entire organization to avoid data loss if you miss any step. With the selected migration approach (recommended phased migration), connect Microsoft 365 to Gmail using a migration endpoint, map the users between source and destination, and create migration batches.
Once the migration is complete, you can see the status of the listed batch as Completed.
Note: To avoid the hassle, you can try out a professional Google Workspace to Office 365 migration tool that supports error-free migrations.
Stage 3: Post-migration approach
Once you’ve migrated data from Google Workspace, log in to Microsoft 365 and verify that all mailboxes are carefully migrated. During the email migration, the DNS records used by the email system were pointing towards the G Suite email system. After the completion, you need to make sure that the records are pointing to Office 365.
After the confirmation that your emails are now routed to Office 365, delete the migration batch and eliminate the synchronization between Google and Office 365 mailboxes. Now, you can export contacts and calendars from G Suite to Microsoft 365 migration.
Stage 4: Decommission Google Workspace
Managing two different environments can be hectic for you as an administrator. Therefore, now that you have everything migrated to Microsoft 365, you can decommission Google Workspace. This will help you save your resources invested in managing the platform and the cost of buying the licenses and storage.
Conclusion
With the roadmap prepared for you, it will be easier for you to migrate the organizational data from Google Workspace to Office 365. One major practice that will help you exclude chaos from the process is data backup. However, the best method to migrate the data without following the long and tedious process is using a professional migration solution. Consider a powerful Google Workspace to Office 365 migration tool for the process that supports migration of mailboxes and other data with 100% accuracy.
Read also: Step by Step Guide for G Suite to Office 365 Migration
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