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You’ve taken the leap and decided to migrate from Google’s G Suite to Office 365 (now Microsoft 365). The debate on the pros and cons of G Suite vs Microsoft 365 is an endless one. However, one thing is sure – a secure and successful migration from G Suite to Microsoft 365 is critical to getting maximum ROI. Let’s simplify the migration with a comprehensive G Suite to M365 migration checklist. We’ll discuss the hows and whys in addition to the crucial aspect of securing your G Suite migration and Office 365 data through the migration.
Migrating the other way around from Microsoft 365 (Office 365) to G Suite? Read our Microsoft 365 to G Suite migration guide
Confused with the Google 365 conundrum? Check out our detailed comparison here
The Whys: Google G Suite to Office 365 Migration
Why migrate from G Suite to Office 365? Four driving factors for a G Suite to Office 365 migration include:
#1 Familiarity: The older giant beats Google with an incomparable adoption rate in the business community. Most of the now professionally active folks “grew up” with Microsoft. This minimizes the time spent on communication and coordination. It helps reduce the adoption effort and re-training costs. Owing to its widespread adoption, it also helps with the ease of sharing files with external vendors.
#2 Desktop-friendly: Do a majority of your employees use desktop computers? Well, Microsoft 365 shines in that department. G Suite is essentially web-based. It falls short when compared with the proven offline app support of Office 365—particularly the Outlook desktop client and OneDrive.
#3 Collaboration mechanisms: Yes, we’re talking about Microsoft Teams. Although file collaboration solutions of both platforms are pretty much identical, Microsoft managed to create a real enterprise working hub: the Teams app. It has no alternative in the market so far.
#4 Scalability: If your organization is growing, you need a SaaS platform with proven scalability. Microsoft 365 (Office 365) excels in seamless scalability. Apart from offering a variety of plans to suit every organization’s size, it also has inherent Azure support for effortless scalability. It can truly grow with your organization.
Now that you’ve zoned in on the reasons for your G Suite to Office 365 migration, let’s start with laying the groundwork.
Groundwork: Google G Suite to Office 365 Migration: Buy-in, Scope, and Timeline
Before you proceed with the technical aspects of the G Suite to Office 365 migration, ensure that you have stakeholder buy-in, defined scope, and a phased timeline ready. Take the time to understand the needs of various departments. Remember that you will not only be migrating data but entire business workflows that impact daily routines and productivity. A robust migration plan is the first step to minimizing post-migration turmoil.
- Get stakeholder buy-in and define migration champions. Strong stakeholder buy-in helps ensure a smooth implementation and tide through hiccups. Cultivate department-wide Office 365 experts who are aware of and thoroughly convinced of the advantages of using the new platform.
- Understand the span of apps being currently used. Map the working procedures and features from G Suite with the analogous in Office 365, or find a good alternative.
- Chalk out the timeline and scope: With rare cases, you may need to migrate everything in one move. However, a gradual, staged migration mitigates risks. Consider a pilot migration to get org-wide support for your plan.
G Suite to Microsoft 365 Migration Prep
Congratulations, you have put a stressful preparation phase behind you with these deliverables:
- A schedule that reflects your chosen type of migration: staged or cutover.
- In case of a gradual migration, you’ve defined batches to be moved separately.
- A list of essential native Microsoft or Google tools, as well as of the third-party vendors.
- A disaster recovery plan.
A tick in each of these to-do boxes? Then, let’s take off!
Stepwise Migration Guide: G Suite (Google Apps) to Microsoft 365 (Office 365)
#1 Setup a Google Service Account
Migrating from G Suite to Office 365 is only possible if you already acquired and verified a custom domain.
In Chrome, from the Developer page for Google accounts, create a migration project by typing in your domain name twice.
Follow the path IAM & Admin > Service Accounts > Create Service Account to create your service account.
Click Continue and then Done on the following two screens. You’ll land on the list of the existing projects. Select yours and click Edit. From the Service account details page, write down the Unique ID.
Click Show Domain-Wide Delegation. Make sure that it is enabled by ticking the box at Enable G Suite Domain-wide Delegation
Go back to the Service account details page. Create a JSON file with your key. The download of the file will start automatically.
You will need the exact file name for later.
Grant access to the service account
Now go to the G Suite Admin page, and follow the path Security > Advanced settings > Manage Domain Wide Delegation. You see the API Clients list, choose Add new
The Client ID is the Unique ID from one of the previous steps.
In the OAuth Scopes, you must list the products to migrate, like e-mail and calendar. Separate items in the list with commas. For instance:
“https://mail.google.com/,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar,https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.sharing”
Press Authorize to finish this step.
Mail Routing to Office 365
On the G Suite Admin page, open Domains > Manage domains > Add a domain. After entering a sub-domain, a few simple steps are needed to verify the ownership.
You must also update your Mail Exchanger (MX) record in the Domain Name System (DNS).
Mail routing to the Google G Suite domain
On the G Suite Admin page, open Domains > Manage domains > Add a domain alias. Follow similar steps as in the previous section:
Provision Users in Microsoft Office 365
Check that your users have enough rights (and not too many!) to perform their daily businesses.
Create Migration Batches
Eventually, you arrive at the final stage of migrating from G Suite to Office 365.
In the Microsoft Exchange admin center, follow the path recipients > migration > New + > Migrate to Exchange Online. Choose G Suite (Gmail) migration.
Upload a .CSV containing e-mail addresses of the migrated users.
You’ll be asked to upload the JSON file from one of the previous steps. Don’t forget to enter your Google super admin email.
Click Move configuration. Remember, the step Mail routing to Office 365? This one you put in here!
Customize progress notifications by accessing “Start the batch”.
DNS Update
Does the “Synced” status appear now? Well done! Lastly, update your MX record in the DNS.
For further details, please refer to the documentation here.
Final Check! Secure Your G Suite to Office 365 Migration
G Suite and Office 365 are exceptionally secure. But SaaS protection is a shared responsibility. Microsoft or Google cannot protect you from the causes of data loss at your end or the occasional outage or downtime. (Free Ebook: 7 Reasons Why Enterprises Need SaaS Backup). This is particularly true during a migration. A colleague may have forgotten to ask to include deleted calendar events in the migration plan. Or an employee suddenly realizes that Drive files disappeared from the trash bin before the migration, due to their expiration date. You do not want to add to the stress of an already stressful migration with the fear of data loss. So, how do you secure your Office 365 migration? With SaaS backup and recovery.
CloudAlly’s top-rated SaaS Data Protection platform secures all your SaaS data, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with AWS S3 backup and 1-click/granular recovery.
This ensures that all your G Suite and Shared Drives data as well as your Microsoft Office 365 data – MSExchange, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Groups/Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Public Folders – is backed up and secure.
You can back up your Google G Suite data with CloudAlly Google Workspace backup, and when the migration period is over, you can seamlessly continue the same top-rated cloud backup without changing your data recovery partner. Simply switch to CloudAlly’s Office 365 backup. Thus, your entire migration from G Suite to Office 365 is completely secured from data loss.
Watch how easy it is to recover M365 data with CloudAlly