EBOOK SAAS PROTECTION

4 Steps
to Migrate from
G Suite to Office 365
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of the copy

Say Goodbye to Google Apps

Any IT admin leaving Google’s G Suite for Microsoft’s Office 365 knows that
there are some significant differences between these two software-as-
a-service (SaaS) productivity platforms. As a result, migrating data from
Google to O365 requires some careful planning that may not be explicitly
addressed in the official Microsoft Office 365 Onboarding Guide.
To ensure your G Suite data isn’t lost in translation, we’ve outlined the best
practices for IT admins managing the migration from Google Apps to O365.
No matter what third-party tools or services you employ to move your data
from Google’s cloud to Microsoft’s online office suite, this guide will help
you avoid the common pitfalls and problems associated with G Suite to
Office 365 migrations.
 SCOPING YOUR MIGRATION
Before you begin a migration between Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365,
you’ll need to answer four key questions. Your answers to these questions will
determine the type and scope of your migration. Having these answers firmly in place
before the migration process begins will prevent problems down the road.

Migrating Email, or Everything?

Let’s be honest: most migrations to Office 365 are all about Microsoft Outlook.
If you aren’t leveraging a
Some organizations simply can’t live without the world’s most famous desktop
migration consultant, make sure email application. As such, many G Suite to Office 365 migrations are simply Gmail
your timeline is generous. to Outlook and Exchange online migrations. This is doubly true in mixed-vendor
environments where OpenOffice is used instead of Google Docs, or Box or Dropbox
are used instead of Google Drive.

Bottom line: are you moving everything to Office 365, or just your email solution? If
you’re moving more than email, is all of it coming out of Google Apps, or does data
need to be migrated from additional platforms? Be certain you know the answers
to those questions before you begin your migration. You’d be surprised how often
specific locations, departments, or even individuals use alternate software that IT
didn’t know about. Otherwise, you will run the risk of leaving data behind.

DIY, or Partner Migration?

There are a number of third-party services and consultancies out there that
specialize in migrating data into Office 365. If you’re business works with a Managed
Service Provider (MSP), he/she may offer to manage the project or at least to assist.
If you’re going to involve a third party, make the decision beforehand, as the cost and
complexity of bringing in a consultant mid-migration will be much higher.

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 If you aren’t going to enlist an experienced migration partner, make sure you are
generous with the project timeline, as there are always unexpected complications
Each migration tool has an
that show up when moving large amounts of data between systems. Also, be certain
associated set of costs and
you have a robust and regular data backup solution in place in order to avoid any
compatibilities to consider, but unrecoverable data corruption or loss during the migration process.
you should be very clear about
What’s in Your Migration Toolbox?
which tools you’re going to use Just as there are multiple cexperts-for-hire to handle a Google Apps to Office 365
before migration starts. migration, there are an equal number of software tools and services for this as well.
These solutions range from free applets that simply do IMAP transfers between Gmail
and O365 mail accounts, to complex SaaS tools that map and move data between
Google accounts and Active Directory-managed Office 365 users. Each migration tool
has an associated set of costs and compatibilities to consider, but you should be very
clear about which tools you’re going to use before migration starts.

What is Your Migration Timeline?

Unless you can count the number of G Suite users in your Google domain on two
hands, it’s unwise to migrate everyone over to Office 365 at the same time (and it’s
probably a bad idea even for domains of less than 10 user accounts.) Migration should
happen in waves, and start with a pilot subgroup of early adopters. If possible, break
up your migration into at least three stages -- typically ten percent of users in the
first wave (sometimes called the pilot wave), 40 percent of user accounts in the
second, and the remaining 50 percent in the third -- and leave ample time between
each stage to troubleshoot any problems discovered during each phase. By setting a
clear, reasonable timeline before your migration starts, you’ll avoid several headaches
in the future.

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 IDENTIFYING DATA THAT CAN’T BE MIGRATED
Some items are not reasonably Office 365 and the G Suite are comparable SaaS productivity suites, but not every
accessible or exportable from Google Apps data element has a counterpart in O365. Some items are not reasonably

Google Apps, and a noteworthy accessible or exportable from Google Apps, and a noteworthy percentage of G Suite

percentage of G Suite data data and metadata simply can’t be imported into Office 365. This information will
have to be manually transferred, modified, and/or abandoned during migration -- and
and metadata simply can’t be
both you and your users need to be prepared.
imported into Office 365.
Non-Classic Google Sites
In November of 2016, Google introduced a fully redesigned version of Google Sites
with new templates and features. Unfortunately, when they revamped Sites, Google
did not include the new system in their standard Google Drive REST API, which
most migration tools use to extract data from Google Sites for import in Office 365
SharePoint Online.

By the same token, Google Sites created with legacy versions of Google Apps -- the
free versions of Google Apps that were retired in December 2012 -- are also excluded
from the Drive API. Thus, almost any Google Site created before December of 2012 or
after November of 2016 is not easily migrated, and IT administrators should determine
if their migration tools and services have a workaround for migrating this Sites data.

Google Hangouts Links

Google Calendar natively makes a Google Hangout available for almost any calendar
event, including a Hangout link in the event’s details, but there is no equivalent online
conference links in Office 365. Skype for Business, even when integrated with O365, does
not yet offer pre-generated URLs for a scheduled video conference. If your organization
regularly used Google Hangouts for remote meetings, your migration plan must address
how to replace these Hangout links when migrating calendars to Office 365.
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 Calendar Colors
You’ll need to manually recreate By default, Google Calendar offers 24 different colors for calendar events. Office 365
Outlook online only supports six event colors. Google also allows you to customize
any survey in Office 365 that
calendar event colors from outside the default set of 24. Thus, when you migrate
needs to be migrated from a
between Google and O365 calendars, the event color key will be different. IT admins
Google Form. will need to address this (often surprisingly disruptive) change during user training
and, if your migration tools and services support it, do their best to match the colors
in Google Calendars as much as possible to the colors available in O365 Outlook.

Google Forms
There is simply no equivalent to Google Forms within Office 365 OneDrive for
Business. Any Google Sheet that holds response data from a Google Form can be
converted to an Excel or CSV file, but the form itself will not survive migration. If
you have not exported Google Form response data to a Google Sheet or similar
file (you can go directly to an Excel-compatible CSV file, which may simplify your
migration), do so immediately. This will ensure your Form data is preserved.

If you need to continue to operate something like a Google Form, Office 365
has a survey feature that can perform many of the same functions, but you
can’t directly convert a Google Form to an O365 survey. You’ll need to manually
recreate any survey in Office 365 that needs to be migrated from a Google Form.
For external-facing Google Forms (that a customer may fill out, for example), a
SharePoint survey is most appropriate. For internal-facing Forms, you can employ
an Excel survey.

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 If you want to avoid recreating your Google Forms, it may be worthwhile to preserve
a handful of Google Apps accounts simply to host the Google Forms. If your Forms
are spread out over several G Suite user accounts, you can stand up a new Form
manager account and simply transfer ownership of the existing Forms to the new
placeholder account.

“Muted” Gmail conversations

All the muted responses in the
The muted status of a Gmail conversation -- where follow-up reply-all messages
thread will be migrated, so no
to group email strings are immediately marked as read and archived -- cannot be
data is lost, but future reply- migrated to Office 365 Outlook online. All the muted responses in the thread will be
all responses made after the migrated, so no data is lost, but future reply-all responses made after the migration
migration will not be muted. will not be muted. Users should be prepared for replies to previously muted email
conversations to suddenly appear in their inboxes again.

Files Larger Than 15GB

Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business supports a maximum file size of 15
gigabytes. G Suite Google Drive supports a maximum file size of 5 terabytes. If
your Google Drive users regularly store large multimedia files that exceed 15GB in
size, you’ll need to inventory those and make arrangements to store them outside
OneDrive, as they will be incompatible with Office 365 today.

Individual Email Signatures

Both Google Apps Mail and Outlook online allow for the management of standardized
email signatures, and the migration of standard signatures can often be handled by
mature migration tools and services. Individual email signatures, customized to a
single Gmail user, are not programmatically accessible via IMAP or the Gmail API. As
such, individual signatures often cannot be migrated by standard tools and services,
and thus need to be explicitly addressed by migration administrators.

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 Gmail Filters
More than data moves when you While Outlook rules are almost the same as Gmail filters, enough differences exist
that Gmail filters often cannot be directly migrated -- or, more accurately, translated
migrate from G Suite to Office
-- into Outlook. IT administrators should examine what Gmail filters can be converted
365 -- your policies around that
to Outlook rules, and how to train users on recreating filters that did not survive the
data move, too. migration to Office 365.

MIGRATING POLICIES
When you migrate data from G Suite to Office 365, your policies around that data move,
too. IT administrators should lock down their processes and policies around the scenarios
outlined below before initiating a Google Apps to O365 migration.

Migrated vs. Archived Data

Some data may not need to be migrated from your G Suite domain to Office 365, as it
is no longer business-critical, but your organization may be required to maintain it for
compliance purposes. In worst cases, this includes Google Apps user accounts that
exist merely for reference purposes, still incurring annual licenses fees long after
the actual user has departed the company. Don’t migrate zombie G Suite accounts.
Instead, save some serious money by offloading this data to a stored third-party
system, such as Datto SaaS Protection, and it should be identified and accounted for
prior to initiating your migration.

Advanced Threat Protection Settings

The Office 365 version of Exchange offers Advanced Threat Protection, which is the
O365 counterpart of Gmail’s Enhanced Pre-Delivery Message Scanning and other
anti-phishing and anti-spam features. Advanced Threat Protection offers more
fine-grained control over your mail quarantine policies, which means configuring

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 your O365 email security will entail more than simply migrating your blocked - and
approved - sender lists. Migration administrators should review the available options
During your migration, messages,
and adapt your previous email security policy for Microsoft’s O365 feature set. For
documents, and data will exist
total cloud-to-cloud data protection and recovery no matter what, check out Datto
in two systems simultaneously SaaS Protection for Office 365.
- a situation that may persist for
Legal Holds and eDiscovery Requests
weeks or months. During your migration, messages, documents, and data will exist in two systems
simultaneously - a situation that may persist for weeks or months. In the event
you are served with an ediscovery request, which may be enforced by a subpoena,
or your internal audit and compliance policies require a legal hold on any data
during the migration period, administrators must be prepared to act on those
requirements in both systems.

Just because you use Google Vault to perform a legal hold on data in your old G Suite
domain doesn’t mean the migrated version of data isn’t being disseminated across
Office 365 users. You’ll need to ensure that an Office 365 Litigation Hold is enacted in
parallel with the Google Vault hold. IT admins will need to develop procedures to deal
with this eventuality. Datto SaaS Protection helps with this as well.

Calendar Resource Reservations

It may seem petty, but nothing sours users on a system migration faster than a fight
over conflicting conference room reservations. During your migration, some users
will still exclusively operate in G Suite even as others have transitioned to Office
365, which means they’ll be reserving conference rooms, audio/visual equipment,
and other shared calendar resources in two different systems. IT admins need
a process for syncing this data in order to avoid confusion and frustration over
double-booked rooms and equipment.

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 Changes to Naming Conventions
When changing systems, administrators create an opportunity to update the naming
conventions for shared folders, user groups, or even physical assets like conference
rooms. While it may be tempting to implement these changes by fiat, admins need
to clearly develop crosswalk documents that explain the new and old names for all
assets, and ensure that these changes are thoroughly communicated to all users.

IT admins should be prepared Updates to Whitelists/Blacklists

to adjust their website access It’s not enough to simply migrate your website and email domain blacklists or
whitelists from G Suite to Office 365; you need to consider how those lists may
policies under Office 365, rather
change in O365. For example, once you’ve fully retired your old Google domain, do
than just blindly copying them
the URLs associated with that domain go onto the O365 blacklist? Have any other
from Google Apps. structural URL changes occurred that may require updates to your list of trusted
sites? IT admins should be prepared to adjust their website access policies under
Office 365, rather than just blindly copying them from Google Apps.

Spam and Trash Folders

Gmail has a Spam folder, and both Gmail and Google Drive have Trash bins, and all
of them may include data that was either inadvertently disposed of, or that must be
maintained for compliance reasons. IT administrators must have a firm grasp of how
much Spam or Trash data will be migrated from G Suite to Office 365.

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 DEVELOPING YOUR MIGRATION FAILSAFE
As users are migrated from The most important part of your migration plan is your failsafe planning. No matter
one environment to another, how skilled or sophisticated the tools, services, plan, and staff involved in your G Suite

avoid paying for both solutions’ to Office 365 migration, data can still be lost. In some cases, the original Google Apps

licensing fees by having a copy of data is inadvertently destroyed as it fails to load properly into Office 365.

their data to fall back on outside How do you ensure data is not corrupted or deleted during the migration?

of the app itself. Backup Your Original G Suite Data

Before you begin moving data out of the G Suite, make sure you have a full third-party
backup of all your Google Apps data. It’s up to you to ensure that no matter what
havoc migration tools may wreak on your G Suite systems, you’ll always have a clean,
reliable backup you can restore to the original Google domain.

Backup, recovery and export solutions, like Datto SaaS Protection, also take care
of another potential headache for your stakeholders: licensing costs. As users
are migrated from one environment to another, Datto SaaS Protection allows
businesses to avoid paying for both solutions’ licensing fees by having a copy of
their data to fall back on outside of the app itself. This service - and also that of
backing up data on O365 as its migrated - ensures businesses can get back up and
running quickly should an error occur in the process.

Some migration tools actively remove data from G Suite to ensure that, once it
“arrives” in Office 365, there are not two competing copies of the same messages,
documents, or files. This practice guarantees that there is always a single system
of record for any individual user. Unfortunately, this practice can be problematic if G
Suite data is corrupted during the transfer to Office 365.

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 In the case of a one-system-at-once migration process fails, a third-party
backup of your Google Apps data would allow you to restore the original G Suite
IT administrators should have
version of your user data, and then re-attempt the migration. While it is rare for
firm plan in place for calling
any migration tool to fail outright and delete or corrupt all your users’ Google
off a migration and restoring full Apps data, individual user accounts or individual files within those accounts can
functionality to Google Apps. be lost or damaged during migration. Restoring that data to G Suite and then
re-migrating just those accounts or files is often far easier than attempting to
manually port over individual user data.

Rollback Plan
Some migrations simply don’t work out. Perhaps it’s simply impossible or impractical
to recreate old G Suite business processes in Office 365. Perhaps the time and effort
required to re-train end users on Office 365 is more difficult than would justify a
migration. Or maybe your IT department has simply encountered a new, unexpected
set of priorities that make migration impractical at this time. Whatever the reason, IT
administrators should have firm plan in place for calling off a migration and restoring
full functionality to Google Apps.

That almost certainly means having reverse-migration tools - apps and services
that can move data out of Office 365 and into G Suite - as well as a full, easy to
restore, backup of your original data for direct restoration into Google Apps if
necessary. While it may seem tedious to plan for undoing the same migration
you’re already outlining, having this failsafe in place ensures that a failed migration
doesn’t become an outright data disaster.

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CONCLUSION: THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
Migrating from Google’s G Suite to Microsoft Office 365 is a fairly straightforward
process for an experienced IT professional but -- as with all complex tasks -- the
devil is in the details. This guide outlines some key areas where data, metadata,
and IT policies don’t directly translate between Google Apps and O365. By
breaking your migration down into manageable stages, addressing the areas of
data and process incompatibility noted above, and being responsive to the impact
of the project on your users, IT administrators can ensure that their G Suite to
Office 365 migration is a success.

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