Migration to GMail from 365 - thoughts anyone?

[AndyWoods]

My Trust has been happily using a hybrid of Google Workspace for Education and 365 for email.

Inevitably, our Google fan-boys keep asking the question about going the whole hog and migrating the email as well to Gmail.

 

To try and get a balanced view, any chance someone who has been down this road would be willing to chat to me?

[paulkerton]

I didn't migrate from 365, but I migrated a few years ago from a hosted Outlook solution (by Capita) to Gmail at an old job and haven't looked back. Then again, I'm a Google fan-boy.

 

You could try a split delivery setup maybe?

[yac2016]

If you are using all the Gsuite features and just 365 for email makes sense to move to the one system.

 

Both systems tick all the boxes you need, just depends which one you and the staff prefer. If its total web experience you want then Gsuite wins if you prefer hybrid setup then MS365.

 

We have moved schools one way or the other.

[rogerdnixon]

I've moved many schools into out Trust Google Workspace setup. Mail is fairly easy to migrate with the built in migration tools. We have ~20000 users and Gmail takes up almost zero of my time - pretty rock solid and very secure.

[willtech]

We have done a primary school and it was not too bad. We came pass the Google process guide: https://support.google.com/a/answer/180898?hl=en#zippy=

[AndyWoods]

Thanks for the thoughts guys.

 

I think my biggest worry is the users (isn't it always!) I'm concerned how users adapted to losing their hundreds of folders and having them replaced with labels.

[paulkerton]

I think my biggest worry is the users (isn't it always!) I'm concerned how users adapted to losing their hundreds of folders and having them replaced with labels.

 

This is where the Rogers Adoption/Innovation Curve kicks in.

[Garacesh]

Office 365 natively has Powershell support, although you might need the Azure module.

Combine that with PSGSuite, a third-party Powershell integration for G Suite, and you could probably do a ForEach loop to download each user's OneDrive contents to local storage, upload it to their Google Drive, delete from local storage, then move on to the next user. I used it to do similar (well, the second half, at least) at the start of Lockdown to dump everyone's on-site user area into their G Drive. I'd imagine you'd be able to do it for SharePoint/Shared Drives too, though that's just a guess.

 

Your gripe about converting inboxes/folders to labels is probably fair. Effectively they work exactly the same way for 99% of users once set up - you drag a folder from your inbox to the label, it disappears from your inbox, and appears under that label - but it's still a lot of faff to set up for people that utilise it heavily (safeguarding/student support making a folder/label for each kid, for example).. The upside is for the people that do make heavy use of it, giving an email multiple labels is actually super useful. But users that would actually benefit from that are few and far between, I suspect you'll find most of your issues are 'Why do I have to...' or 'I don't get it It's different and that frightens me'

Edited September 8, 2021 by Garacesh

[Zoom7000]

With the updates announced today, Gmail is becoming more and more like Outlook with Google wanting it to be the central communications hub for Google Workspace.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/8/22661348/gmail-ring-meet-communication-suite-series-one-monitor-workspace

[xicor]

office 365 does emails. sharepoint and many more things very well, if i was you I would convince them to move away from google all together and go with microsoft, combined with apple classroom you would get the best of both worlds. office 365 gives you good pricing on the office software package too