Migrate Emails from Gmail to Outlook for Microsoft 365 Adoption

As part of moving away from the current cloud environment and completely embracing Microsoft 365, it is important to comprehensively migrate the current email system along with user accounts, data, chat systems, and others.

Businesses and their IT teams undertaking an email migration project for the first time can have a lot of confusion and may not be aware of the unforeseen roadblock that can raise the risk of migration disruption. Therefore, it is important to prepare a structured roadmap to avoid going wrong in any area.

Here are five key action items to consider for streamlining the process of migrating emails from Gmail to Outlook:

Decide Whether To Migrate All or Selective Emails

One of the foundational yet crucial decisions to make is to decide whether to migrate all mailboxes from Gmail or choose to migrate them selectively. Both approaches have their unique set of advantages; migrating all mailboxes ensures that your IT team does not miss out on any aspect and performs a comprehensive email migration, while taking a selective approach helps optimize the email migration project can keep the cost of leveraging an email migration service in check.

Considering some of these crucial factors may help in deciding whether to migrate all or selective emails from Gmail to Outlook:

• Microsoft 365 use cases, such as M&As, cloud cost savings, simplifying fee structures, etc
• Complete replication of the source cloud environment in Microsoft 365
• Tight migration deadlines aligned with upcoming source cloud license expiration

Migrate Contacts and Calendar Syncs

Migrating only emails does not suffice when it comes to performing a comprehensive e-mail migration that ensures a complete replication of Gmail in Microsoft Outlook. It is also important to migrate other crucial aspects linked to Gmail, including calendars, calendar events/syncs, and contacts. Migrating these aspects helps ensure that the workflow is not impacted after onboarding Microsoft Outlook.
To achieve this technical feat, it is critical to use a capable email migration tool which helps transfer all emails and their associated features with uncompromised security and zero downtime.

Preserve Shared Mailboxes and Distribution Lists

Since shared mailboxes and distribution lists in Gmail make it easy to send emails to a high volume of users in a single go, it is crucial to preserve them when migrating to Microsoft Outlook. And since a manual approach can be highly taxing to replicate shared mailboxes and distribution lists, it is a must that your IT team uses an email migration service offering these capabilities.

Transfer All or Selective Incremental Changes

It goes without saying that it is crucial to transfer the incremental changes that build up as users continue using their emails while the Gmail to Outlook email migration project is in progress. However, is it necessary for your IT team to transfer all the incremental email changes that build up overtime or transfer them selectively?

Perform an assessment on this with your IT team and finalize whether to migrate all or selective incremental changes via delta e-mail migration. Our email migration tool supports both.

Validate the Migrated Emails with Reports

Lastly, make sure to get the validation part right by checking the reports of each email migration batch. Check for vital metrics, such as the number of mailboxes migrated (associated with user accounts), calendar migration status, conflict status (if any), and more.

Also, ensure that you factor in the estimated time required to transfer the incremental email changes and include it in the overall timeline of the email migration project. Taking this step helps set the right expectations from the planned timeline.

Perform a Business Goals-Focused Email Migration with CloudFuze

Our email migration service is designed from the ground up to cater to companies worldwide in helping them reach their business-focused goals with email migration. Use our email migration offering as a standalone tool (only for email migration) or leverage it with our user and data migration service for undertaking a complete cloud office migration.