Migrate from Office 365 to Google Drive & Shared Drives Entirely

For businesses that are planning to embrace a new cloud office suite and entirely decommission the current cloud storage license, it is crucial to have a migration strategy that ensures a comprehensive move, leaving nothing behind.

In this post, we have shared the best practices for planning and performing a comprehensive migration from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace without security compromises.

1. Migrate Permissions

When preparing to copy user accounts, files, and folders from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, it is important to migrate all the root level and inner level sharing permissions to ensure accurate replication in Google Drive and Google Shared Drive. Because migrating only the files without user access adds no value to the business.

It is helpful to understand the difference in access levels in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace when planning to transfer sharing permissions for all users.

It is equally critical to migrate the sharing permissions for external users to preserve the external sharing structure in Google Drive and Google Shared Drives.

2. Move Files Without Breaking Links

If you don’t accurately transfer embedded links within the source files, your team might encounter the issue of broken links, which disrupt end users’ data access. This issue arises because the embedded link’s file URL references the source cloud address. So, after migrating files to a new cloud, these links can no longer point to the original address.

As this issue restricts data access in the destination cloud, you must overcome it through a robust link migration tool like CloudFuze LinkEx, which is capable of seamless link transfer.

3. Consider Transferring Other File Features

One of the best approaches to comprehensively copy Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace is to migrate all the essential features, such as version history, in-line comments, timestamps, etc. Preserving the associated file metadata like timestamps and version history helps retain user productivity in Google Drive and Google Shared Drives.

4. Migrate Emails

As part of the plan to migrate from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace comprehensively, it is crucial to move other channels of communication, including email. Partner with an email migration service provider who can help your team migrate all the crucial aspects of Outlook, including mailboxes, calendar syncs, contacts, email attachments, etc, to Gmail for all users.

5. Reflect Incremental Changes

When your migration goal is to achieve a complete transfer of user accounts and data, it is critical to migrate all the incremental changes that users make during the one-time migration. The best approach for these is to perform a single or multiple delta migrations.

These steps can help you achieve complete replication of Microsoft 365 user accounts and data in Google Drive and Shared Drive. At CloudFuze, we have helped businesses worldwide migrate comprehensively from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace and between other cloud storages with tailored solutions.

Contact our migration team to learn how our bespoke approach can work to your company’s advantage.