How to Migrate G Suite Business to Office 365 Productivity Suite?

g suite business to office 365

TechsPlace | Both G Suite and Office 365 are cloud productivity suites with collaboration tools. But they seem to have established a domain in different business levels. While G Suite is the most preferred cloud suite for small scale industries, Office 365 with its ability to work offline has established itself at the enterprise level. Medium-scale firms that start with G Suite gradually switch to Office 365 with increasing scalability. Here, we will demonstrate how to migrate G Suite business to Office 365 account. The focus will be on email migration with additional options to transfer calendar, contacts, and documents.

Hi, Not long ago, we decided to make the switch from Google Apps to Office 365. But the important emails have become a hindrance. There is unrest about what to use for the migration – the manual way or an automation tool. A few suggestions will be appreciated.”

Dear all, I have a project where my team needs to migrate our company emails from G Suite business to Office 365. I have read the Microsoft documentation, but it looks like a daunting task to educate each of the 67 users to export their mailbox to O365. How do I move the entire data without having to do it individually for each user?”

The queries help us understand user requirements and pain points. So we can provide a solution that effectively relieves the major issues.

Microsoft Manual Method to Export G Suite Business to Office 365

  1. Verify if the domain used for G Suite accounts is owned by you.
  2. Then, add users to Office 365 one at a time or several users at a time. However, do not proceed with Set up domain options. This is to be done only when all Gmail accounts are migrated to Office 365.
  3. Open G Suite admin console and note down every G suite account username and password in an Excel spreadsheet. Headings must be EmailAddress in A1, UserName in B1, and Password in C1 for each column.
  4. Go to the Save As option and save the Excel file as a CSV file.
  5. Now, connect the G suite accounts with Office 365. A migration endpoint is required to set up such a connection.
  6. To set up a migration endpoint, go to the Recipients section in the Exchange Admin center. The more option in Migration provides a way to set up Migration endpoints.
  7. The next step is to create a migration batch to start transferring G Suite mailboxes. Look for the plus sign in Exchange admin center for Migrate to Exchange Online option.
  8. Choose IMAP migration and browse the CSV file that contains the list of G Suite mailboxes.
  9. Once validated, proceed to select the IMAP option and name the migration batch.
  10. The process is completed once the status changes from Syncing to Synced.
  11. Now, change the MX record so that the new emails are received on the Office 365 mailboxes and not the Gmail ones.
  12. Wait for about 4 days, then stop the synchronization of G Suite to Office 365 by selecting the deleting the migration batch in the Recipients section.

Another Approach for G Suite to Office 365 Migration

There is another alternative for users who are having difficulty with the manual process and/or do not want to risk the data migration. You can use G Suite to Office 365 Migration Tool provided by a number of firms such as SysTools. It provides GUI to users and automates the migration process once the prerequisites are taken care of. There are some additional options during G Suite to Office 365 migration as well that the previous method does not provide. All in all, one has complete freedom to choose the solution of their choice as long as it gets the job done.

When we compare both the methods, we end up with the following points:

  • While the manual way is free, it is technically complex and long. The alternative approach provides a much faster migration experience with the disadvantage of not being free.
  • If you wish to prioritize the migration of some important staff before the other, you have to include only those accounts in the CSV file. But, the second approach has an inbuilt facility of giving priority to such users.
  • Both the solutions provide concurrent migration experience.
  • You can exclude mailbox folders such as Trash, Drafts by inputting the names in the exclude section of the manual method. The automated method also provides this facility with the additional options of specifying date filters.
  • If you wish to migrate contacts and calendars along with emails from G Suite business to Office 365 migration, they are to be done separately. But with the alternate approach, these can be included and migrated with G Suite emails.
  • Pause and Resume feature and Incremental migration are some of the points associated with the automation tool.

Conclusion

G Suite and Office 365 originally was developed to improve data security and provide enterprises with collaboration tools that do not have desktop dependence. However, Microsoft’s ability to understand user intent and provide a set of tools that work both offline and online made it the leader of the cloud productivity suite. The big question is, how do an industry that works with G Suite can switch easily to Office 365 without risking data loss. Well, the answer is simple, either look for a manual way or go to the automated section. But the output must remain the same i.e., concurrent migration of G Suite business to Office 365 in a seamless manner.