Unboxing a G Suite Migration

“It’s not going to work for us!”

“What nonsense is this?”

“It’s not an enterprise tool — the project will fail….”

These were the sort of phrases (which were plentiful) in the months before a successful global migration to G Suite, from Microsoft Exchange and Office.

TL;DR this article covers some of the key aspects which helped our project team and organisation succeed with this change to the new world. To bring the old world across, we needed to tackle

• Multiple MS Exchange deployments
• 3000+ mailboxes (user and shared)
• 3.6 TB of data
• 1700 distribution groups
• 38 email domains

Uncertainty — Just under a year ago, our transition to different ways of working was becoming more apparent, with more teams communicating and collaborating, more rigour around Agile rituals, and the importance of Jira on the rise, to name but a few things. It was also apparent that our stalled move to Office 365 was no longer in the pipeline. This stalled move opened the door to other options, and ultimately a move to G Suite was preferred for “the drive towards improved collaboration”.

With a background in MS Office 365 consulting, I was initially apprehensive. My concerns centred around MS Exchange and MS Office being such a mainstay in organisations of all sizes. Microsoft products for collaboration — that was all I knew as a proven enterprise ready platform. Perhaps that was part of the problem? Time for new ways of working….

Discovery — Google provides plenty of online resources to help with a transition from Microsoft to G Suite. The G Suite transition guide places particular focus on:

• Executive support
• Project management
• Change management
• End user training

Apart from a few incompatibilities with Exchange, the technical details were pretty straightforward. From that perspective we were comfortable in what we needed to do albeit concerned that there was no seamless hybrid approach. We agreed to use an external company — a Google partner, and possibly a 3rd party toolset. With a global workforce and support team, it was vital to get this right. Our organisation invested nearly 20 years into their Exchange environment, and there would be many aspects to consider.

Sponsorship — The key to the success of most projects is having your senior leaders visibly support the change. From the outset, top level leadership participated and championed the change.

Many pilot users fully immersed themselves, using the platform for everything, including calendaring. Slack channels were setup for support purposes, and often C-level staff were responding to other pilot users with possible solutions. This facilitated a learning culture with no standalone hero, but a more knowledgeable group who would later become champions during the organisation-wide transition.

Resistance to change was expected, and this was where having the visible executive support came into play. It provided the environment to have the appropriate discussions, to address any concerns regarding the change. Based on their feedback, it was clear that going forward, communication was vitally important.

Project Management — The Google Transition Guide recommends that the project be as quick as possible, with a 3 phase approach. Due to various reasons our project stretched out to 11 months which created a lot of baggage, with unforeseen circumstances during the pilot and after migration. Easily fixed with the right people, but cumbersome nonetheless.

Fortunately we were able to go live globally on the same day, which was the right decision for us. Doing it any other way would have created a disconnect between users on G Suite, and others left behind in the old world.

All in all, from the point of assigning a dedicated internal project manager (along with choosing a Google Partner) to the actual migration day, it took around 2 months for a global go-live.

Training and Collaboration — Engaging with a Google Partner turned out to be invaluable. From a technical perspective, we felt we had a handle on things hence opting to do the migration ourselves; while they provided their experience and a sounding board for everything else. From a project planning perspective, they covered so many aspects at various stages which we would not have considered.

Our comms team were the ones to bring this all together for the end users. Using the Google change management guide and the partner’s experience, they communicated the changes in an understandable manner. The team covered all training aspects via Zoom to 4 continents, advocating Google’s Learning centre to users, for self-paced learning.

It was important that the trainer had considerable experience with Microsoft Exchange and Office. The trainer matched some Microsoft features to Gmail, Sheets and Docs, extending the experience to different ways of doing the same things, in a cloud native platform.

Success — Based on the discussions with the partner, we only used the Google provided tools. It ended up being one of the more stressful projects, but once all the tasks on the run sheet were completed, it just worked — a fantastic team effort!

The comms and project team coordinated Google Champions in each office, which was the first point of call for any “How do I do…..” scenarios. Some things from the old environment did not map precisely to G Suite, but in most cases there was an alternative way of doing things to achieve a similar, if not better, outcome.

The project facilitated a much needed “cleanup” exercise of the old environment resulting in

• only 2400 mailboxes and 700 groups being provisioned
• all supporting data being migrated 6 weeks prior, and
• retention of only the required email domains

The complexity of our physical infrastructure has been vastly reduced, with resolution of issues in fewer minutes. Our tech debt and overall spam has diminished. Monthly patching no longer impacted people needing to do work at odd hours.

Everything works seamlessly, and overall I was impressed with the smooth transition and innovative features. We also found smarter ways to transition legacy work processes.

“Sheets and Docs are awesome”.

“No more mailbox limits!”

“It’s so easy to collaborate on the same document”

These became the more familiar phrases since we’ve transitioned. In all fairness our company builds software, so having the right skills and experience in the organisation does help.

While Office and Exchange has not yet been completely decommissioned/uninstalled, our “drive towards improved collaboration” is definitely on the up!