Here a nice bone of contention for you. As we all know that ‘Free’ doesn’t always mean ‘Free’ when it comes to performing a migration. That being true, there is in fact a good solid way of migrating from Google into Microsoft 365 using the Native Tools that are now a part of the M365 architecture.
So are the free tools any good? Can you perform a decent sized migration, end to end, using these free tools.
The answer is YES, but you do need to pay attention to what is happening and be aware that there are a lot of functions inside the migration tools that you pay for that you may either miss or require. Either way, I will let you make up you own mind about whether you can use these tools or not.
Migration tools that are paid for are going to give you a greater amount of flexibility on the dashboard, understanding what is migrating, the batching is easier and definitely management of that is solid. Tools will make it more functional when working as a team, sharing the migration tasks.
What I have put together here is a three part YouTube series showing how to perform the tasks. Everything I am doing on the video series is with a ‘live’ system. An actual Google migration of a company that I have been using in all the video tutorials recently, planeium.com. You will see how it all happens in real time, with all the ugly errors, mistakes and processes along the way. I prefer to keep the videos relevant to what happens in a real migration using these tools. Things go wrong and I fix them, because never do things run 100% smoothly with these things. There is no point editing all that out, all the wounds and scars are on display.
Here is the format and contents of each video.
Part One
- The Discovery Process for the Google environment
- Extracting the User Lists and deciding who is migrating
- Creating the identities in Microsoft 365
- Enabling licensing for the accounts
- Preparing the accounts in Microsoft 365 for OneDrive migration
Part Two
- Preparing Google to extract the data
- Performing the complete Mail migration, showing it in real time
- Updating MX records for Mail Flow
- Forwarding mail from Google to Microsoft 365, for use in a ‘Slow Burn’ migration rather than a ‘Big Bang’ approach
Part Three
- Preparing Google Drive to extract the data
- Using the Native Tools in Microsoft 365 to migrate the data to OneDrive
- Discussion on issues in OneDrive during a migration
- Showing the data extract End-to-End
- Summary of what has been achieved
From all of these you can see the migration of the planeium.com company into Microsoft 365.
Here are the three videos. Please remember that I very much appreciate it when you subscribe to my channel. It keeps you up to date with new videos but helps me too.
https://youtube.com/thecloudgeezer
Migration Series – Parts 1 to 3 – YouTube Playlist
If you prefer to watch them separately, then the links for each of them are below.
Migration Part One
Migration Part Two
Migration Part Three
Update – 30 December 2022
In the first video I make reference to some PowerShell code to create the users and to provision the users in Microsoft 365. Here is the ‘Excel’ formula that creates the users and can provision the OneDrive’s.
="new-msoluser -displayname """ & A2 & " " & B2 & """ -firstname """ & A2 & """ -lastname """ & B2 & """ -userprincipalname """ & C2 & """ -usagelocation US -licenseassignment tcge5demo:DEVELOPERPACK_E5"When you put those in the spreadsheet that you created in the video by downloading the user list from Google, in column ‘K’, it will end up creating the PowerShell command that looks something like this.
new-msoluser -displayname "Ellie Fredricksen" -firstname "Ellie" -lastname "Fredricksen" -userprincipalname "ellie@planeium.com" -usagelocation US -licenseassignment tcge5demo:DEVELOPERPACK_E5And in column L, the OneDrive provision formula
="Request-SPOPersonalSite -UserEmails """ & C2 & """"This will create the code that looks like this
Request-SPOPersonalSite -UserEmails "carl@planeium.com"
Mark – The Cloud Geezer
