Plan Your Business’s Email Migration from Gmail to Office 365

Whether your organization is planning email migrations from Gmail to Office 365 (Microsoft 365) as a standalone project or as part of a broader use case, e.g., a merger or an acquisition, that also requires cloud storage migration, it is critical to get the planning stage right.

The more informed the migration plan, the more structured the overall project will be which, in turn, lowers the risk of security compromises and performance downtime. Having helped SMBs, enterprises, and MSPs migrate emails from Gmail to Outlook successfully over the years, our migration team has gained a lot of deep insights into planning the migration. We have shared them below for you to explore:

1. Finalize the User Accounts and Mailboxes to Migrate

The most critical component to planning an email migration from Gmail to Office 365 is finalizing the user accounts to choose the mailboxes to migrate. Your organization can conduct an in-depth analysis of the Gmail environment and evaluate whether all or selective users are critical to migrate and take the decision accordingly. For example, if your company is planning to move away from Gmail to completely adopt Microsoft 365, then it is a must to migrate all the user accounts in Gmail.

After finalizing, create accurate user mappings from Gmail to Outlook. The best option is to create CSV mappings, especially if your IT team prefers to customize the mapping paths between specific user accounts.

2. Choose the Email Features to Ensure Accurate Replication

A large part of ensuring accurate replication of emails in Outlook post-migration has got to do with the replication of the associated features. With CloudFuze as your organization’s email migration partner, your IT team can prioritize the preservation of these features:

• Email attachments
• Timestamps
• Read and unread status
• Starred and Important labels
• Deleted emails
• Junk emails
• Draft emails
• Sent emails

With this methodological approach of preserving all the essentials elements of the emails, your IT can keep the risk of user disruption at bay.

3. Retain the Calendar Properties for Proper Email Sync

Similarly, make sure to preserve the crucial properties of the calendar so that the migrated emails sync the same way they did in Gmail. With our Gmail to Office 365 email migration solution, your organization can securely and accurately preserve:

• One-off calendar events
• Recurring calendar events
• Calendar event timestamps
• Calendar event attachments

4. Plan a Realistic Email Migration Timeline

Timeline is another critical aspect of email migration planning. Collaborate with our migration team to create a migration timeline that sets realistic expectations around project completion, validation, and wrap up. This way, your IT team can ensure that the entire project proceeds in a timely manner.

Planning a proper timeline is especially important for specific migration use cases that requires timely project completion, such as mergers, acquisitions, other types of organizational restructuring, and source platform license expiration.

5. Validate the Migrated Mailboxes Post-Completion

Apart from performing email migrations from Gmail to Office 365, it is also crucial to validate the migrated mailboxes. Our email migration tool generates detailed reports which your IT team can use to validate the email migration. Moreover, our managed migration team will help you perform in-depth validation to ensure your organization does not miss out on anything included in the migration scope of work.

Your organization can leverage our Gmail to Office 365 migration solution in more strategic ways to make the entire move seamless, swift, and highly secure. Discuss further with our team on how our solutions can work to your advantage of achieving specific business goals with the migration.