G Suite to Office 365 Migration to Improve Email Management

Client

The Client is a UK-based IT company that offers SAP consulting and managed services.

Challenge

The Client used G Suite that didn’t provide structured storage and convenient search for project-related documentation and emails. As a result, employee collaboration and project management were hindered. Also, G Suite didn’t allow integrating its mailboxes and calendars with Skype for Business, which made internal and external communication inefficient as employees couldn’t schedule meetings via Skype for Business.

Solution

The Client had Office 365 subscription, so they decided to transfer emailing from G Suite to Office 365 to get extended functionality of the services like Exchange Online and Office 365 Groups for sending emails, sharing files, collaborating on projects, scheduling meetings and more. The Client chose ScienceSoft as a trusted provider of Office 365 services with 8 years of experience to handle the migration process.

After analyzing the Client’s needs, ScienceSoft’s team started migration planning. They received access to the company’s mailboxes and performed mailbox mapping. ScienceSoft’s team kept mailbox information up-to-date due to receiving regular reports with a list of current employees and their email addresses from the Client. Thus, our team could map mailboxes of new hires and exclude employees who left or were expected to leave the company during the project implementation.

Upon completing the planning stage, ScienceSoft’s team performed test migration of a mailbox with the largest number of items. It helped the team to detect potential issues like missing emails that could come up during migration from G Suite to Office 365.

Then our team started the main phase of the project. It consisted of two stages:

• Migration of mailboxes. To transfer mailboxes from G Suite to Office 365, the team used a built-in migration tool available in Exchange Online on subscription.
• Migration of distribution lists. To download distribution lists from G Suite, the team used Gmail API. To upload the distribution lists into Exchange Online, they used PowerShell. To ensure the migration of distribution lists that were created in the course of the project, ScienceSoft’s team applied incremental synchronization.

To enable the Client’s employees to schedule meetings via Skype for Business easily, our team integrated the app with Exchange Online.

Results

Migration to Office 365 allowed the Client to improve employee communication and collaboration as Exchange Online provided intuitive and convenient email management. It allowed new employees to get access to all the previous email communication on projects belonging to a project team they joined.

As required by the Client, the company’s employees could easily schedule meetings using Skype for Business. They also could leverage Office 365 Groups to create team collaboration space. This area included a shared Outlook inbox, a shared calendar or a document library for collaborating on documents and enabled its members to make notes on emails.

Technologies and Tools

G Suite, Office 365, Exchange Online, Gmail API, PowerShell.