Mailbox Migrations

Two of the most common migration strategies are cutover and staged migrations. Cutover strategies involve migrating all mailboxes over a weekend, ready for your users on Monday morning. Staged strategies provide more flexible migration options, as discussed on this page.

What can be migrated?

When migrating between Google Workspace tenants, all the following mail-related items can be migrated:

• Emails

• Contacts

• Calendars

• Secondary Calendars

• Labels

• Delegations

• Rooms and resources

• Groups

• Archives

• Tasks

1. The Cutover Migration Strategy

This strategy is the simplest to implement. User mailboxes are migrated in a single pass. Depending on the amount of data to migrate we may decide to pre-stage a mail migration by migrating years of email ahead of time.

A cutover migration is essentially a process in which the entire company is switched at the same time.

Cutover Migration Benefits

• The fastest, simplest form of migration.

• Your users can start using the new mail system immediately.

• New emails are received in the target messaging system.

• Older emails are migrated either in a single pass or a pre-staged.

Cutover Migration Considerations

You can combine your cutover migration with pre-staging if required.

In this case, during the days or weeks leading up to your cutover, we migrate all emails up to a week or so ago along with calendars and contacts, then on the day of your cutover, we’ll run a quick delta pass to migrate the remaining items.

2. Staged Migration Strategy

A staged migration allows you to migrate batches of mailboxes over a few weeks or months. This strategy is useful for migrations with large volumes of data (large mailboxes or numerous mailboxes) that won’t be able to complete a single weekend.

There is additional flexibility in the approach to a staged migration. One common scenario is to migrate the last six months of emails over a weekend and leave older emails and archives to be migrated after cutover, notifying users that older emails will populate soon.

Pre-staging is an excellent strategy to address environments with many large mailboxes. As an example we may decide to perform several multi-pass migrations to migrate the bulk of user inboxes prior to completing the final cutover.

We have a number of approaches for a staged mail migration. Depending on the source and target environments coexistence and batch migrations are available. Basically, we choose who, when and what gets migrated during each pass.

Staged Migration Benefits

• Many flexible migration strategies.

• Allows more time before final cutover, avoiding tight deadlines.

• Complex migrations can be completed without disrupting end-users.

• It can be performed in batches according to your needs.

Staged Migration Considerations

Staged migrations tend to be more complicated than single cutover migrations. We’ll work one on one with you to plan the approach thoroughly before starting your migration.

 A well-planned migration is essential for limiting business impact and managing end user interruptions. Contact us and prepare to make your cloud migration as smooth as possible.

Email Settings

Canned responses, filters, and mailbox customizations will not be migrated and will need to be configured in your new mailbox.

Recommendations
The migrated users will need to reconfigure any preferred settings in their new accounts. Existing email filters can be exported from your original email account as an XML file and then imported into your new destination account by navigating to the "Filters and Blocked Addresses" section under "Settings."

Signatures

Email signature and out of office will migrate as-is. However, note that images in signatures do not migrate (plain text only).

Recommendations
The end user is responsible for recreating any formatting after migration.

Snoozed Emails

Snoozed emails are migrated. However, they will no longer retain their snooze rule association.

Recommendations
End user to replicate any snoozed email rules post migration if required.