Global Supply Chain Solutions Provider Transitions from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 with Tenant Consolidation
A world leader in supply chain technology solutions provider consolidates all its tenants to Microsoft 365 post M&A activities including GWS migration
Background
The customer is a leading provider of visibility technology solutions and cloud-based supply chain execution. The company supports many of the world’s leading brands with essential technology for yard management, maintenance, transportation, repair operations, ocean carrier solutions and terminal systems. Being on Microsoft 365 Cloud and specially a software solution supplier, the company wanted to migrate all the entities being acquired and existing to a consolidated and holistic M365 tenant.
Challenges
As a result of certain M&A activities, the company was facing operational challenges with 3 different collaboration services tenants and wanted to create a new Microsoft 365 tenant. As such, it involved 3 different migrations to the new M365 tenant.
- The acquired M365 tenant
- The existing M365 tenant
- The existing Google workspace
The Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration would involve most of the existing M365 and Google workloads with few exclusions and needed to be done in some dependent order because of operational considerations.
The major migration items comprised of:
- Gmail including encrypted mails
- Exchange mailboxes
- Google, Teams and SharePoint sites
- Drives/Files
- Users/Groups
- Retention of shared data and secured migration of sensitive information
The M365 tenants had about 2400 users together. They had various MS workload subscriptions e.g., Office, MS Project, Power BI, Visio etc. The new tenant was upgraded to an Enterprise license.
The Google tenant was comprised of numerous services and contains a large amount of data. The services in use include Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive (personal and shared), Google Scripts, Data Studio, and Meet / Chat.
There existed some additional projects that needed to be migrated after consolidating the collaboration service tenants into a single environment.
- Usage of Microsoft endpoint manager as a replacement to BigFix
- Usage of Azure AD SSO as a replacement of OneLogin
- Protection of VPN with Azure AD MFA
- Consolidation of on premises domain into the new M365 Azure AD or Azure AD Domain Services
Solution
The highlights of the major phases of the project are:
Initialization
- Project Kick off and onboarding
- Evaluate, select and provision tools for migration e.g., ShareGate, MigrationWiz, BitTitan and custom PowerShell
- Configure testing environments
Content Inventory
- Assess the workloads in scope
- M365 workloads e.g., email, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Stream, Yammer, Power Automate, Power BI
- Google Workspace e.g., Google Drive, Google Site, Google mail, Google chat
- Users and Groups
- Usage Reports
- Miscellaneous Services
Configuration Analysis
- O365 Admin Settings
- Security Analysis (DLP, CA, ESR)
- Email Hygiene and Mail flow
- Desktop Deployment Configuration
Change Management
- Change Calendar
- Communication Templates
- FAQs and training content
Detailed MigrationMerge Strategy
- Mapping Plan
- Detailed Planning Sessions (Workshops)
- Key Use Cases
- User Migration
- Content Migration and Help Desk
- Detailed Project Plan
The project was executed in 4 months' timeframe. A big bang approach was employed to migrate all workloads on the same cutover date. Initial bulk migrations were followed by delta migrations until cutover. This strategy ensured simpler communication and coordination. It also lowered the complexity of migration. The risks were covered through detailed planning and stakeholders' participation at the appropriate time along with the tooling and test migration benchmarking throughput of the migration activities.
Benefits
The project provided several benefits to the company.
- Single unified environment using M365
- External branding so emails flow through one company
- Unified content access and reduced user pain by having all content in one collaboration suite
- Single infrastructure, tools, and processes established for possible future migrations owing to acquisitions.
- Better integration and optimization for all M365 workloads
