Microsoft facilitates migration from G Suite to Office 365

Microsoft has started rolling out tools for the migration from G Suite to Office 365. This so-called “migration experience” was announced at the end of 2018 as a service that will become available in the second quarter of 2019. The migration experience should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

The tool promises to simplify the migration of mail, contacts and calendar information to Office 365. The IMAP protocol is used to migrate the mail data. To enable a phased migration, Office 365 Directory Syngronization (also called DirSync) must be set up. Another possibility is manual commissioning of all MailUsers outside the migration process.

However, the tool does not migrate all mail, contact and calendar data. For the mail this means, among other things, that holiday settings, automatic responses, filters and rules are not transferred. In terms of contact information, the tool transfers a maximum of three e-mail addresses per contact, while the Gmail tags and contact URLs, for example, are not included either. Shared calendars and Google Hangouts links also stay behind.

Microsoft had already built a tool for admins to migrate a mailbox from G Suite, but not one that automatically migrates contacts or calendar items. When announcing the migration tool, the tech giants pointed to the feedback they received: there would be a demand for such a migration method. The company talked about a very secure solution to migrate data directly to Office 365, without detours. There is also support for migrating mailboxes in batches.

Competition is doing well

Google already had a similar Exchange migration tool, which it can use to lure customers away from Microsoft. This could have contributed to the recent milestone, as Google recently announced that G Suite is being used by more than 5 million companies worldwide.