[SOLVED] Migrating from Google Apps to Office 365

[LifelineIT]

Looking for a smidge of assistance, I'm moving my main office from Google Apps (~15 users) to Office 365 because we got a nutty discount.

This company has been with google apps for about 3 years, and all users just use the web interface. NO outlook use at this time.

What I'm not clear on is how really to export each users massive archive and then import it into outlook, and whether I do that locally or via the web-version. I'm pretty unqualified in the MS world.

I don't expect anyone to hold my hand through it, of course, but if you have a great information resource I'd love to know what it is.

 

[lcoughey]

I just googled your question (https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourcei...TF-8#q=migrate from google apps to office 365) and this is the first link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn568114.aspx

I hope it helps.

Luke

 

[LifelineIT]

Well paint me green and call me gumby.

I had looked inside the office 365 help docs...but for some reason I guessed I skipped the bare naked googling.

Thanks man.

 

[lcoughey]

If it weren't for the huge price difference, I'd consider doing the same.

 

[LifelineIT]

Well, I'll tell you why I'm doing it:

Email retention.

MailStore is cost prohibitive for us and almost equipment prohibitive. Google Vault is unnecessarily expensive ($1000/yr.) Backupify only gives me a once a day backup and will still cost ~$500/year.

I need to keep, store, and maintain ALL user emails, incoming or outgoing, deleted or otherwise, for a long time. Google lets regular users delete email, and after 30 days or a forced delete, they're gone forever and can't be recovered. I've also got issues with my unsavvy users being completely perplexed by Gmails threaded replies, and trying to maintain some Outlook users on Gmail and some not, plus mobiles...was too time consuming.

This agency is actually a nonprofit, so I can get E3 level Office 365 for $5/month/user, which seems silly to me. It'll give me way more control and filtering and will let me keep deleted emails.

(I have a lot of employees who operate remotely in rural areas, we've had ~1 major and 2 minor employee issues regarding nefarious use of email in the last couple years. I've also got EXTREMELY unsavvy users who can't seem to grasp archiving versus deleting, and gmails amazing filters/tags are completely over their heads.)