Microsoft introduces new Google G Suite migration tool to win back customers

Microsoft is now going after Google G Suite customers with a new migration tool that will allow them to easily migrate their mail, contacts, and calendar data to Office 365. Mail data will be migrated using the IMAP protocol. When using this migration tool, the following data will not be migrated.

• Mail: Vacation Settings or Automatic reply settings, as well as Filters or Rules
• Meeting Rooms: Room bookings
• Calendar: Shared calendars, cloud attachments, Google Hangout links, and event colors
• Contacts: A maximum of three email addresses per contact are migrated over
• Contacts: Gmail tags, contact URLs, and custom tags are not migrated over

Since Office 365 mail doesn’t support labels, Microsoft will copy mail with labels into a folder with the corresponding label name. Mail with the ‘Starred’ label will become flagged.  Mail with the ‘Important’ label will influence its Focused/Other designation.

There are several other ways to migrate data from G Suite to Office 365, but Microsoft recommends its own migration tool because of the following reasons:

• As a built-in first-party migration experience, there are no additional costs or setup required and no ‘per head’ migration cost (like some 3rd party migration solutions might require).
• Ability to migrate mail, calendar, and contacts with high fidelity.
• Data is copied straight from the source to Office 365 with no rest points. Be at peace knowing that your tenant’s data is migrated in isolation.
• Service account authentication delegation: no need to have knowledge of or reset users’ credentials to migrate their data.
• Tenant service account isolation: the service account used to migrate data is owned and controlled by you and can only be used to migrate data to your tenant.
• Ability to migrate users in batches; staged migration support.
• Settings simplification: automated mail forwarding between source and target environments for users being migrated in batches.
• Built-in mechanism to optimize storage for Labels to Folders conversion by reducing item duplication.

You can learn more about this tool here.

via: ZDNet