On Migration From Google Workspace to Microsoft Office - Some caveats and notes

If you’re migrating a large number of clients from Google Workspace over to Microsoft Office 365, there’s a bunch of software that allows you to do that. They require configuration but the task will be much more scalable, you’ll be able to move over hundreds of accounts with minimal time and hiccups. But if you’re doing only a handful of migrations and you have to install the Office 365 thick clients on client machines, doing it manually will probably be faster and cost effective. Either way, if you go the manual route, here’s a few things that need to be noted.

1. Get a Google Takeout. For a few GB accounts, its quite fast. The emails are exported in MBOX format and Outlook doesn’t like it but you can convert MBOX into PST using third party paid tools (like, Systools MBOX to PST Converter) and it’ll preserve the folder structure.

2. If current Google Workspace account is being used with Outlook, an OST file is created in outlook that has all the emails. You’ll need to remember to export it as the export creates a PST instead of an OST. And even though Outlook actually creates OST files, it cannot import them. And to make matters worse, if you’ve removed the Google Account, and even though you already have and OST file, Outlook cannot export it! Intricate! OST file is only ‘alive’ when still connected to the IMAP servers.

3. Upon switching from Google Workspace email to Outlook, when you go in to setup the new Outlook account, Outlook refuses to add the new account because an account with the same already exists (the Google Workspace one). A safer bet, if the usernames are the same (and they generally are because you’re migrating the user from one service to another), you can create a new username in Microsoft Office and make the existing one an alias. So when you go to add the new account, you can add it WITHOUT deleting the Google mailbox because you want a copy of the emails there as well. For example, if the email you’re trying to import is [email protected], create a new email account in Outlook as [email protected]. Import the account into Outook. And ONLY then make [email protected] an alias of [email protected]. The idea here is to preserve existing emails so if in the next steps our PST migration fails, the user still has their old emails in Outlook to refer back to.

4. Importing a PST is not 100 percent perfect. It can fail silently and it can fail with an error. Also with Office 365 online, you can only import a PST in Outlook (classic) and not in Outlook (new) as I write this. Additionally, a large PST will take days for all emails to be ingested into Office online and until then, you cannot do a search and find all emails.

5. When the ingestion of PSTs fails for whatever reason (of course, you can run scanpst on them and see) but if you don’t have time or want to use a better mechanism, you can actually load a PST file. PST files that have failed to be ingested into Outlook online will be loaded and visible this way. On outlook go to File –> Open and Export –> Open Outlook Data File and then provide your PST. Once the PST opens, you can copy and paste entire folders into the main Outlook folders.

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