Microsoft is finally working on G Suite to Office 365 migration tools. An update to the roadmap reveals a migration experience coming to Microsoft's suite, designed to make the transfer from Google's services seamless.
“We've heard the feedback and we're excited to announce the new G Suite migration experience which will allow you to directly migrate email, calendar and contacts from Google G Suite to Office 365! Our highly secure solution ensures your data is directly migrated to Office 365, with no resting points along the way. We're also adding support for migrating mailbox in batches,” says the update.
The tool with improves significantly on Google's Exchange migration tool and other solutions by putting them under one banner. Unlike those solutions, the G Suite migration tools will also transfer contacts and calendars automatically.
Security Improvements
Doing this should convince more users to make the switch. Office 365 is in a much stronger place than it was a few years ago, with the release of solutions like Microsoft Teams, which acts as a Slack competitor. However, transferring all of the user's data is a big undertaking, and is likely to dissuade many.
According to Microsoft's Greg Taylor, though, the motivation is more about security.
“The primary reason we're doing this is to improve the end to end security of customer data. We want to make sure the customer's data itself is secured as it moves, that it doesn't make an unexpected staging stop along the way, and the authentication used to get to it is strong and trustworthy,” he said to Petri.
In short, it's bad practice to trust the security of user's transfer data with a competing company. With its own migration tools, Microsoft can control every aspect of the process and ensure integrity.
The migration tools are currently in development and planned for release in Q2 2019.
