Google Vault to Office 365 migration

User Query

" I currently use G Suite Enterprise and would like to migrate all of my Google Vault archives to Office 365. Could someone please advise me on how to proceed with the migration as I am unfamiliar with the migration environments and the steps I need to take? "

I. Pre migration activities for Google Vault to Office 365 migration

1. Make sure you have admin access on the source and target server

   The admin account that has all the necessary permissions to migrate mailboxes on behalf of all the users in your organization. Also assign the Organization Management role group and impersonation rights to the admin user on Office 365.

2. Create a list of users in a CSV file, which you want to migrate from BigRock.
3. Find the name of your source email server from an email client
4. Purchase a suitable Office 365 licensing plan. You can also sign up for a 30 day free trial and decide to go with a suitable one later. Compare Office 365 business plans and Compare Office 365 enterprise plans
5. Create Office 365 mailboxes and assign licenses to them

     Add users and assign licenses to Office 365 users

     Assign Microsoft 365 licenses to user accounts

6. If you plan to migrate your mailboxes to Office 365 Public folders, ensure that you create and configure the Public folder mailboxes on the target server.

    Create Office 365 Public folder and assign mailbox user

7. Similarly, if you want to migrate mailboxes to Office 365 In-Place archive, enable them from the admin center.

    Steps to enable archive mailbox in Microsoft 365.

8. If you have a custom email domain from the source which you want to retain and receive emails to, you must add and verify the domain on Office 365.

    Steps to add a custom domain to Office 365 and steps to add DNS records to connect your domain.

9. Configure Office 365 to send and receive large messages.

    Follow the steps to increase the message size on Office 365 to 150MB. See message size limits on Office 365 for more information.

II. How to migrate from Google Vault to Office 365?

You can perform the migration with the following three methods.

1. Migrate Google Vault to Office 365 from Microsoft admin center
2. Migrate the PST file from Google Vault to Office 365 with EdbMails

Note that depending on the data you're exporting, Google Vault can export emails in PST or MBOX format. Emails and mail data, for example, are exported as PST, while documents and files from Drive are exported as DOC, PDF, XLS, and so on. Let's go over the steps for migrating your emails to Office 365.

Steps to migrate Google Vault to Office 365 from the Microsoft admin center

• Step 1: Sign in to your G Suite account with an administrator account
• Step 2: Login to Google Vault and click the ‘Create’ button on the left
• Step 3: Enter a Matter name and Description in the Create new matter window
• Step 4: Create a Hold for the New Matter by entering the Name, Type and Users.
• Step 5: Create a search by selecting Mail, All Data and entering your email address
• Step 6: Click on ‘Export’ and select a suitable format to download (PST or MBOX)
• Step 7: Download the ZIP file containing the PST after the export operation.
• Step 8: Import the PST file to Office 365 from Microsoft's admin center

Importing the PST to Office 365 is possible with the Azure AzCopy tool and the network upload option. However, this method is not very intuitive and takes time if you have larger data to migrate.

If you download an MBOX file from Google Vault, you can use Thunderbird to open and export the MBOX to EML. You can then import the EML into Outlook and then save your emails as PST which can be quite lengthy and time consuming as well. To get around these obstacles and directly migrate your Google Vault data to Office 365, you can use EdbMails, which supports migrating both PST and MBOX files.

Steps to migrate Google Vault to Office 365 with EdbMails

EdbMails is the ideal tool to import the PST files to Office 365. You can migrate the exported PST file from Google Vault to Office 365 without downtime or data loss and transfer all your email data to a new or an existing tenant.

• Download EdbMails and install the application on any computer that is connected to the source and target environment. You can also perform the migration operation by installing EdbMails on a non-Exchange computer.

   See a detailed list of EdbMails system requirements for IMAP migration.

• Launch the application and click ‘Login’ or ‘Start Your Free Trial’
• Login to the application (if you have purchased a license and already have the username and password). The free trial version allows you to migrate 30 items from every folder of the source account to the target.
• Select the migration technique as ‘PST Recovery and migration’ in the main window
• Step 1: Select the PST file in EdbMails that you exported from Google Vault

• 

• Step 2: Select the mailboxes and connect to the Office 365 tenant
• • Select the mailboxes and folders from the left panel to migrate
  • Click ‘Migrate to Office 365’ to set up the connection with the target server.

• 

  EdbMails provides the following additional options to help you customize the migration task.

  • Additional Include and Exclude Filter Options
  • Filter emails by Date: Migrate to Office 365 by applying the Date filter
  • Filter emails by Size: Exclude emails from migration larger than a specified size.
• Step 3: Connect to target Office 365 as Global Admin User

  EdbMails supports both modern and classic authentication. Connect to the target server by selecting Auto or Manual registration for modern authentication and the connection method as Mailboxes, Public folder or Archive Mailbox. You can also connect to the mailboxes by loading a CSV file of users from the Office 365 tenant.

   Connect to Office 365 server using secure modern authentication

• Step 4: Map the mailboxes and migrate PST to Office 365

  Map the mailboxes and start the migration from Google Vault Archive to Office 365. Finally, verify the count of migrated emails, folders and mailbox items with EdbMails text-based log report. You can also pause and resume the migration.

   If you require further assistance, contact EdbMails 24x7 support. Try the free trial version today to start the migration!

   See steps to import PST to Office 365 and steps to import MBOX to Office 365 with EdbMails.

Post-migration tasks

Step 1: Update the MX records to point to Office 365

If you have not done this step previously, add the DNS records known as MX records to enable and receive email messages on the target Office 365 server by keeping the same domain name (yourname@domain.com) from the source server. In addition to this setup, configure the Autodiscover record to allow Outlook to connect to the migrated mailboxes.

Step 2: Create a new Outlook profile for users in the new domain

Configure and recreate the Outlook profile for each user in your domain if Outlook has problems connecting to Office 365 mailboxes.

Migration troubleshooting

  See the migration troubleshooting guide for possible solutions related to common errors. For more information on EdbMails Office 365 and IMAP migration, see frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Final Takeaways

Google Vault is a Google Workspace-integrated tool that stores archives and emails for search, compliance, and eDiscovery. However, when it comes to migrating these emails to Office 365, there is no simple solution. One option is to export your emails from Google Vault to PST and then use Microsoft's network upload option. This method, however, can be complicated and time-consuming. EdbMails being a Microsoft partner tool can help you directly migrate a PST or an MBOX file to Microsoft 365, eliminating all of the manual workload associated with other methods.