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Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are common in the business world. They're a way for companies to grow, expand into new markets, gain a competitive edge, improve efficiency and reduce costs.
As part of their consolidation efforts, if the merging companies have separate Google Workspace environments, they'll want to migrate all users into a single tenant for more effective administration and to allow for internal collaboration between existing and incoming teams.
The challenge
Migrating users and their data from one Google Workspace environment to another can be complex and time consuming depending on the migration method. These are some of the most common migration pain points:
- User disruption due to data freezes, cutovers, and potential data loss.
- Maintenance required for migration hardware, software and services, along with licensing costs.
- Project and change management overhead.
Introducing Google Workspace Domain Transfer
On the other hand, Google Workspace Domain Transfer has been around for many years now, helping more than 90 customers and with more than 270 transfers executed globally. Some of its benefits include:
- High data fidelity: the transferred entities (users, emails, calendar events, drive files, etc.) are moved to the new Workspace environment, while preserving user identities, Drive links and permissions, so that the user experience is not impacted. The data never leaves the Google environment.
- Business as usual for non-admin users: the transfer can be executed during business hours since there's no downtime, except for the admin users who have their access revoked during a brief timeframe. While most of the transfer tasks usually take less than 2 hours to complete, the overall process is generally done within 24 hours with minimal impact.
- Low operational complexity: there's no need to install additional hardware or software. The Google Workspace Professional Services team works with you, as the customer, to ensure the prerequisites are met, coordinates the transfer and supports the entire preparation and execution.
See this story with the Product Owner, Global Collaboration at Randstad, discussing how they performed 36 migrations over the course of 2 years with Google Professional Services and partners.
How Google Workspace Domain Transfer works
Any secondary domain (and associated aliases) in the source environment is eligible for transfer. These transfer domains will become secondary domains of the destination.
For the primary domain and its contents to be transferred as well, you'll have to define an empty “placeholder” domain, perform the primary domain swap and just leave a Super Admin user as primary contact for this remaining environment.
Also, you need to create a transfer root organizational unit in the destination where all the source organizational units will be placed following the same structure. If there are specific policies and configurations in the source organizational units, these will have to be recreated under the transfer root organizational unit.
The key watchpoints of Domain Transfer are:
- Licenses are not transferred and it's required to have the same type of Workspace licenses in both the source and destination with enough of them available in the destination to accommodate the source users. Google Sales would normally activate grace licenses so that there's no additional cost during the transfer timeline.
- Certain Google features are not covered during the transfer and need to be momentarily removed, such as MDM Advanced Management, and other subscriptions which do not allow the primary domain swap. Also Google Voice is not supported.
- Google Cloud Projects are not transferred.
- Configuring any 3rd party systems is out of the scope.
Example migration timeline
(The timeframe for any Domain Transfer execution will normally vary between 2 and 6 weeks depending on the prerequisites and other dependencies).
How to get started with Google Workspace Domain Transfer
To get started, you may contact your Sales Representative, Google Cloud Partner, or fill out this form to determine whether your Workspace environments qualify for a paid Professional Services engagement. Our Professional Services team has global coverage with specialized resources in the US, LATAM, EMEA, and JAPAC.
Please note that Domain Transfer usually refers to a full merge of two Google Workspace environments. Partial transfers or divestiture are currently supported under a limited pilot in a pre-GA program. Reach out to Google/Partner Sales for more information.
References and additional resources
- Detailed technical description of Google Workspace Domain Transfer
- Google Workspace Domain Transfer glossary
- Understanding Google Workspace Domain Transfer, with customer example
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.