Transcript

Hailee Zapata: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to our webinar on the secret to a fast, seamless Google Workspace migration. I'm Haley Zapata. I'm the Alliance Marketing Manager here at Promevo, and I will be your host and moderator today. Over the next 45 minutes or so, we will talk about basically how to assess your organization's readiness for migration the common challenges within migrations and how we can help you overcome them. Optimizing that Google Workspace post migration. And then we always do our live Q and a at the end of the session.

/Now let's meet our Google Workspace migration experts. Joining us from CloudM is Chris Cockton. He's the head of support and services. And we have Colin McCarthy, the change management leader here at Promevo.

Colin McCarthy: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I am Colin McCarthy. Promevo is a Premier Google partner and was actually the Google partner that I used for over 10 years in my previous role, and they did their first migration for me back in 2011.

And then in 2012 with some M& A activity. I worked with Promevo to do a couple of migrations off of Exchange, hosted Exchange back in those days. Promevo sells, services, and builds Google products. We're 100 percent Google focused and specialize in Chrome OS, Google Workspace with Gemini AI, and Google Cloud on our own wonderful Workspace management tool, Gpanel.

Chris Cockton: Hi, everyone. So yeah, I'm here representing CloudM. CloudM, we were a Google cloud premier partner, and we were born in back in 2008 around purely around Google Workspace. We have a big focus on migrations into Google Workspace, or as it was back then, Google apps for work for some of the historians in the group.

We branched out into SaaS and we provide tools now around automation, backup, email signature and archive. But obviously today we'll be talking a lot around our migrate product. We were purpose built with Google in mind we've got a pretty solid proven track record. We've completed over 80 million migrations for over 45,000 customers, shifted just over 40 petabytes of data in that time. As a group, we have a pretty extensive experience in completing large scale, complex migrations alongside key Google partners such as Promevo.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and a fun fact for you and I, Chris, and everybody, is that we've actually worked together at my previous role during migrations into Google Workspace with with CloudM.

So I do know what a great tool it is. But let's get started and talk about the process of doing your migration. So obviously there are a number of reasons why you might need a migration service, mergers and acquisitions into an existing Google Workspace tenant or a collaboration platform change, changing from Office 365, Exchange or even the HCL notes.

There are still a lot of companies out there with their own on premise exchange some quite big ones you would probably be surprised to find out about. So you've made that great decision. But when you come to think about what has to be done, obviously the hardest part of any migration is the change management that's involved.

All it professionals know that the human element of any it project is the most complex. The technical aspects are relatively easily, right? You have access to the source tenant. You have a new destination or access to the destination tenant, and you just click copy and paste and it's done. But there's that human aspect that really needs to be focused on.

So this is our best practice for change management, which focuses around excite. Enable, expand and embed. And we concentrate the change management work streams around these focus areas.

First with Excite, we have to have sponsorship and engagement and influencing our users. You have to have leadership, knowing and understanding why this change is happening and sponsoring it, being on board and being able to really champion that change inside the business.

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Colin McCarthy: Then for enable we have to look at the organization's analysis and transformation process, understand what aspects of, of your organization are going to change as you go from one email platform or document management platform to another. And also you need to identify opportunities for transformation.

You don't really want to just copy what you previously had. That is, it's going to be a whole new set of features and opportunities in the expand part. We focus on the communications to build visibility and excitement about the change. We want to make sure that people understand the benefits and the reason why that change is happening.

And then lastly, in the embed, this is where we focus on building proficiency through evangelizing and training. And ensuring that people fully understand how to make the best use out of the new platform and the new tools they have in Google Workspace. So communicating the change to users is vitally important to ensure the smooth transmission, transition from one platform to another.

Users need to be properly trained and prepared. They also need to be reassured that all their data is going to be moved. It just might be accessed in a different way. And that's what users generally have always just cared about. Where is my data? They're less concerned about the actual tool, or file document storage that it might be in, or the email client that they're using.

So during this process between enable and expand, this is where we have our, our go live process. Where we move you from one platform to another. And through all of this, we do have, as we say, this change management process and a dedicated resource.

So along with those four stages of change management, we have a five phased approach to the technical aspects of the migration.

Yeah, remember, I said that the change management is the hardest and this technical aspect was the easiest. That's a good discussion over a pint that probably Chris and I will hopefully have one day when we're in the same place, but there's a lot of things to contemplate, and that's why the technical aspect on our approach is broken down into a number of small stages.

And this is really where you get the benefit of a dedicated team and where they can add great value to your migration project. It's very difficult for internal teams to manage their current level of responsibility and focus on projects of this scale. The timelines for these phases can be adjusted based on the size and complexity of the migration and the available internal resources.

We will be the champions for your success and when we talk about this migration approach and these number of phases I love to use an analogy that somebody in a previous role told me about and I've used it a number of times and it's the car analogy. This migration process is like driving down the road in your car.

But trying to change the wheels at the same time, potentially, as you're also servicing the engine as passengers, and maybe even the driver is changing. They are coming and going. So through all of this process, your business is going to be carrying on going forwards, doing its daily business stuff.

You're going to get new hires, you're going to get leavers. So I think that analogy is a really good one to help visualize how important it is to have a really good partner to help you with this change management and have a very strong approach for dealing with it. So let's have a quick look at phase one and phase two.

So phase one, the kickoff phase and phase two, the assessment phase. This is where the planning is done and this is where you really get. To a successful project is outlined, and this really determines your success. So the discovery work done in these phases establishes what you have in the source domain, who is the owner, everything, and how potentially how spread out it could be.

Often companies will be surprised about what they have, because even with their best intentions, they might not have everything documented, and discovery often reveals unknown elements that they just weren't aware of. This is also where you really find out, is your source of truth a real source of truth?

Is your HR system robust? Is your Active Directory up to date? Is your identity provider up to date? Do all of those sources align so that we can accurately know who is in scope for the migration and how to map all of their accounts and all of their access. This is also a great time to find what is going to move to Google Workspace.

Another analogy, just like when you're moving house, you don't take everything. You rent a dumpster, or a skip for those listening in the UK, and you only bring over what you need. You throw out what you don't need. So this stage also determines how the CloudM platform will also be deployed and configured.

Chris Cockton: Yeah, thanks. I really like the analogies. The car analogy was when you shared with me the other week and it got me thinking about which, part of the car is CloudM in this process? I think we can't keep moving right without the engine. So I'm, taking the engine, but if that's all right with you.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. Yeah. You can tell that I would have thought you'd be the road cause the roads. I, yeah that's, another discussion that we can have, but yeah, it is, it is interesting how those analogies can help visualize it.

Chris Cockton: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think one of the obviously is we we go through phase one and two of the process that you've just shown up on screen.

Once we start to understand a little bit more around the environment that we're migrating from and what it is that we're trying to migrate to that kind of brings you from a technical perspective. CloudM is a tool of choice. It brings you to the first question, which is which, version of our tool do you want to use?

We have two versions, so we can self host. Spin it up on virtual machines, and that can be hosted wherever it needs to be. Whether CloudM hosts that for you, whether Promevo hosts that for you, or if the specific custom we've got has kind of data requirements and information security protocols that mean it needs to be within their environment.

So that's our kind of most adaptable option, and also allows a lot more kind of bespoke scaling. We do also offer a SaaS version of our tool that's just a URL, much less complex to set up, but as a general rule of thumb, when we're talking about large scale migrations, like the types that yourselves at Promevo handle self hosted is generally the route that we go down just as it says, allows us a lot more flexibility.

Bespoke scaling, we can adapt it to whatever the migration needs are and hopefully help alleviate some of that that car analogy, right? Maybe we can just stop one of those tires needed if we can speed things up for you a little bit. So just wanted to touch on the fact that we, do have those two versions, they're all built around the same kind of, Features and functionality on the kind of same baseline, but it's just where it's hosted and ultimately just the, bespoke nature of what you might require.

As I said, more often than not, self hosted is where we're going when we talk about these large scale.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and Chris, I know from my experience, like if you're migrating off of an on premise platform, like on premise exchange 2019 or HCL notes or another proprietary email system that you might have on premise, then you have to have self hosted because you have to have the tool actually installed on premise where the where the migration source is.

Chris Cockton: Yeah, correct. Obviously we've worked on a few of those over the last few months and years. Yeah, you can often be led by what you're migrating and where you're migrating from. Yeah, we try and provide an option to suit every company and every scenario.

Colin McCarthy: Talking of options, lovely segue into what, can and can't and how gets migrated?

Chris Cockton: Yeah, so we, offer a lot. So we as I said at the start of the call we were born in Google, but that's where the tool really started up. We, our first ever migration was group wide Novell Groupwise into Google apps for work.

So that was the very first source platform that we supported and we still support quite a wide number of source platforms. We've mentioned a few already today. We do support Microsoft as a destination as well. Although I know that's probably a dirty word in this in this group. For today we'll just focus on how we can migrate into Google.

So across the bottom are all effectively the destinations inside of Google that we can bring your data to. And this is where our tool can effectively align with the analysis that you do with your customers early on in terms of understanding what are the skipping. or dumpster in if that's the right us phraseology in what they're bringing over and that's where CloudM can come in, work with you, understand what the scope of that work is.

And we can flex the tool to migrate what we need to, where we need to within reason. So this really is just an idea, a snapshot of some of the things that we support moving into Google. And as it says, we've got some. Down in the bottom right hand corner. We're actively working on how we can migrate into spaces Within google as well.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, because that's a recent update, isn't it? I think with the change the google Workspace made That allows the migration of spaces. Obviously a lot of these are reliant on API access so as they expand get improved then the whole ability to migrate your data improves

Chris Cockton: Yeah, absolutely. We have a really good relationship with Google and we're trying to keep close to when these changes and API changes are coming we try and get ahead of the curve with those, not always possible, but we do it as much as we can.

And yeah we're always looking for opportunities to expand, the scope of items that we can migrate. So yeah the spaces API was a nice one for us. It's something that a lot of customers, particularly customers. Already in the cloud migrating from Microsoft, or even if they're migrating Google to Google through a merger or acquisition, spaces, it contains a lot of really useful and important data.

So being able to bring that across in the future will be key for us.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, certainly with the drive in the last few years to have a lot of companies have moved away from email as being the primary communication platform to being one of the chat applications. Yeah, the being able to migrate that data.

Is is very, important as well. So it's not lost. A wide range of different, source to destination applications can be mapped out there. So all part of the design and test phase. So if we carry on with the moving house analogy, this is where we will plan what is going to go where and how it will exist in your new Google Workspace.

This is where it's really time to rethink and re engineer, not just recreate, because this is really an opportunity to be transformational. If you've made the decision quite correctly, I will say to adopt Google Workspace. So if this is a new Google Workspace domain, then you'll map teams and resources to your existing services that you have in your tenant.

This is where we will go through and create a migration plan, get buy in and approval from key stakeholders about how that migration is going to be done. We also do a lot of dry runs and validate the success of the migration. And this is where we really need to think outside the box when testing. We need to work with users to validate how they worked or originally worked in the source platform and what it looks like now in the destination.

Google Workspace. And we have to think, we have to think as a user and not just look for how we would expect things to do. This is how often something seemingly, insignificant, but potentially vital for a section of your users can be overlooked. So that's why we really do need to reach out and get a wide range of people invested and involved in the testing.

This is also where we review the security and compliance settings on a new domain and help you get that new domain set up as it should be. With the the best best practice guides from Google on what we at Promevo consider to be best practice for your domain set up for security and compliance.

Also look at what services might be replaced in your new Google Workspace domain. What did you previously have to do? MDM? Are you going to be using advanced MDM within Google Workspace? Are you going to be deploying context where access to replace a previous service that you might have used? All of that comes in the design and test phase and then phase four.

This is where we do the scheduled cut over. And this is done in stages. So generally it's done with a core group of the I. T. Team, making sure that your support desk, your I. T. Leaders security operations center network team, whoever you have in I. T. The core I. T. Team fully know understand Google Workspace.

We encourage them to do the Google Workspace administrator exam. Give them access to training and really get them up to speed. Next, we'll choose a group of early adopters. These would be some Google Workspace champions, people who can really help to drive the transition and the adoption of Google Workspace and also be a great source of testing and validating all of the systems that you used to have running on your source destination, your old tenant, everything's working as you want to going forwards inside Google Workspace.

And obviously not everything could be replicated exactly. Not everything is apples to apples or apples to oranges. So if something did work, so users did work in a specific way in the source tenant then we'll find ways and encourage adoption of a new way of working inside the the destination inside Google Workspace.

And then lastly, this is where we generally have a global go live. This would be migrating everybody. All in one giant big bang. Although as your business, depending on how your business operates and business needs, this can be broken up, but generally will cut people over in one go. So let's actually talk about the technical part of migrating the data and how those cutovers work seamlessly.

Chris Cockton: Yeah, thanks Colin. I, the the global goal I have, like the big bang I find in my experience of running these projects is that's usually the bit that really gets people. They're a bit, that's like the oh moment that they all have when they think about the idea of cutting so many people over onto a new system.

In the years that I've been doing this, it's amazing how ripping that bandaid off, can be really helpful. Obviously the key is what you spoke about in the very beginning, which is the, key, the change management piece, that's the thread that glues all of this together all the way through.

So if there's certainly people on the call hearing the idea of a big they've got big several thousand user organization and they've just heard the fact that they might be cutting them all over at once and that's scaring them. I think it's good to call out that there's a lot of, success with this process and this this idea and this approach.

It feels quite insurmountable at first, but what with a partner such as yourselves putting out really strong change framework around that, it's amazing how successful it can be.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, I think in some organizations it's impossible not to do it all at once because you can't, companies can't operate on different platforms.

I've cut over a global company with 3, 000 users in 22 offices and they had no choice but to do it all in one big bang because everybody needed to be working in the same platform all at the same time. But if you're a more distributed organization where office is self contained or there's less intercompany communication than you.

You can split it up and do a rolling migration. And those rolling migrations are or even a big bang is very easy when you have a good tool to do those the actual migration of the ones and zeros, all of the bits and bytes of their email and drive documents.

Chris Cockton: So just moving on then into how we make that work technically mentioned earlier on around our self hosted version of the tool being quite adaptable and scalable to meet the needs. And I know I've given you all the prompts, Colin, but I forgot the first prompt, so if you could just click once, yeah, cool.

This is just it's very high level and very simple. The first bit already you've got very simple, migration option is ultimately just to run whatever workloads that we've agreed has been in scope in what we call a bulk and delta approach. So we run a bulk migration.

We bring everything over for that user in the background. So user will continue to work in the source environment. We'll migrate that data into the destination and then over the course of a short period of time, usually a weekend, we will do what we call a delta. So we'll top that migration up and that user will go live the following Monday.

So they'll log out of their HCL notes environment on Friday and they'll come back into the office or their home office as we all live in now on Monday in their kind of new fancy Google Workspace environment. So this is an ideal world, a perfect scenario where you doing your data analysis and determine you can do it in a reasonable time frame.

What we find in as, things have moved on is customers are adopting the cloud more and more. Workloads become larger and ultimately timelines customer timelines, your business timelines, whatever is driving your migration project just doesn't allow you to take that approach and do a full migration.

And that's where we can adapt the product to meet your needs. So what we might agree what we might work with Promevo and customers with on is, can we get your users live with just a subset of data? And that way we can do what we call a post go live backfill. So as you can see now, we've done a subset in those first few months and then we bring over the remainder of the data.

And as we've done that for a variety, or a number of different kind of configurations, but some people have gone live with nothing and everything's come in afterwards. That feels a bit gung ho, a bit crazy to me, but each to their own. But as a general rule, we'll get enough data over so that.

From day one, users are able to complete the day job we can bring over kind of a year, two years, six months, whatever someone feels is appropriate for their project. And again, that's where that kind of analysis piece is really critical. What we can also do again, as workloads have expanded in the world of cloud is we can set up additional instances of our tool.

And this is where being on our self hosted environment really helps. And this will allow you to migrate workloads in parallel. We call this internally dual threading. So our tool typically will work in a sequential format, so it will migrate a user's mail and then it will move on to their drive items, calendar tasks, so on.

What we've actually been able to do as things have progressed, is we can set up two migration instances and we can hit the same user. in parallel for mail and drive, which will obviously naturally speed up your overall migration. And you can do that in a number of ways. You can go back to the standard kind of bulk and delta approach and everybody goes live.

But we're able to do that for a greater amount of data in a shorter period of time. Or we can continue with the idea of getting users on board bringing the remaining data across after the fact. So just some kind of really simple suggestions around how we can adapt our tool and technology to meet a customer's needs.

It's one of the driving factors usually with these is you want collaboration, you want users in that environment fast and making the most of those tool sets. And not every customer has six months to wait for that data to be migrated. So that's where we work with the likes of Colin, Bramivo to understand the customer's needs and build a solution from a technical aspect that meets the timeline requirements that a customer has.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, it's great that you've said about it does require on meeting the customer, the client's requirements. I'm a big fan of the quick migration of migrating over three months, six months of emails, getting people up and running on the platform, getting them used to it. And then in the background, doing that post go live migration of bringing, in all of their archive emails from, depending on your data retention policy from three years, five years to 20 years.

If they've been there for 20 years and got all their mail for the most part, I think people only need the last couple of months for 95 percent of their work, so they can get going a lot quicker doing that migration and then do the backfill afterwards. I'm a big proponent of that and seen that being done a couple of times successfully.

Chris Cockton: Yeah. And again, it all harks back to that change management slide you had up at the beginning. The technical solution could be whatever it needs to be. What's key is that users understand exactly what they're getting, when they're getting it, how it's going to come across. And you're just putting them in a position where on day one, it's as seamless as it possibly can be.

So they're either Transitioning straight into their day job, or they already know what they might be missing. If that's the approach you take, so again, it's that thread of change management is the critical piece Ultimately any google Workspace or any migration project.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah Yep, and the most exciting part of the change management process and the migration process It's the last phase.

You have reached the top of the mountain. This is where we have the successful closure of the project after all of the users have been cut over and any issues have been resolved. This is a time for celebration and excitement continues because now all your users are on Google Workspace and they have a wonderful platform to collaborate on.

They can use all of the tools like Google Meet, Google Docs, Gemini AI to enhance how they work. So how do we get started on that migration journey?

Hailee Zapata: All right, I am going to join you guys after this slide. Sorry, my computer took a while. I was thinking to add me. You guys are doing a great job. I didn't want to disrupt anything.

Colin McCarthy: Fine, good to have you back.

Hailee Zapata: But thank you guys for watching us do the migration process. Once you make the decision to migrate to Google Workspace, Promevo and CloudM will provide What we call like the three stages that are very important, a comprehensive approach, competitive offers, and consistency, which is really important to make this process as smooth as possible for an organization.

Basically what this means is you have a dedicated team consisting of a client success manager, a project manager, change management leader someone from CloudM to support you and then your post migration support as well. So it's a big team for a project that really makes sure that the consistency, the communication, everything is up to par and runs as smooth as possible CloudM top notch products partnered with Promeo services provides your team with the best support. We do hope you will check out our website for more information and below is a link to our latest blog on migrations, which gives you some more details, information as well. Also, on the right hand side, you'll see a list of our upcoming webinars, including our next gPanel office hours webinars.

It is on signature templates. GPanel is our own proprietary Workspace management tool. So if you're interested in Google Workspace, signing up for our monthly office hours is a must. Now that we've got through that great demo, we are going to start with questions. So let's ask Colin and Chris some questions.

We did get a lot of questions submitted ahead of time for people who couldn't join us live. But any questions that are not answered today, someone will personally contact you with an answer as well. So our first question, what's the bottleneck when running this migration for an on prem exchange server or Office 365, for instance?

Colin McCarthy: Oh. Great question, and I guess brings up the whole topic of bottlenecks in general. Do you wanna answer this one, Chris, for on the technical side of the tool?

Chris Cockton: Yeah I, can give you the technical from an on-premise exchange perspective first. More often than not, it's the bandwidth of the infrastructure that your exchange is sat on.

As we talked about. Earlier in the webinar, in that type of scenario, you would need to host the tool locally on that. So it comes down to the infrastructure that's hosted on. We often find as well that can degrade over time, particularly through a migration process when we are starting to hit it quite hard.

What we would generally do with that is do a bit of an assessment with the customer and understand what it's sat on and how we can try and optimize. When migrating from on prem exchange 365 obviously being cloud, cloud native. More often than not the big issues we see or the big challenges we see with office 365 migrations is Imposed throttling.

So that's just ultimately where Microsoft start turning the tap down. They don't like you taking data out as fast as you're trying to take it out and they start to exponentially back you off. Our tool is built in such a way that it works, tries to work around as much of that as possible. But sadly, sometimes Microsoft can really clamp down on those.

And when we hit that can become problematic. But again, there are always ways we can work with customers with partners with Microsoft to try and optimize and work around right now.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, in my previous life and experience, I've been hit with those where the throttle limitations that Microsoft will impose.

So that's a sort of an unknown element. And it is with that on premise. It is having the necessary resources to run, or install as many primary and secondary servers as required because obviously the CloudM tool can explain it. You can have if you have enough infrastructure internally and enough VMS or physical servers, you can have a lot of secretary servers.

Can't you, Chris to help if you have enough bandwidth as well to utilize as many threads off of your Exchange server, as long as your exchange server has got enough or whatever your server is, has enough resources and capability to cope with that pull of data out of it. So I think there's a number of things that can impact that bottleneck.

Hailee Zapata: Yeah. You never know what's going to happen in a migration, right?

Colin McCarthy: No, that's why the the discovery phases and understand the architecture and having a correct scope and realistic timelines and getting ahead and upgrading your your internet connection to, to really make it.

Possible to do that migration, running off of a 50mb Time Warner connection you're never going to get off of anything. So you got to have a one gig connection.

Hailee Zapata: Yeah. I like the analogy back to the phases. That's how we have all the phases to keep it just as smooth as possible.

Colin McCarthy: Let's move to our next question. I'm going to combine these two because I think they go together. Do you offer training services for employees to help them adjust? And then how long do you offer that post migration support? Yes, so we will do a number of webinars and help put together training material.

A lot of companies do have their own training department. They might have their own LMS, learning management system. We'll work with their LMS partners and training team. There's a lot of great free Google resources. So we'll help direct people to bear and encourage training, encourage the incentivization of training, the gamification of training and learning, and then generally our post life support is, two weeks.

That's generally when we, close out the products The project once you've fully moved on to Google Workspace. But I know that, if if your Google Workspace is with Promevo, then you always have our ongoing support and support through customer success managers and our own support team.

So another reason to come and be part of our family.

Hailee Zapata: Yeah. That, team is always there to help support and be there for you. We have a great client success management team that's very on top of things and always available to our clients. So let's see. Do you guys like in the process of getting started?

Do you select employees for early testing to make sure everything's running smoothly? What's the criteria for that?

Colin McCarthy: Yes. Generally it's the it people. They're gonna be the ones that are ultimately gonna be responsible for the ongoing success of using that platform.

So they need to be the ones that migrate into it the soonest so that they can. Become experts before they have to support everybody in their company and be seen as the experts. But I'd also choose people from as part of the early adopters from different parts of the business maybe somebody from HR.

Finance, communication marketing operations depending on the nature of the business, how they're split up to have them as early adopters and, find out how they operate inside their current position, inside their current platform and how that's going to transition once they're in Google Workspace.

Hailee Zapata: Okay, great. No, Colin, I think this is a question for you. Oh, no, actually, Chris, this will be probably a question for you. How does your technology scale to support larger migrations? Because I know there's different sizes, companies that are coming in different size migrations, the data you're bringing over.

Like, how do you scale that?

Chris Cockton: Yeah, so talked a little bit about it around the kind of scalability and adaptability piece in the conversation. But basic level we run primary servers and then we can scale horizontally using secondaries, the route that migration through that primary server.

So we set standards and specifications around what those machines need to look like and how many users we can run through those. So we can scale indefinitely. Officially, all of that is tied to the specification that you're going to tie into those machines. And ultimately you'll get to the point of no return.

So we, what we try and do is work with customers and partners to assess the data, understand the timelines, the amount of data that's coming over, the kind of expectations for call live. And then we'll, we've got a, smart calculation that we can do to work what's the most appropriate number of servers.

So that, that is. Stay inactive all the time and you're not paying for infrastructure that you're not using.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly if you're using a SAS, if you're doing Office 365 to Google Workspace and the tool is in GCP, you only want to be running what you need. But if it's, if you're doing an on premise and you've got a spare server sitting around, then you, really had to look.

You really don't have any limits and you can install as many as you want to be configuring, but it does get to a point as you say, Chris, there's a sweet spot in getting the migration to work really effectively. And you're just wasting resources if you have too many.

Hailee Zapata: Okay, we're going to do about two more questions.

I did want to ask this one. Do you migrate OneNote and or tasks?

Chris Cockton: So we don't, support one note, but we will migrate Google tasks. And so that was the question. Okay.

Hailee Zapata: No, I want, yeah, I want to ask, it's very specific. So I think it was from a, someone was very curious. I want to make sure we touched on that one.

And then this is a, this will be our last question. It's pretty open and then I think it's going to change for each client, but how is success typically measured for the customer? Everything's over. What? I know. It's very, it's personal. Like, how do you feel like it was a successful migration?

Chris Cockton: I think every success is different for every customer. So the key really is defining that upfront and being transparent with your customer, because I've sat with customers and partners and they've got ideas that are far beyond what's what's achievable. If you were to collectively agree at that point, that's your success metric you're, walking into a project that is not going to meet those, and then again, we keep, we've told a lot of technical, but we keep pushing back to that change piece at the very beginning.

It's so critical that you get that sponsorship thread going early on, and you define these success metrics. From a technical product perspective, we have predefined success metrics. So we we'll run to a minimum of 98 percent data migrated. We generally run a kind of three nines and above our minimum success criteria for a user is that we will migrate 98 percent of their data successfully.

And it's ultimately just about, I find pulling all of those little pieces in. Working with your customer around what defines success for them and coming up with kind of a holistic view on what success is for your project and aiming for that.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and for me, success is ultimately not breaking anything during the migration, not damaging the business, not crippling people from working. But then. Also having people excited about the move, being happy about the move. Not everybody, very few people have a choice that the move is happening because the the leadership team have, made that decision.

If you're moving from a platform that you weren't particularly fond of, or there were limitations, then moving to the Workspace, everybody's very happy. But if they were content in the platform that they were previously in, and Can do everything that they wanted to do in Google Workspace going forwards them, then that's a success, but ultimately not breaking anything, not disrupting the business.

And if as we said at the start, and I think that the title is a seamless Google Workspace migration, as long as it is virtually seamless and certainly for external people. If external people don't see any change, there's no bounced emails, there's no other problems and all the changes internal, then that's a success.

Hailee Zapata: No, completely agree with both of you. I think that's why when you guys do the phases, it really helps lay out such a good plan. So there are no hiccups within the migration. Defining the success ahead of time is great. And then I think that goes back to that consistency Colin that we talked about with our team.

It's like the transparency, the communication. And I think we touched on a lot of pain points where people are intimidated and nervous about migrations because they're just not sure what's going to disrupt their day to day business. And you guys have covered like, here's the pain points, here's how we overcome them. I think that's great.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and it's very difficult having previously been in an I. T. team. It is very difficult to try and visualize taking some of this stuff on when it is for some companies such a monumental change. That's why in 2011 and 2012, I reached out to for me, though, and had then managed migration.

My migrations because I was busy doing other things. You need a good strategic partner to do what they do best. So yeah, that's the. That's the joy and the success rate that people can find.

Hailee Zapata: That's amazing. We're really proud of our partnership, especially with CloudM. Thank you for joining us today, Chris.

Colin, thank you for joining as well. I know you guys are busy, so taking your time out to do these webinars are super important and very helpful, especially to our prospects and clients. And letting them know we're here for them through the whole stage. Thank you everyone for joining us We really appreciate your time.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us We'd be more than happy to walk you through it have a personal conversation with Chris and Colin and answer any questions that you guys have so thanks for joining us. Everyone. Have a great week.