Why Email Migration Turned Out Easier Than Expected?

For a considerable period of time, we were planning to migrate emails from Google Workspace to M365. It was in our heads for so long that by the time we actually did it, we almost didn't believe it was over.

During previous meetings, everyone always talked about the worst case scenarios. We had discussed numerous scenarios, where all previous records of client correspondence would be lost forever, or the whole staff would suffer from a week-long email interruption.

Not to mention that there might be some unexpected flaws that we would not even realize until the whole process was over. We'd heard enough horror stories from other IT teams. They shared their sad experience of disastrous migration, which became a warning story for many others.

Thus, we felt confident that our migration would not fail since we expected it to become a part of our own cautionary tale. On the weekend when we had intended to perform the migration, our team was crushed with anxiety.

All the plans for the rest of the day were canceled, and multiple staff members gave prior notice about the possibility of losing contact for several days. We had rehearsed dozens of failure scenarios in advance as if we participated in an annual fire drill event.

In fact, the actual process of migration turned out to be much less dramatic than we expected. Not because we prepared less effort for it, but because we worked harder.

We had scheduled the time for migration, carefully planned the organization of all mailboxes, performed several tests, and verified the permissions for shared inboxes. We had chosen the Email Migrator tool to assist our staff in transferring the emails from one system to another instead of trying to perform all the necessary actions manually.

Therefore, it was expected that everything would not work correctly because it always failed in the past. As it turned out, the tested group of folders was correctly delivered, the other group followed right after, and nothing seemed to be broken throughout the entire process.

After several similar successful attempts, our employees had time to watch for the transfer of shared inboxes as well. When everything had been set up in the new system, the entire team gathered around the monitor to check whether all items were properly placed.

We realized that what we previously considered a multi-day work had only taken several hours.

On that Sunday night, we were double-checking the numbers of items transferred one by one several times more than it was necessary to be absolutely sure that no error had occurred. It was not a surprise for us to see the identical numbers on the screen but, perhaps, it was too calm, and we were expecting the worst to happen on Monday morning.

Still, the following day, we only received several concerns from the staff regarding the absent folders and incorrect configuration of their clients. There was no migration-related drama, even though we had imagined it more than once.

All the frightening stories that we had heard from the other companies’ managers and IT specialists became an integral part of our own expectations of the event. We did not even realize that none of these factors had any actual influence on the migration outcome but created additional stress for us. The main reason why our migration was successful was our detailed planning and multiple tests.

Now, we think that no migration, email-related or otherwise, should be considered successful if it does not entail a dramatic story and fearful concerns for the future. When one of my colleagues gets anxious about the upcoming migration or an organizational change at the workplace, we can always remember those scary Sunday nights and our migration-related fears.