Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | It’s Tuesday, May 14 and today’s topic is migrating from G Suite over to Microsoft 365. Today I talk with Tommy about some things that you should think about. We primarily focus in on migrating from Google Sites over to SharePoint online and then some other things that you might want to think about along with Google Drive and migrating content off of that. Some other topics that move beyond just the simple migration of email. Enjoy.
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| Today we are talking about migrating from G Suite to Microsoft 365. I’m here with Tommy Ryan. How are we doing Tommy Ryan?
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| Tommy Ryan: | I’m doing well. Coming off from long weekend.
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| Danny Ryan: | Good weekend?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, my first farmer’s market.
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| Danny Ryan: | Excellent. The amount of organics is legit.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s legit.
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| Danny Ryan: | Legit. Excellent, excellent. First dollar, nice. Today we wanted to talk to you about, we’re sort of continuing on the conversations with different platforms, moving from different platforms over to Microsoft 365. The discussion today is about the big one, really the big one for us, which is Google G Suite and making the move from that over into Microsoft 365. I think that some of the ones that we’ve talked about have been more of social products like Facebook, workplace for Facebook, workplace by Facebook, one of those things. And slack and looking at G Suite is really comprehensive. It covers a lot of the office products like, they have equivalence to Word and Excel and Powerpoint, and equivalence to OneDrive. It’s really pretty comprehensive. And that little thing called mail, Gmail, which we’re all pretty familiar with.
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| So as we looked at this, it was interesting cause our background is helping people primarily around SharePoint and more recently around things like teams and OneDrive and migrating content over into those Microsoft 365 products. And so as I sort of dive into it, I noticed that number one, unlike some of the other things we’ve looked at, there is pretty comprehensive set of tools for doing this. And especially for the email migration piece of things, and there is also tooling from companies that we are already partnering with for migrating some of the document content. It seems like something that is pretty well-formed and that people have been doing and will continue to do as they look, using one of the big companies like Google or Microsoft’s collaboration platforms.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, I see a mature ecosystem for folks going from G Suite over to Microsoft 365. So I organizations that are looking at this, they have options, probably the challenge they have is, “How do I do that in a proper way?” and “How do I organizationally manage that process of knowing what is the content I should bring over? How do I determine that? And how do I work with my end users to make sure we do the proper spring cleaning before we take that move going from G Suite over to Microsoft 365?” And that way the content when it gets over, it’s discoverable, it’s valuable, it’s not cluttering the platform. Instead of pushing the buttons and moving everything over without really assessing it, we help organizations with how do you approach it and how do you manage it.
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| Danny Ryan: | It was interesting looking at this, if I look at Google sites, they sort of have an equivalent to what’s happened within the SharePoint world where there’s sort of like classic sites. So the older version of sites versus a newer, modern experience.
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| Tommy Ryan: | But theirs is not modern, it’s just sites.
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| Danny Ryan: | It’s just sites. It’s the new modern- but it’s really for responsive type of experience, its setup. So it was interesting to see that they’ve sort of done the equivalent from what Microsoft has done on the SharePoint side, which is having a way for you to build out your intranet or series of team sites and having it something that you can access from a mobile device or make it more of a content that you’re not just viewing on your desktop but also via mobile device.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right. I think it speaks to how long it’s been out there and trying to bridge that gap of here is all this content that’s out there represented in a certain way. Now there is newer ways of managing that content, newer ways of storing it and putting it into content and having that bridge, how do we get this old content in a different structure into the new way of doing things. It’s interesting how similar it is when you look at the newer Google slides compared to the modern pages similar type of widget view and kind of adding sections as you go. And similar looking field.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s just they just have a page layout type of view and SharePoint world is more of like web parts so different things you can lay out on a page. I would be interested- I don’t know whether companies are gonna be using this more for like team sites versus their overarching intranet or really is it a fully formed platform for building out an intranet. It seems to me like it might be more along the lines of, “This is good for team sites”, but I’m not sure people are using this build out a full-fledged intranet or not. But could maybe probably one of those things you can whether people are doing it or not. But I think that’s definitely an area where people looking for help for moving from Google sites over to SharePoint online, it’s definitely an area that they may be looking for some outside help from consulting firms to get that moved over.
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| Danny Ryan: | I think that the other thing we’ve run into is the long term storage, files, so moving from Google Drive over into Microsoft OneDrive is one of those things that companies look for outside help to make sure that they do that properly. Have the right process in place for doing that and ensuring to make that that goes out well.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right. Another thing that comes into play is information architecture and thinking about where are the destinations, locations, what are the content types and the future state of where you’re gonna store this so it’s easy to search, easy to navigate to versus being confusing to the end user of where is this content now.
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| Danny Ryan: | One of the other areas where as I was looking at this, I was thinking, where is Microsoft team has come along so quickly and I think that we were looking at not only Jive, but also some of the social products that sort of looking like some of the content will get moved over into Microsoft teams or into Yammer. As I looked at the G Suite stuff, they have Google Groups, they’ve got Google Plus, they have community sites. So some of that content as well as helping people decide where that content goes and coming up with an overarching plan for where all of this content is going to move over into Microsoft 365. Some of this stuff I think is- there is a lot of this that’s sort of can be done point in click, just sort of using a tool and moving this stuff over. I’ve always when talking to Kirk, who leads up our migration practice, talking about migrations and he emphasizes, “Migration can technically go perfectly, but it would not be a success if you don’t nail the communication piece of this.”
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| Tommy Ryan: | So I think also looking at this, I sort of think of maybe where someone can use help from an outside firm would be- what is the overarching plan for moving all of this content, making sure everything. And not just the content too. I also think of profile information, the security, you were talking about the information-
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| Tommy Ryan: | Information architecture.
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| Danny Ryan: | Information architecture. Thinking about- you can look at sort of one off pieces of moving things over. But sort of overarching plan for where all of this, there are so many overlaps between G Suite and Microsoft 365 is to come up with that overarching plan for how are we gonna do this, what’s the process that we’re gonna use to do this, to do this successfully, and what’s that communication plan look like.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, and what I have noticed in our maturity over time, I’ve seen this 80-20 flip for us where in the beginning, when we did migrations, we were very quick to run to start cranking out these migrations. And so we had about 20% of our time in the planning phase to build out that communication plan, build out information architecture to determine what’s gonna move. And then the 80% being towards moving this content and what I’m noticing more recently is, it’s more 80% of working on that plan and then 20% of moving it because the least amount of content that you move, the better off you are. And trying to understand what is that content that needs to come over, how do we determine where it’s gonna go, and does there need to be any cleanup before and after.
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| Danny Ryan: | So when it’s moved to the new location, it’s more valuable versus it’s just a bunch of stuff that we dumped in the basement and we have to kind of open up the boxes and search through things to find things and it’s almost lost versus you looking at- and you can always make these analogies like moving that I’m going to, I can move to a new house and I can do no prep and the movers get there and we just take everything and dump it in the basement, or I thought about where am I going, what furnitures gonna go in what room, and what can I leave behind and donate or have someone pick up that I don’t have to move it. I don’t have to put in that work to moving it. And then I have a better product at the end if I have not moved over a bunch of junk. I’ve moved over exactly what I need to put in the right place.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I’m a much more productive, happier person post that move. So we’re finding that we can add more value more in that conversation, more of that planning and organization around what should come over, where should it go, and how do we get the community involved to make this as seamless as possible.
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| Danny Ryan: | Awesome. Great conversation. I think this is a great start. If folks are interested in this, we have a service offering that’s for Microsoft 365 migrations. This is one of many different platforms that we’re looking at helping people move off of and over into Microsoft 365. As you go to look at the service offering page on our website, let us know that this is one of the areas that you’re one of the platforms that you are looking to migrate off of. And you can fill out that information and we will follow up with you. We also wanna emphasize- we are putting together- we’ve got digital workplace briefing that we have free for folks that we take a couple of hours and I think just gets us set out in the right direction. Cause overarching, I think a lot of this, it all follows underneath your digital workplace. And so, when we are looking at consolidating off of these different platforms, we wanna sort of talk about where we are moving to and what we are trying to enable in the digital workplace.
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| So if you are interested in that, just come to 3will.com and on the contact us page, you’ll see at the bottom of that page, say I’m interested in the digital workplace briefing. So drop by there and let us know you are interested and look forward to continuing this conversation with you. Thanks Tommy so much for taking the time to do this.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Sure thing.
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| Danny Ryan: | Thank you so much and have a wonderful day. Bye bye.
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| Bye.
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