Lessons from NDI’s Google Apps Migration

A number of organizations and NDI partners around the world are considering a move to Google Apps. If you’re considering or planning a move to Google, here are a few of the key decisions and approaches that helped us steward a smooth migration and some of the issues our users faced during the process.

NDI staff members have been using Google tools for 3 weeks since our migration. While the process of switching from our Exchange-based mail platform to Google Apps hasn’t been completely without incident for some, it has gone much more smoothly than we’d expected.

Some of the factors that led to our successful migration - and challenges that users faced - are provided below:

Good Communication Plan: As part of our migration project we decided on an 8-week communications plan leading up to the switch (first tip: I think 6 weeks would have been optimal as it dragged on a bit and we wanted to keep building momentum). In addition to a series of briefings at key meetings, we built a portal site on our staff Intranet with extensive information about the process, focusing on the key information folks needed and addressing problems, concerns and anxieties directly and honestly. We used regular internal blog posts and email updates to gradually introduce new content starting with broad information about the why, when and how – then progressively moved to the benefits and challenges, and finally a large set of more specific training resources available in various formats (video, online resources, etc).

We used the Going Google portal site to house all information about the training programs as well; it was the one-stop shop for information about the process. Our Google portal will be a resource for new staff orientation and training going forward, so it was well worth the investment in time and trouble.

Of course, it helps if you're preaching to the choir for a good number of your staff - which we definitely were. We knew in advance that many of our staff around the world had already been using Google tools, and we got such good feedback from several respected field staff when we announced the change that we used their quotes on our internal portal site - sending a strong message that while our team in DC was certainly spearheading the initiative, we got immediate support from our most key audience.

Training: We offered about a dozen face to face and online webinars in the week prior to and after the migration. The beginner, intermediate and advanced user training sessions were provided by Cloud Sherpas, a recommended consulting partner that we used for various technical tasks as well as delivering training. Outsourcing the training proved helpful and gave staff a fresh perspective on the tools. One thing we’d do differently is offer a few more classes in the day or two immediately following the migration as we found that quite a few people procrastinated or recognized the need for training as they started using Gmail. We trained 227 people (roughly 1/4 of our staff), which was a good number for NDI computer training.

Pilot Testing Program: we selected about 30 staff, primarily the tech team but also a few others, to migrate and run Google Apps for 3 months prior to the beginning of the 8-week move process. We rectified quite a few small glitches during this period and the system administrators got lots of practice with data migration and other administration issues. In retrospect, this was a very important factor in working out the kinks in advance. As mentioned, we also contracted with Cloud Sherpas for technical assistance and to bounce questions off as we worked through the pilot process and planned our rollout.

Phased Data Migration: If you’re planning to move historical mail from the legacy system, decisions about how and when to migrate the data are important. The Google migration tool for moving mail, calendars and contacts from Exchange to Google works well but has limitations – a key one being a one message per second throttle. This can make the data migration process take days or weeks depending on number of users and amount of historical mail being migrated. We decided to migrate historical mail in advance rather than moving all the mail at once – and the Google tool made this easy. About 6 weeks out we started moving email Inboxes. On switch weekend we ran the process for all users but only had a few weeks’ worth of mail to move – greatly expediting the process and reducing stress during the migration. In fact, we had projected as much as 72 hours’ worth of migration but the process completed in about 24 hours. Had we tried to move a few gigabytes for about 1200 users on switch weekend we wouldn’t have been successful as the process would have taken at least a week of processing 24x7 and our goal was a weekend switch.

TCO– total cost of ownership: The TCO story is a good one, but not as ideal as it seemed at first glance. As an NGO we qualified for Google's free Education edition - so as long as our staff stay under 7GB of mail we're saving a lot on licensing subscriptions. The reality is we’ll eventually need to upgrade to the premium edition so the costs will increase somewhat although Google does provide non-profit pricing on the premium tools. We realized saving in IT staffing costs – we estimate about 1.5 people - significant cost savings associated with moving mail services to the cloud that will be realized through using our technical people on more strategic initiatives.

An unanticipated cost arose because we've got enterprise requirements in terms of spam management, email discovery and other issues that required us to cough up the extra money for Google’s Postini add-on. Depending on your email retention policies, you may end up coughing up $20-40K per year for this service as we did.

We also contracted with Cloud Sherpas for technical assistance through the process as an insurance policy against unexpected problems and we used them for specific tasks and consulting on key decisions. These are things to keep in mind when you’re looking at TCO.

Biggest User Issues: The process went smoothly for most of our staff, but there were obviously problems during the transition. Concerns about Gmail were anticipated and addressed as much as possible in the trainng, questions about organizing email by conversation and using Google labels instead of folders being by far the most common. The other common problems our users experienced were:

• The biggest immediate problem was with Blackberry users, who were immediately unhappy with the Gmail app for Blackberry due to limited functionality. The lesson: don’t bother with it, configure your Blackberry users with IMAP connections to Gmail.
• Several users wanted to keep the Outlook client in spite of strong encouragement to try Gmail – so for some getting the Outlook sync installed, running and sync’d was a challenge. The tool works well as long as expectations about the time required are made clear - especially for people working in low bandwidth environments.
• One of the benefits of going Google that we emphasized in our communications plan was support for data sync with mobile devices over the air. The majority of our calls in the first hours and days after the switch were for help configuring personal mobile phones, particularly iPhones/Pads and Blackberries. Suggestion: have folks configure these in advance if possible so they aren’t struggling during the transition period and contacting the Help Desk.
• A number of our users have email archives stored in PST files and there was a lot of interest in moving these archives into Gmail. This is easy using an automated tool for users on your LAN, or using the Google Sync tool for Outlook for remote users. The challenge is that users may use up their email quota (7GB for Google Education users), and run up against mailbox full limits. Our main challenge was to encourage people to be patient, as our focus during switch weekend needed to be current data migrations, historical migrations were to start the following week.

In summary I'd say that the process went surprisingly smoothly. We did a ton of planning and had a dedicated team working on the project over a period of several months - which was the key to aniticpating as many of the problems as we could and being in a postion to address the issues we didn't forsee as they arose.