Easy Steps to Migrate Google Apps Gmail to Microsoft Office 365 Email

If your organization is using Google Apps Gmail, and if you are considering to migrate it to Microsoft Office 365, this tutorial will explain everything that you need to know to complete the migration.

Verify Your Domain in Office 365

Login to Office 365 portal: http://portal.office.com

From here, click on the “Admin” tile from the home page. This will take you to the “Admin center” as shown below. This will says “Your office 365 setup is incomplete”. Click on “Go to setup” from here.

Add a domain: The first is to “Add a domain”. Click on the radio button that says “I already own a domain”, and type in your domain name. Click on next.

Verify domain: Now you have to verify to Microsoft that you really own this domain name. To do this, you have two options. This will automatically figure-out who own the domain. In this case, office 365 knows that the domain I entered is owned by go-daddy. 

• Sign-in to go-daddy
• Verify TXT record (TXT name: @  TXT value: MS=ms1234567   TTL: 3600 )

Create User Mailboxes and assign Office 365 License

From the “Admin center”, click on “Users” on the right panel -> Click on “Active Users” -> From here, click on the “More” button, which will give you “Import Multiple Users” option.

Create an excel file (it’s really a CSV file) the first line should have the following columns exactly in the same order.

This is the header row:

1) User Name

2) First Name

3) Last Name

4) Display Name

5) Job Title

6) Department

7) Office Number

8) Office Phone

9) Mobile Phone

10) Fax

11) Address

12) City

13) State or Province

14) ZIP or Postal Code

15) Country or Region

Once you have the excel with the list of usernames, from the following “Create and upload file” screen, click on “Browse”, and select the excel file. After this click on “Verify”, which will tell you whether the format in the excel file is correct or not. Once the verification is done, it will say “File looks good”. Click on “Next”.

Create Migration Endpoints with Gmail IMAP

From the “Admin center” -> Click on “Admin centers” link at the bottom of the left panel -> Click on “Exchange” from here as shown below. This will take you to the exchange admin center.

From the “Exchange admin center” -> click on “recipients” from the left panel as shown below.

From here, click on the “migration” link located on the top bar (the last option here) as shown below.

From here, click on the “…” the last option, which will show “migration endpoints” as shown below. From here, you can create the migration endpoints.

In the migration endpoints screen, click on the “+” icon to create new migration endpoints.

This will give the following three choices. Select “IMAP” from here.

• Exchange Remote
• Outlook Anywhere
• IMAP (select this)

Enter the following values for Gmail migration.

• IMAP server: imap.gmail.com
• Authentication: Basic
• Encryption: SSL
• Port: 993

Click on “Next”, and enter a name for this “Migration endpoint”. In this example, I named it as RN-test-migration.

Leave these two fields empty. Don’t enter any values for these:

•  Maximum concurrent migrations
•  Maximum concurrent incremental sync.

Once you’ve created a migration endpoint, it will look like the following:

Create List of Users for Migration Batch

Next, we have to create a list of users to migrate in an excel file (it’s really a CSV file). Please note that this excel is different than the one we used for creating new users in Office 365.

This excel will be used only for migrating mailboxes from gmail to office 365 for the users that we’ve already created in office 365.

The 1st line of this excel file will be a header line with the following three values:

• EmailAddress
• UserName
• Password

Starting from the 2nd line, enter the list of mailboxes that needs to be migrated.

Note: The password field should have gmail password for the corresponding mailbox that we are migrating. The following is an example file:

Create Migration Batch to Migrate Mailboxes

From “Exchange Admin Center” -> Recipients -> Migration -> Click on the first “+” icon, and click on “Migrate to Exchange Online” as shown below.

From here, you can create a new “Migration Batch”. This will display the following 4 options. Select the “IMAP Migration” from here.

• Remote move migration (Supported by Exchange server 2010 and later versions)
• Staged migration (supported by Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 only)
• Cutover migration (Supported by Exchange server 2003 and later versions)
• IMAP migration (supported by Exchange and other email systems) — Select This!

Next, in the “Select the Users” screen, click on “browse” and select the CVS file that we created in the previous steps with the username and password for gmail account that we like to migrate. Click on “Next”.

This will display the IMAP migration configuration. This will display the IMAP configuration values that we already entered. This should display the following: 1) IMAP server: imap.gmail.com 2) Authentication: Basic 3) Encryption: SSL 4) Port: 993

Click on “Next” and enter the Migration Batch name. In this example, I entered “rn-migration” as the name for this migration batch. Click on “New”, which will create this migration batch and start migrating the email automatically. You’ll see the status of this migration batch as shown below. Initially the status will be “Queued”, and will change to “Syncing” as shown below. Once it is done, it will says “Synced”.

While the emails are getting migrated, click on “View details”, which will display how many email have been migrated so far for each and every mailboxes.

Update DNS – Repoint MX Records to Microsoft

To do this, from the “Admin Center” -> click on “Settings” on the left panel -> Click on “Domains” as shown below. Click on your domain name. This will says “Setup in progress”. You might also see another line here, which will says “Setup completed”. For example, if you domain name is example.com

• example.com (Default) – Setup in progress
• example.onmicrosoft.com – Setup completed

Now Click on the manage my own DNS records option, to see what MX records you should be adding on your DNS. In this example, it shows the following three records: MX, TXT and CNAME. Please note that for your domain, the MX record value will be different.

Once you update your DNS with the above values, you'll start receiving the new emails to our Office 365.

Oh !  Are you still having issues with migration from gmail to office 365, then don't worry and contact Live-Tech and one of our expert will get back to you for assistance. Get 24 / 7 Support 

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