Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are common in the business world. They're a way for companies to grow, expand into new markets, gain a competitive edge, improve efficiency and reduce costs.
As part of their consolidation efforts, if the merging companies have separate Google Workspace environments, they'll want to migrate all users into a single tenant for more effective administration and to allow for internal collaboration between existing and incoming teams.
Migrating users and their data from one Google Workspace environment to another can be complex and time consuming depending on the migration method. These are some of the most common migration pain points:
On the other hand, Google Workspace Domain Transfer has been around for many years now, helping more than 90 customers and with more than 270 transfers executed globally. Some of its benefits include:
See this story with the Product Owner, Global Collaboration at Randstad, discussing how they performed 36 migrations over the course of 2 years with Google Professional Services and partners.
Any secondary domain (and associated aliases) in the source environment is eligible for transfer. These transfer domains will become secondary domains of the destination.
For the primary domain and its contents to be transferred as well, you'll have to define an empty “placeholder” domain, perform the primary domain swap and just leave a Super Admin user as primary contact for this remaining environment.
Also, you need to create a transfer root organizational unit in the destination where all the source organizational units will be placed following the same structure. If there are specific policies and configurations in the source organizational units, these will have to be recreated under the transfer root organizational unit.
The key watchpoints of Domain Transfer are:
(The timeframe for any Domain Transfer execution will normally vary between 2 and 6 weeks depending on the prerequisites and other dependencies).
To get started, you may contact your Sales Representative, Google Cloud Partner, or fill out this form to determine whether your Workspace environments qualify for a paid Professional Services engagement. Our Professional Services team has global coverage with specialized resources in the US, LATAM, EMEA, and JAPAC.
Please note that Domain Transfer usually refers to a full merge of two Google Workspace environments. Partial transfers or divestiture are currently supported under a limited pilot in a pre-GA program. Reach out to Google/Partner Sales for more information.
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