So you’ve been thinking about switching your email away from your current hosted email provider and you are probably considering the two biggest competitors in the hosted email and collaboration space G Suite or Office 365.
If you read our previous blog about G Suite and the Enterprise you know that G Suite is usually our go-to productivity suite for smaller offices and those who are ready for a web first approach to email and collaboration.
If you have a small team of fewer than 15 users shifting is usually something that can be handled by the business owner or technical support staff. The migration can be done in stages using cloud email backup, and most people understand if old email messages take a few days to be imported from the old system.
You may have years of emails in Outlook, you may worry that cloud hosted email migration is difficult. (Good think, if you are not ready to switch to Gmail as your Webmail client you can still use Outlook or any other email client with G Suite) But if you want to dive head first into a conversion you may be worried about data loss and how your employees may react to the switch.
To determine if the move to G suite is even possible, it may be best to conduct some internal research and see take the temperature of your users.
Checklist to research and evaluate employee openness to adoption of G Suite
- Create a survey that asks your employees if they use Gmail and/or any of Google’s productivity apps on a regular basis. If you have a significant number of employees using Gmail or any of the Google productivity apps, then your employees may be open to making the change.
- Ask yourself if you are ready to migrate your files, documents, and spreadsheets to the cloud. Have your users import some templates into Google Docs and Google Sheets to see if the functions that you need to perform are supported by the software.
- Are you going to move completely to G Suite or just use Gmail with your corporate domain and keep everything else about how you share, save and access files the same? Will people continue to use Excel and Word or is online only the way to go for your organization
- To help guarantee a successful transition, communicate the change throughout your company and provide education and training on how to properly use G Suite apps and features. There are some great websites that provide training for G Suite. The learning curve is steep for the more sophisticated use cases – but for most people, they’ll be up and running in a few days on the new platform.
- Make sure that your team supports each other and documents (using Google Docs) and tips and tricks that they have found useful in their migration.
- Check out the G Suite Tips Library with quick ideas of ways you can get more done in G Suite.
Learn How to use the tools at the G Suite Learning Center
If you follow these steps, you will find the transition to G Suite relatively painless and easy!