With technology becoming an essential part of education, academic institutions need digital tools that support productivity, communication, and collaboration. Google Workspace for Education enables administrators, teachers, and students to achieve their goals in an intuitive, reliable, and secure environment. To more effectively and efficiently leverage that technology, CDW Amplified for Education offers institutions the Google Workspace for Education Migration service.
During a migration, institutions experience a seamless transition from their current email and/or file system infrastructure to Google Workspace for Education. While school leaders often believe completing a Google migration during an extended break, like summer vacation or the winter holiday, is best for their stakeholders, there are many benefits to going through a migration while end-users are present during the year instead.
Benefits of a school-year migration
- Avoid misplaced users: When users actively use their email, they can quickly let you know if they have not migrated any data. Sometimes, some accounts are missed when generating the list of accounts to migrate data for, and typically, these issues should be identified quickly rather than months after they return from summer break.
- Mitigate potential data issues: With a migration, like any system upgrade, there is the potential for problems when copying data over. Data may not migrate as expected for some users in certain situations. Suppose data migrates during the school year. In that case, they are more familiar with how their data should look if everything migrated correctly and will raise the issue shortly after the cutover rather than months after summer break ends. This helps to ensure that any data a user needs only infrequently (e.g. only once a year) will be migrated over before shutting down the old email systems.
- Decrease lapses in mail flow: In addition to just misplaced users resulting in some data not migrated for the cutover (which you can always migrate later), there is also the risk of new incoming mail being lost if the misplaced users do not have Gmail mailboxes. If mail flow gets directed to Gmail during summer break or extended breaks, it can expand the amount of missed and missing emails since they won’t try to log in to their Gmail accounts until they return from their break. Users must be present and active so admins can identify and resolve issues while reducing institutional communication impediments.
- Smooth user training and adoption: A successful migration to Google Workspace requires buy-in from stakeholders. There is often so much preparation that comes with returning to school after an extended period that learning new technologies can cause frustration, making the adoption process much more complex and strenuous. After the migration, while users are active, they will also be available for strategically implemented training and troubleshooting problems by logging in to their new accounts once they are ready. Additionally, users can log in to Gmail while the migration is in progress if you’d like to provide hands-on training before the cutover to Gmail is complete.
- Save time and resources for future projects: To avoid major disruption to teaching and learning, IT departments use school breaks to complete projects that absolutely can’t be done while administrators, teachers, and students are present. Usually, they have a series of projects to start at the same time. When a migration takes place during the school year, institutions can cross another task off their list to leave that time available for those other projects.
Customer Success
One of the main concerns with migration is the operation of the established digital infrastructure. However, migrating during the school year presents additional anxiety around stakeholder adoption. This scenario was initially true for Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) in Tucson, Arizona. “Before the migration starts, you know the specs, you know the stats, but you don’t know how everything is going to work until you press that button and turn it on,” explained Heba Mueller, TUSD’s Educational Technology Integration Specialist.
This past spring, TUSD’s Department of Instruction Technology engaged with CDW Amplified for Education to migrate their schools to Gmail and Drive to provide their administrators, teachers, and students with the tools they need to succeed. “We’re an Office 365 district but, after the past year of remote learning, we learned a lot and it has shaped where we are going,” Heba shared. “We’re transitioning to a new LMS, we’ve started a 1:1 initiative, and our teachers wanted access to the Google suite and integration tools like Peardeck.”
TUSD is currently piloting Google Workspace at three schools to see how it will work for them. Though she initially had concerns about the school-year migration process, Heba attests that the experience has been positive. “It’s been amazing. The Migration team has been great with response time and getting all our questions answered,” Heba said. On top of CDW Amplified for Education’s support, TUSD has found the migration to be smooth because of how they introduced it to stakeholders. Gmail is more widely used than Office 365 in personal communications, so migrating to Google provided a more intuitive end-user experience because TUSD communicated the strategy, allowed teachers to adopt the new email system voluntarily, and ensured effective training in using it before it went live increased overall buy-in.
Phases of a migration
CDW Amplified for Education supports migrations year-round with a near-zero downtime approach, providing a smooth transition with minimal end-user impact.
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Pilot: To begin, data is migrated for 5-10 select users, typically in the IT department, during a pilot phase. This provides an institution with proof of concept and direct experience with the migration process. This includes switching the pilot users to Gmail before everyone else and provides the IT team the opportunity to experience first-hand the migration process from beginning to end, so they better know what their end users can expect to see.
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Early Adopters: After the pilot phase, institutions have the option to conduct an early adopter phase for users who are anxious to get started with the Google Workspace tools and are willing to be monitored as additional test cases.
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Main: A full migration takes place in the background as users continue to immerse themselves in their normal day-to-day workflow with no interruptions until it’s time for the cutover and the migration is live.
To learn more about migrating to Google Workspace for Education, take a look at our Migration web page.
If you are ready to migrate, connect with a Google Customer Success Specialist and begin your customized journey.
Document Version | Date | Description of Change |
1.0 | 3/18/2024 | Updated references of RAM to GCSS |
1.1 | 5/28/2024 | removed author block |
1.2 | 8/26/2024 | Minor text edits, reverify |