What We Migrate
A migration is not really a technical problem. The technical part is well understood and repeatable. What makes migrations go badly is doing one for the first time, without a rehearsal, while still running the business — which is exactly the situation most small companies are in when they attempt it themselves.
On-premises or hosted Exchange, including old servers still sitting in a closet. Mailboxes, calendars, contacts, and mail flow.
Gmail to Exchange Online, Drive to OneDrive, shared drives mapped to SharePoint sites with permissions agreed up front.
Merging two Microsoft 365 tenants after an acquisition, or splitting one when a business separates. The most detail-heavy migration type.
Mapped drives and file servers moved to SharePoint and OneDrive, with folder permissions carried across rather than rebuilt by hand.
The Process
We inventory mailboxes, data volumes, shared resources, distribution lists, and anything integrated with email — scanners, line-of-business apps, alarm systems. This is where surprises get found, and it is the phase most self-run migrations skip.
A small group moves first — usually including at least one person who uses email in an unusual way. Problems surface on five people instead of fifty, and the cutover plan gets corrected before it matters.
Everyone else moves, on an evening or weekend you pick. Mail is already synchronised by this point, so the cutover is a redirection rather than a transfer. Most people find out it happened when they are asked to sign in again.
Someone is available for the small things — a phone that will not reconnect, a shared mailbox nobody mentioned, a scanner still pointed at the old server. This phase is short but it is the difference between a migration people remember badly and one they forget entirely.
This is the question every business owner asks first, and the honest answer is: nothing you will notice. Mail is synchronised into the new environment ahead of time, so by the time the cutover runs, the messages are already there.
During the switch itself, mail sent to you queues at the sending server rather than bouncing — that is standard behaviour built into how email works, not something we engineer. Once the change propagates, the queue delivers. Nothing is lost, and senders see no error.
The realistic disruption is that people sign in again the next morning, and mobile devices need their account re-added. We write that instruction out beforehand so it is not a support ticket for every employee.
Migrations are quoted as a fixed project price, not hourly. Hourly billing on a migration puts our interests against yours the moment something takes longer than expected, so we do not do it. The number is agreed before work starts and does not move.
| Size | Typical end-to-end | Cutover window |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 users | About 2 weeks | One evening |
| 10–30 users | 2–4 weeks | One evening or a weekend |
| 30–75 users | 4–6 weeks | A weekend, sometimes staged |
| Tenant-to-tenant | Scoped individually | Usually staged |
Ranges assume email plus OneDrive. Adding file shares and SharePoint restructuring extends the discovery phase rather than the cutover. Microsoft licensing is billed separately and directly to you — as a Cloud Solution Provider we can often simplify it, and we will tell you if you are on the wrong SKU.
A migration is a project with an end date. What follows is the part that determines whether the investment was worth anything: somebody keeping licensing right-sized, security policies current, and the tenant administered as the business changes.
Two things worth deciding before the project closes. First, backup — Microsoft does not back up your data the way most people assume, and the shared responsibility model surprises people after an accidental deletion rather than before. Second, security baselines — a fresh tenant with default settings is not a secure tenant.
Ongoing licensing, security, and administration once the migration is done.
What Microsoft actually covers, and what the shared responsibility model leaves to you.
Monitored backups and tested recovery for cloud data and everything else.
Still deciding whether to move at all? The honest comparison, including where Google wins.
Plain-English definitions of the plans, SKUs, and terms in your migration quote.
Common Questions
For most small businesses the whole project runs two to six weeks from first conversation to post-cutover support ending. The variables are mailbox count, how much historical email exists, and where you are migrating from. A ten-person office moving from Google Workspace is usually at the short end; a fifty-person firm with fifteen years of Exchange archives is at the long end. The cutover itself — the part where anything could disrupt your team — is normally a single evening or weekend.
No. Mail is synchronised to the new environment before the cutover happens, and during the switch messages queue at the sending server rather than bouncing. Anything that arrives mid-cutover is delivered once the change propagates. In practice most people notice nothing beyond being asked to sign in again the next morning.
Yes, and it is one of the more common migrations we run. Gmail moves to Exchange Online, Drive moves to OneDrive and SharePoint, and shared drives are mapped to SharePoint sites. Calendars and contacts come across with the mailboxes. The part worth planning carefully is shared Drive permissions, which do not map one-to-one onto SharePoint, so we agree the structure before anything moves.
Historical mail migrates with the mailbox by default, so people keep their full history. Where an archive is very large or subject to a retention or legal-hold requirement, we discuss whether it belongs in the live mailbox, in an online archive mailbox, or in a separate retained export before the migration rather than after.
Yes. Cutovers are scheduled for evenings or weekends by default because that is when disruption is cheapest for you. Preparation and synchronisation happen during normal hours in the background without affecting anyone.
Migrations are quoted as a fixed project price rather than hourly, so the number does not move once work starts. What drives it is user count, data volume, the source platform, and whether file shares and SharePoint are in scope alongside email. Microsoft licensing is billed separately and directly. Call (702) 333-0333 and we will scope it against your actual environment.
