Our traditional, three-phased approach enabled Green County to migrate email, calendar, contacts, files, and folders from the Exchange server over to the Cloud. We started with just a small group of their users—the 4 members of the project team, to fully acclimate in Google prior to the remainder of the users.
The project then expanded to its second phase, which shifted tech-savvy users and champions of project—about 60 people, in this case. Over the course of four weeks, they provide constant feedback to the Resultant team, and we continue migrating data in the background—moving copies of emails into employees’ Google accounts, for instance.
Training for the first two groups is typically light, and we go heavy with training and documentation during phase 3, when the rest of the team makes the move to Google. That approach worked here, as well—with constant communication and a lot of support in the final phase, including train-the-trainer sessions, virtual training, and documentation. Because Green County had its own well-developed education department, collaboration made this phase go smoothly.
We’d worked together to really map out the educational sessions, so we had thorough materials with side-by-side notes about how things worked in Exchange and in Google. We got great reviews from the staff about how that went. The last time we’d done this was seven years ago, and we’d had a lot of hiccups that we just didn’t experience this time.
- Ryan Cameron, Director of IT, Green County, WI
