Seamless integration of Google Workspace tenants transforms Atlassian post-acquisition

Migration scope

A Google Workspace tenant-to-tenant migration with data consisting of:

Background

Atlassian is a global software company with more than 4,000 employees that makes software to help teams organize, discuss, and complete their work. 

Seisma Group is an Australia and New Zealand based managed services provider (MSP) with a specific focus on cloud and infrastructure, strategy and advisory, engineering, delivery and digital platforms. Seisma Group is a longstanding partner of CloudM, delivering successful migrations and SaaS solutions to customers worldwide. 

Use case: merging two Google tenants following acquisition

Following its acquisition of Loom, a video messaging tool, Atlassian was looking to consolidate the two separate Google instances. With a history of successful migrations completed in the past, Atlassian chose to work with Seisma Group (formerly known as Fronde) who in turn selected CloudM Migrate as the tool of choice to deliver the tenant-to-tenant migration:

“CloudM is our preferred choice. We have worked with the tool in the past, so we can be certain that it will deliver results for our customers.”
– Hardy Patel, Technical Consultant, Seisma Group

Preparation and insight put the customer at ease

Despite this being a tenant-to-tenant migration of two Google Workspace instances, the project requires the same attention to detail and preparation as migrations of different productivity suites. From watch point meetings to identify potentially tricky elements of the migration to ensuring the impact on the users is as limited as possible and ongoing support following the migration, Seisma Group worked with Atlassian to ensure a smooth transition. 

This approach was reassuring for the customer as Harrison Novak, Senior Technical Support Analyst, Atlassian, explains:

“After that initial watch points meeting, everyone on the Loom and Atlassian team was really impressed. There were so many watch points that we would have never considered. Just going through all of the individual components that comprise a Google Workspace environment and making sure that we have visibility into all of those really put me at ease.”

Expect the unexpected – and make the most of it

The initial scoping exercise showed that the migration included over 600 users and 1 terabyte of data. The data consisted of contacts, calendars, tasks, Drive items and 14 million emails. There were also 26 Shared Drives with a total of 380 gigabytes of data and 350,000 documents. 

While the project started well, the team hit a stumbling block when they discovered a number of contractor accounts that did not have a destination account. The creation of these accounts took longer than expected, but the team made good use of that time by determining naming conventions and setting up the migration so that when the accounts were finally created, the migration could proceed and complete as quickly as possible. 

A rewarding project with unexpected outcomes

With migrations, the focus is typically on whether they were completed on time and without significant disruption to users. Harrison, who was working for Loom before the acquisition, identifies another benefit:

“This migration was the first big step into integrating two completely separate organizations. For the first few months after the acquisition, it very much felt like Loom was still a separate entity. Combining all of our Google content with the overarching Atlassian organization has really helped the sense that we are one team and not just a little separate bubble off to the side somewhere.”

A hugely important measure of success for Atlassian was the seamlessness of the migration. With no data loss, CloudM and Seisma Group successfully delivered on that front. As Harrison puts it: “There was an immediate reduction of confusion of how things work and where files are. There was this sense of seamlessness instead of chaos.”

CloudM Migrate was essential to achieve this outcome for the customer. Hardy, who has experience working with other migration tools, explains:

“There’s no other tool I would consider for this type of migration. CloudM is our preferred migration partner and the tool that we use for all of our migrations.”