Google Workspace and Zoom to Microsoft 365 Migration

Overview

I oversaw the company-wide move from Google Workspace and Zoom to Microsoft 365 and Teams across US and Canadian offices: the user migration, the room licensing, and the physical conference room hardware that had to change with it.

Problem

The company ran split collaboration tooling, Google Workspace for productivity and Zoom for meetings and conference rooms. Consolidating onto Microsoft 365 was more than a mailbox cutover. Every conference room was Zoom-native hardware with Zoom licensing, and the rooms are what people notice. A migration can be technically complete and still be judged a failure if a leadership meeting cannot start on Monday morning.

The hardest single case was the largest event space, a divisible room with audio DSP and room-splitting capability, the most complex conference room in the company.

Approach

The migration ran as a user track and a room track in parallel. The user track handled provisioning and licensing. The room track handled Teams Rooms licensing, hardware reconfiguration and validation room by room instead of as a bulk cutover.

Rooms were converted and tested one at a time. A room only moved once it had been verified working, so at no point was there a floor of rooms in an unknown state. I handled deployment and validation directly for the local office and supported troubleshooting for headquarters rooms remotely.

The large divisible space was its own mini-project because of the DSP and room-splitting behavior, which had to keep working across the platform change instead of being rebuilt after it.

Architecture

Identity and productivity consolidated into Microsoft 365. Meeting rooms moved to Teams Rooms with per-room licensing, keeping the existing audio infrastructure where it could be repointed and reconfiguring where it could not. Room-splitting and DSP behavior in the large event space was preserved through the transition.

Outcome

The cross-border migration completed with minimal operational disruption and unified collaboration tooling across the organization. The conference rooms, including the most complex one in the company, came out the far side working. I stayed the primary liaison for those systems afterward, maintaining 99% uptime and resolving 95% of critical issues within one hour.

Lessons Learned

In a collaboration migration the mailboxes are the easy part. The rooms decide whether people believe the migration worked, because a broken room fails loudly in front of an audience that includes leadership. Sequencing room by room with verification gates cost more time up front and bought the whole project its reputation.