Migrating to Google Workspace for Education

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) is North Carolina's urban research university. Walker Todd, Security Engineer at the University, worked closely with the CloudM team when migrating the University from Microsoft® Exchange, and has a unique insight into the process.

UNCC’s primary motivation for moving to Google Workspace for Education was cost savings. They had explored the free versions of migration utilities from Google before seeking any premium services. The out-of-the-box tools from Google had some deal-breaking deficiencies that they just could not proceed without, such as: calendar mappings, progress / status of a migration, error reporting and auto throttling.

Walker came to hear about CloudM's migration software through the North Carolina University system, of which UNCC is a part with 16 other schools. The University system was a previous customer of CloudM and the product came highly recommended, with other CIO’s from EduCause also making recommendations for the product - “The migration exceeded previous projections of performance”.

“CloudM came highly recommended from several CIO’s at various events and roundtables I attended”

“I worked daily with the CloudM team who were always available even when it’s the middle of the night in the UK! Support has been exceptional. Due to the complexity of our environment, we are more hands-on than a typical serviced migration and we primarily utilize the support resources as a go-between for us and product development. Any issues or product enhancements we require, the development team at CloudM has been very quick to turnaround a new build of the product”.

- Walker Todd, Security Engineer

CloudM migrated 16TB – that’s 470,130,074 items – for UNCC. With 8,000 users and a 99.9% success rate. Along the way they encountered some experiences unique to the University’s environment and CloudM was very quick to remediate with a revised build, for example: emails with digital signatures, primary SMTP addresses in contacts.

Walker found that the key benefits with CloudM were the insightful user reports and granular settings.