CloudM Migrate’s Google Site migration solution allows you to migrate Google Sites to SharePoint as part of your G Suite to Office 365 migration. Site migrations require no additional installation or overhead and can be performed as part of your mailbox and file migration.

CloudM Migrate provides all the essential features such as site content, permissions, site layout and URLs. Delta migrations are also available, which means you can complete a migration to capture any changes since the initial pass.

 

Features

• SharePoint sites are automatically created in an existing site collection.  
• File cabinets: Migrated as Document Library.   
• List Pages: Migrated as a Generic List.   
• Announcement pages: Migrated as a Discussion List.   
• Webpages: Migrated to wiki pages in the SitePages library.   
• Native Google documents are converted to Office format.   
• Embedded documents (viewer): Displayed in the SharePoint viewers.   
• Gadgets: Basic viewer that have an equivalent in SharePoint are migrated.
• Attachments: An attempt is made to migrate all attachments found in pages.  
• Attachments in pages.  
• File cabinet content including  Google Drives documents  
• Google Drive documents embedded in files

 

File migration

During site migration, files embedded on or attached to Google Sites pages can be migrated. This includes attachments in pages, file cabinet content including Google Drive docs and Drive docs embedded in sites. Google Docs are migrated to MS Office format.

 

Performance

CloudM Migrate has been designed to be infinitely scalable, meaning you can run unlimited numbers of mailbox, file and sites migrations concurrently. Although Office 365 and Google can throttle connections, we implement incremental backoff procedures to keep the impact of any throttling to a minimum and ensure your migrations runs as quickly and smoothly as possible..

 

Site migration scope

What can be migrated?

When migrating from Google Sites to SharePoint, the following can be migrated:

1. Vertical Navigation
2. Horizontal Navigation
3. Permissions
4. Site Content - Formatting, Images and so on are preserved.  Some layout differences may be observed as a result of migrating to the SharePoint platform.
5. Home/Welcome Page
6. Urls - Rewritten during the migration process. Urls pointing to internal documents, pages or lists will point to the target location of the documents, site pages or list in SharePoint.
7. Web Pages - Migrated to Wiki Pages
8. Announcements - Migrated to Discussion List
9. File Cabinets - Migrated to Document Libraries
10. List Page - Migrated to List
11. Google Gadgets
    • Presentation
    • Spreadsheet
    • Text
    • Recent Post
    • Recent List Items
    • Recently Updated Files

12. Document Viewers - iframes are migrated to view documents in the office web viewer

 

Assumptions and Limitations

Due to the significant differences between the Google and Sharepoint solutions, there are some prerequisites and some limitations in what can be migrated and how it appears post-migration.

Assumptions

1. Only Google Classic Sites are supported
2. User Password is the password for Google account, this account should be dedicated for the migration, and set as the owner of Google Sites.
3. Google 2 Factor authentication is not supported
4. All regular user accounts must be migrated before the Google Sites with the configuration setting “Record Document Mappings” set to True.  This allows us to map any links within the Google Site page content to user embedded drive files.

Limitations

1. SharePoint stores Wiki pages in a flat library.  To avoid page name conflicts the pages are renamed during migration e.g. site/page/subpage =>  site/page_subpage
2. SharePoint only supports a menu depth of 2.  Nodes in a Google site menu with a depth greater than 2 are not migrated
3. Logo of the site is not migrated.
4. Google gadgets that do not have an equivalent SharePoint webpart are not migrated.
5. Announcement Page attachments.  In SharePoint Discussion List items do not support attachments.  To work around this limitation, the attachments are migrated to a Document Library and a hyperlink is created in Discussion List Item.
6. Google Drive embedded files. Google Drive documents can be embedded in Google sites.  Google Site stores the URL of the Google drive documents embedded in the site. The URL contains the Google drive ID’s but does not provide any information about the owner.  All we get is the Google Drive ID of each document and from it, it’s not possible to determine the owner and to give permissions to the migration account.

 

Pre-requisites

 

Enable Custom Scripts on the SharePoint Online Tenant

Custom Scripts must be enabled on the SharePoint Online Tenant. Be aware that this can take up to 24 hours to apply these changes. This can be accomplished using the following steps:

• Navigate to https://yourdomain-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/TenantSettings.aspx
• In Custom Script Section select the option "Allow users to run Custom script on personal sites and self-service created sites..”

Google Chrome version 72+

Due to the limitations of the Google Sites API the migration process requires screen scraping some of the site content from the rendered html pages. Our solution requires the Google Chrome web browser to facilitate this screen scraping.

CloudM Migrate Migration Service run as Windows user

Our solution requires screen scraping html content from the Google Sites pages.  To perform this function we use a headless version of Google Chrome to traverse the pages.  For this to work correctly the headless Google Chrome must be launched and run as a Windows user.  We achieve this by configuring the CloudM Migrate Migration Service to run as a valid Windows user.

Configuration - Record Document Mappings

The CloudM Migrate configuration Record Document Mappings must be set to True. This allows us to build up a cache of Google Drive Ids and their destination location for later use in mapping embedded content. This can be configured from Step 4 > Advanced Settings > Output settings

 

Multi Server

CloudM Migrate must be run in multi server mode.  This mode centralises the Document Mappings for Google Drive files in SQL server and preserves them between migration runs.

 

HTML Field Security

The SharePoint Site Collection must be set to Permit contributors to insert iframes from any external domain into pages on this site -> https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Allow-or-disallow-iframes-for-a-site-collection-C0A622C3-5E1B-4EE5-9764-BC8BC63AE8E0

 

Google Account Recovery Options

Recovery options should be set up for the Google being used to perform the migration.  This is required to prevent the screen scraping from hitting the “Protect your account” page on initial login e.g.

 

Google Account Login on Migration server

You must login to the Google sites migration account on the migration server using a browser.  This is required to circumvent Google’s unrecognised device account protection.