Merging Google Workspace Accounts for Event Company

The Brief:

Impact Collective Ltd, previously known as Hedonist Events, wanted to optimise their Google Workspaces for the new year. They had three businesses, each with its own Google Workspace account, which they wanted to combine into a single Workspace managed under one admin account. This change would make things easier to manage and optimise their subscription costs.

Our job was to transfer all the unique domain names into one Google Workspace account, migrate all emails from the other accounts into the active Gmail account and transfer the data and documents from each business to the active Google Drive in the unified Workspace.

The priority was that the team at Impact could use the new domain for sending emails to their customers as soon as possible, meeting their rebrand deadline.

Merging Google Workspace Accounts for Event Company

With the brief in place, we quickly set to work. Our first step was to obtain all the Admin logins for each of the three Google Workspace accounts.

Closing a Workspace account and transferring the domain

We got to work closing the first account that was no longer needed (which had the domain they wanted to use moving forward). There was no need to migrate emails or files since it had only been opened a few days and wasn’t active yet. This is where we hit our first hurdle. The licence for Business Standard was on an annual subscription, meaning cancelling the account would charge the client for the year’s subscription, which wasn’t ideal. So we had to contact Google Support via the Admin console who were able to modify the subscription on the account from Annual to Flex. This allowed us to cancel the account with no additional charges. Google Support may have allowed this subscription change because the account has only been open for a few days.

Afterwards, we added the domain from the cancelled Workspace account to the primary Workspace account. With the new domain active, we changed the primary domain for each user to the new domain, which modified their login address and email sending email address. This meant the Impact team could now send emails under their new rebranded email address.

Migrating emails and files from one Google Workspace account to another

With the final Workspace account to be closed, we initiated the email migration tool via Google Admin from within the primary Google Workspace account. We added all the users from the soon-be-deactivated Workspace account to the queue and allowed 24 hours for email migration to complete.

Next, we moved on to the files and folders. We needed to transfer everything to the primary account. We set up a Shared Drive on the primary account for each user on the account that was to be deactivated and invited those users as a Manager. This allowed that user to simply drag files in “My Drive” to the Shared Drive they had access to. We completed this task by logging into each user’s account one by one. When moving files to a Shared Drive owned by a different organisation to yours, a popup will notify you to confirm this.

We transferred all the documents across, emptying each user’s My Drive (all company documents should live in the Shared Drive only – need a quick refresher? Check out our blog post on Best Google Drive Practices)

Once the email migration and files were transferred, we repeated the closing down of the Workspace account and added the domain to the primary Workspace account as an alias domain.

Continue to receive emails from old address addresses

Additionally, we set up alternate email addresses for each user of the two accounts that were disabled. This ensured that even if a customer emailed one of the old email addresses, it would still be received in the active account, and the team could respond from there using their new primary email address.

Successfully combined Google Workspace accounts

We successfully combined different Google Workspace accounts by transferring domains and emails while ensuring everyone could still receive messages. We also put all the company files in one shared place for easy access. By closing extra accounts, we made everything more organised, ending up with just one active account that worked well for everyone.

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