Optimising Google Workspace & Google Drives for Zero Waste Company

The Brief:

The Cleaning Cabinet Ltd had three businesses, each with their own Google Workspace account. Each account had several users who had emails in their Gmail and files in Google Drive. The client wanted to close two of the three accounts and move all the data into one main account. At the same time, they wanted to make sure they could still send emails using the domains from the closed Workspace accounts. This way, they could streamline their operations and save some money in the long run.

We quickly realised the main issue was that the users from each account were not filing their work documents in a way that ensured company ownership. Documents had been stored in the “my drive” section of their Google Drive and not in the “shared drives” section.

This meant that the documents belonged to the individual user and not the company. We could not close the other two accounts until all the documents had been moved to the Google Drive of the main account. If we closed them without doing this – it would compound the problem of documents being individually owned.

How We Helped With Optimising Google Workspace & Google Drives for Zero Waste Company

Drive files and folders

At Pipeline Digital, we’ve established an excellent filing practice, which we have successfully deployed numerous times without fail. If users follow our recommended filing method, they can avoid future problems. First, we created a shared drive for each of the accounts we were closing. Then we logged into the accounts we were closing and moved the files from the “my drive” to the “shared drive”. Once that was done, we moved everything over to the main account that would be staying open. This ensured that all documents had changed ownership to the organisation of the main workspace account. Once the “my drives” were empty we then closed the two accounts.

Transferring domains

After we moved all the files and emails over to the main account, we cancelled the Google Workspace Business subscriptions and closed down the other Google Workspace accounts entirely.. This allowed us to add the domains to the main Google Workspace account and set up alias (alternate) email addresses so that any emails that came to those closed accounts would still be received.

Email in Gmail

We set up an email migration tool in the Admin Console of the main account, to migrate emails from the accounts we closing to a user in the main account.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we cut their monthly subscription cost for Google Workspace Business Standard down, whilst retaining all the files and emails from the Workspace accounts that were closed.

We received an excellent 5-star review too:

Pipeline Digital was very helpful. They helped us to merge our numerous emails while transferring our data safely. Harry was professional and always willing to find answers to all my questions along the way. I highly recommend it.

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