# Nonprofit IT Migration from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 with Steve Longenecker

An episode of [Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1536843269), 14 Aug 2026, 30 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1029925/episodes/19638739-nonprofit-it-migration-from-google-workspace-to-microsoft-365-with-steve-longenecker.mp3

Carolyn Woodard talks with Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting at Community IT, about a client's decision to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, and what a real nonprofit migration project looks like once years of technical debt have piled up. The client's story is a familiar one: a lean two-person IT team supporting 300 information workers, years of default settings, and undocumented shared folders that quietly became a governance risk. Steve walks through why this organization is moving to Microsoft, from their existing use of Outlook and Windows devices to the stronger admin and device management tools Microsoft 365 provides, and why he keeps coming back to a moving-house metaphor: sometimes you need to declutter before you pack. This episode covers: • Why Google Workspace's low barrier to entry can turn into years of undocumented shared folders, oversized mailboxes, and unclear file ownership if no one is minding governance. • The real differences in how Google and Microsoft handle IT administration. • Why this client, already using Outlook and Windows devices, is moving to Microsoft 365 for stronger device management and identity tools. • The moving-house metaphor: purging old email and cleaning up 2,200 shared folders before migration so the new home isn't just as cluttered as the old one. • Why leadership buy-in, often from a newly hired executive, is what finally gets a years-overdue technology migration off the ground. Resources Mentioned: • Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365 – Community IT Innovators – https://communityit.com/google-workspace-vs-microsoft-office-365/ • Migrating Within Google to Use Shared Drives – Community IT Innovators – https://communityit.com/migrating-within-google-to-use-shared-drives/ • Securing Google Workspace for Nonprofits – Community IT Innovators – https://communityit.com/webinar-securing-google-workspace-for-nonprofits/ • Managing Google Workspace and Office 365 Together – Community IT Innovators – https://communityit.com/managing-google-workspace-and-office-365-together/ • Growing Your Nonprofit With Google Workspace – Community IT Innovators – https://communityit.com/webinar-growing-your-nonprofit-with-google-workspace/ _______________________________ Start a conversation :) • Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/ • email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com • on LinkedIn • on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement • on the Community IT website Thanks for listening.

## Transcript

[0:22] Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics podcast.
[0:27] Carolyn Woodard: I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host, and I'm excited today to be talking with Steve Longenecker.
[0:32] Carolyn Woodard: Steve, would you like to introduce yourself?
[0:35] Steve Longenecker: I will be glad to introduce myself.
[0:37] Steve Longenecker: As the director of IT consulting, uh my role is uh I'm I provide leadership on the IT business management team and on the projects team.
[0:47] Steve Longenecker: So I'm really lucky to work with a lot of really great professionals on both of those teams.
[0:53] Steve Longenecker: And so I get to be involved in a lot of uh projects and the consulting that leads up to the projects.
[1:01] Carolyn Woodard: And I think today we wanted to talk about a migration that a client is doing and some insights that you had on that.
[1:08] Carolyn Woodard: And they're moving from Google to Microsoft.
[1:12] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, well, what I can share is the the planning and thought that's going into the decision that is not even fully finalized yet, but the the full intention is to move from from Google to Microsoft and and and the why of that is yeah, it's kind of an interesting story.
[1:32] Steve Longenecker: This is one client's experience.
[1:35] Steve Longenecker: We came to them through participating in an assessment that we did for them.
[1:39] Steve Longenecker: And uh they brought um they wanted the assessment because um a new um COO was hired.
[1:47] Steve Longenecker: And I think he recognized that there was a lot of uh technical debt in the organization and needed help identifying like maybe how bad it was, and also like, you know, maybe some triage thoughts on what the most critical things were to address and maybe prioritizing them.
[2:10] Steve Longenecker: Um, and also um,
[2:12] Steve Longenecker: You know, coming in as a not necessarily as a technical person, as a COO, you're you're at a higher level, you're looking at it from the 10,000-foot view, but getting some senses of what the risks of being like like we are now are, what um what uh it might cost to get out of that out of the position that we're in, um, and and sort of some of the things that that one needs if you need to make a case to your your C-suite colleagues, and I guess ultimately to the you know, the person who makes the the chief executive who makes the final decisions, like, you know, we need to do this, um, even though it's gonna cost us a lot of money or whatever.
[2:59] Steve Longenecker: So yeah,
[3:01] Steve Longenecker: They had a lot of stuff, a lot of issues.
[3:04] Steve Longenecker: They had been underinvesting um for a long time.
[3:08] Steve Longenecker: I think, you know, you've talked a lot about how Google Workspace has, as its advantage, like a very low bar to entry, right?
[3:16] Steve Longenecker: Like you can set up Google Workspace as a non-technical person.
[3:21] Steve Longenecker: And because there are uh fewer switches to look at um and uh you know, and the defaults are you know usually acceptable and work well enough that you know you can you can have a working uh email and file system pretty quickly.
[3:43] Steve Longenecker: Now there's some, you know, we've talked about the gotchas, like maybe out of the box, the default might be people are just using their my what I call their My Drive and maybe sharing folders with each other, which is not the same thing as using what call what Google has introduced a while ago now.
[3:58] Steve Longenecker: I mean, we've talked about this before the the Shared Drives and how much of a superior solution for an organization that wants to have good governance and good ownership of their intellectual property and all that Shared Drives are.
[4:11] Steve Longenecker: So you can definitely you can definitely set it up with the defaults and think you've got a thing that's going okay here.
[4:20] Steve Longenecker: But like if you know you if there's no one to offer some of that counsel ever, you can like, you know, seven years later have a kind of a hodgepodge of no one knows where the files are.
[4:33] Steve Longenecker: Um, there's been no policies, no governance.
[4:37] Steve Longenecker: So mailboxes might be ginormous.
[4:40] Steve Longenecker: We we had you and I did the webinar about security risks with Google Workspace.
[4:45] Steve Longenecker: So offboarding procedures might be out of line.
[4:48] Steve Longenecker: There's all these things that can go wrong.
[4:50] Steve Longenecker: And this client, you know, was doing a lot of those things and uh was, you know, also in the hole a little bit because they only had two people, sort of their IT department was two people.
[5:04] Steve Longenecker: But still, we're talking about like 300 people that are classic information workers.
[5:09] Steve Longenecker: And like, you know, they were still living in that someone set this up once upon a time, you know, and we never really did anything more than that, you know.
[5:19] Steve Longenecker: And so everything's everything that's had happened since is kind of a historical accident of one sort or another.
[5:25] Steve Longenecker: And so yeah.
[5:27] Carolyn Woodard: You and I have talked about kind of the different philosophies of Google Workspace and Microsoft, where Google Workspace is so consumer-oriented, like you said, a person can set it up, and it doesn't ever require you to really have an administrator.
[5:46] Carolyn Woodard: Like you can, someone can take on that role, but it's not baked into how Google Workspace works necessarily.
[5:56] Steve Longenecker: I mean, I think that's what we're stating.
[5:57] Steve Longenecker: Certainly, yeah.
[5:59] Carolyn Woodard: Microsoft have an admin, like, can you even operate it?
[6:04] Steve Longenecker: Well, I mean, there is always an administrator in Google Workspace as well, but it's certainly the case that Microsoft fundamentally views like IT as um the organization's prerogative and ownership and there and and expects there to be a lot of a heavy hand, if you will, from IT administration, um, and builds all sorts of tools to make that heavy hand possible.
[6:35] Steve Longenecker: So, you know, the
[6:38] Steve Longenecker: The classic example of that is, you know, if if an executive director says, hey, we're having a personnel issue with this person, and we need, I need access to that person's mailbox, but I don't want that person to know that I have access to their mailbox.
[6:54] Steve Longenecker: And um, but it's important.
[6:56] Steve Longenecker: The lawyers want me to get that so that we can monitor their email without them knowing for now.
[7:01] Steve Longenecker: And uh, you know, that's a that's always like a a request that, you know, no one likes that request.
[7:11] Steve Longenecker: I'm sure that the person making the request doesn't really particularly like making it, but like whatever.
[7:16] Steve Longenecker: The point is that that that as their outsourced IT department, that's one of our roles is to provide that to meet the request when it's made.
[7:23] Steve Longenecker: And frankly, everybody knows when they, you know, sign up to work somewhere that that's sort of part of the social contract of employment, or it's literally the it's literally the contract of employment.
[7:35] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, it's in your acceptable use policy, usually.
[7:38] Steve Longenecker: So anyway, we can do that in Microsoft.
[7:40] Steve Longenecker: You actually can't do it in Google, which is like just it's just kind of interesting.
[7:45] Steve Longenecker: Like you just can't do it.
[7:46] Steve Longenecker: You can definitely get in as an administrator, get into someone's email, but not without them knowing.
[7:52] Steve Longenecker: You basically have to re - either they have to make you a delegate, which is obviously you have to request it, or you have to reset their password.
[8:01] Steve Longenecker: And which case they're gonna be like, what happened there?
[8:05] Steve Longenecker: You know, now maybe you could, you know,
[8:08] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, interesting.
[8:09] Carolyn Woodard: How deceptive, you are going to be
[8:12] Steve Longenecker: So it's different.
[8:12] Steve Longenecker: It's different.
[8:13] Steve Longenecker: But but I was what I want to say is that you do need to have an administrator.
[8:16] Steve Longenecker: Like someone needs to create the user account.
[8:18] Steve Longenecker: Like if you order someone, if you if if someone new is hired, someone has to have that super admin role to log in and create the new account.
[8:26] Steve Longenecker: But it's true that it kind of like can be a little bit of a fix-it and forget it thing once you have the things.
[8:33] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, once you have like the initial email domain name established and the mail flow is flowing, you know, uh your users can access Google Docs, they can access Google Drive, they can access Google Meet, they can access, you know, Gmail, yeah, um, and they can do all of those things, and you don't really have to pay attention to it.
[8:58] Steve Longenecker: And so if as a and so they can get out of control.
[9:01] Steve Longenecker: It can get out of control.
[9:02] Steve Longenecker: And you can you can get to a place where um the debt is pretty steep because like, well, now we don't know, you know uh where where our files are, you know, it's all like locked into uh the um institutional knowledge of the individuals.
[9:25] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[9:27] Steve Longenecker: And and that's there's a a risk to that.
[9:31] Steve Longenecker: So this particular client, they you know, we did this assessment, we identified some of these concerns, and it wasn't all about Google Workspace.
[9:37] Steve Longenecker: And it is oh, and to be clear, the same thing can happen with Micro ...on the Microsoft side of the fence, right?
[9:43] Steve Longenecker: I I don't want to this is not about Google being the problem.
[9:47] Steve Longenecker: Um
[9:48] Steve Longenecker: But I do think I do think that that um most organizations that are in Microsoft probably um have the the the defaults to Microsoft give them a little bit more um organizational structure that are more likely to have not be quite so um uh laissez faire.
[10:13] Steve Longenecker: So anyway, this organization.
[10:15] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, yeah.
[10:16] Steve Longenecker: So this organization uh the they they what's interesting, and this is not at all our best practice, but they use Outlook to access their Google Gmail.
[10:28] Steve Longenecker: So some people like Outlook.
[10:31] Steve Longenecker: Apparently uh a lot of people at this organization do like Outlook, or it's just become again, maybe it's a historical accident.
[10:39] Steve Longenecker: You know, maybe they got the um the office desktop suite at you know at nonprofit prices, and everyone has, you know, in our generation, yours and mine, everybody uses Word, everyone uses Excel.
[10:53] Steve Longenecker: I mean, you know, the kids today they may have all grew up on Google Docs and Google Sheets in their schools, and and Word and Excel seem like kind of heavy, yeah, ungainly applications.
[11:04] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[11:05] Steve Longenecker: But uh they use so they use Outlook, and it's like it's it's like getting harder and harder to hook um Outlook up.
[11:11] Steve Longenecker: Part of the reason they have out that they're continuing to be able to do it is that they're actually using a really old version of Outlook because, you know, again, it's like you just get into debt, you know, no one's paying attention to this.
[11:25] Steve Longenecker: So they have a very an old version, I think Outlook 2016 everywhere, and they're connecting to Google.
[11:30] Carolyn Woodard: I was gonna ask you about that because I one of my questions was like, so you've done the assessment and this is the recommendation.
[11:38] Carolyn Woodard: And the leadership is on board with this as a way to deal with this, address this technical debt is to move to Microsoft.
[11:47] Carolyn Woodard: And I would think that one of the ongoing issues would be the capacity of that organization who is used to using Google to kind of change that mindset and start, okay, now we're going to use Microsoft.
[12:00] Carolyn Woodard: But if they were all use already using Outlook, then it seems like maybe a slightly lighter of stuff they do.
[12:07] Steve Longenecker: That was definitely part of the argument.
[12:09] Steve Longenecker: And I should that there, we did the recommendation was that moving to Microsoft, the Microsoft 365 stack, which you know, they're when they use Windows, they're a Windows-oriented organization.
[12:21] Steve Longenecker: Windows is made by Microsoft.
[12:24] Steve Longenecker: So the the Windows laptop management tools that are in Microsoft 365 are outstanding because the Microsoft controls both ends.
[12:34] Steve Longenecker: So they can do all these deep integrations.
[12:36] Steve Longenecker: They can it can integrate with you know Entra ID's identity.
[12:40] Steve Longenecker: Um, and and and
[12:41] Steve Longenecker: Microsoft is very good at like building this.
[12:44] Steve Longenecker: Like, we may not be the best at any particular piece of our stack, but like it all works together and it's all pretty good.
[12:53] Steve Longenecker: And what you and the and the sum is greater than the wholes in some ways, particularly if you're not either so small or so big that you can afford to like do this best of breed thing where you might say, okay, I don't think I think the very, very best gold standard for document storage is Box say.
[13:13] Steve Longenecker: So I'm gonna use Box for that, yeah.
[13:15] Steve Longenecker: And then I think, you know, identity, the very best identity I'm gonna decide.
[13:20] Steve Longenecker: And I'm not even sure, I'm not necessarily saying this is true, but let's just say that your position is it's Okta.
[13:25] Steve Longenecker: Okay, so you use Okta for that, and then you decide you're gonna use, you know, this for that, and this so forth.
[13:30] Steve Longenecker: Oh, you love you love Skype, not Skype, what am I talking of?
[13:33] Steve Longenecker: Uh what's the what's the thing the team Slack?
[13:37] Steve Longenecker: You love Slack, so you're gonna use Slack, you know.
[13:39] Steve Longenecker: So you have all these different things.
[13:41] Steve Longenecker: Um that's that's like
[13:47] Steve Longenecker: I think that's a doable approach for for small nimble organizations that are full of a lot of IT savvy workers that they're just so small that they don't that they don't have to worry about this that the challenge of scaling this many platforms up.
[14:01] Steve Longenecker: Well, if it's just you know the 15 of us and we're all like sharp people, we can make it work, you know.
[14:08] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.
[14:08] Steve Longenecker: Or if you have a big enough, you're so big that you can have a whole IT department just focused on Box, you know, not a whole IT department, but like part of your a segment of your IT department is just focused on Box.
[14:19] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[14:19] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[14:20] Steve Longenecker: But at the size that, you know, this other client is, and most of Community IT's clients are, you know, it really is helpful to have one platform is really nice, the stack.
[14:31] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[14:32] Steve Longenecker: And, you know, we do have plenty of clients that straddle that that, but they try to have a clear demarcation, right?
[14:37] Steve Longenecker: That maybe Microsoft, if they're Windows, they might have Microsoft for identity, the Windows device management, and maybe the Office Desktop Suite.
[14:47] Steve Longenecker: And then they have all the informations in in Google, if that's where they came from, right?
[14:53] Steve Longenecker: They like Google Docs, they like Google Drive, they like the Gmail.
[14:56] Steve Longenecker: So they keep that's a that's a possible straddle.
[14:59] Steve Longenecker: And we have plenty of clients who do that.
[15:01] Steve Longenecker: We have plenty of clients that are just in Google, but then they're not really getting the the device management.
[15:09] Steve Longenecker: If they're if they're in um if they're on Macs, uh Microsoft won't help them much with that anyway.
[15:16] Steve Longenecker: So then maybe they have a third-party Mac management platform, or maybe they don't, maybe they're so they're small enough that they're just you know, as a Community IT can provide Mac.
[15:26] Steve Longenecker: We have we have Addigy is our platform.
[15:28] Carolyn Woodard: I was gonna say make sure we like say that we can
[15:31] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, yeah.
[15:31] Steve Longenecker: We'll put our we'll put our little brand, our our our little if yeah, you're one of our clients, we can help you with that.
[15:37] Carolyn Woodard: But a lot of MSPs are like no, like you're on your with Macs.
[15:41] Steve Longenecker: Of course, of course, yeah.
[15:42] Steve Longenecker: Um
[15:43] Carolyn Woodard: And Google too. Like there are a lot of MSPs that are like, we don't yeah,
[15:46] Steve Longenecker: We don't do we don't do Google.
[15:47] Carolyn Woodard: So WE do Google, I'm saying
[15:49] Steve Longenecker: We do Google. And we do the Macs, and we help people that want to straddle.
[15:53] Steve Longenecker: And that and those are all good choices.
[15:55] Steve Longenecker: This particular client, as big as they were, as much dead as they were, they they did, they're like, look, we're already using Word, we're already using Outlook.
[16:03] Steve Longenecker: Like maybe we can make this work, and we're gonna really benefit from having all of our Windows computers managed by Intune, which is the Microsoft part of the Microsoft 365.
[16:17] Steve Longenecker: We're gonna you get it's
[16:19] Steve Longenecker: I would just say that once you start talking about like again, administration, ease of administration, they're big enough that some of the enterprise y features of the Microsoft identity um I think are attractive.
[16:33] Steve Longenecker: Uh some of the security features that you know Microsoft builds out, and Google has a lot of these things, but um, a lot of those things in Google you end up having to go like to a pretty high tier.
[16:45] Steve Longenecker: Whereas I think Microsoft the sort of the baseline, what they call Microsoft 365 business premium.
[16:52] Steve Longenecker: Um got it in it, you know.
[16:55] Steve Longenecker: Now, this client I think is too big for Microsoft 365 business premium because that's a 300 user limit.
[17:01] Steve Longenecker: But uh, but uh even so I think they're they they looked at the Microsoft stack and said this is gonna this is gonna be the right thing for us.
[17:10] Steve Longenecker: Um but we did, you know, we're
[17:14] Steve Longenecker: Where we have been stumbling so far.
[17:17] Steve Longenecker: And in fact, the decision I think was hasn't been made yet, but that we're we're going back and and we're um talking about this with them, is uh they might need to do a some of the cleanup in in Google now ahead of time because the the scale at which they are operating at um and the fact that they are their IT department is still relatively small.
[17:43] Steve Longenecker: Hopefully they they hire on that.
[17:45] Steve Longenecker: But um, you know, we need to things can't be we can't do that sort of sometimes with Community IT migrations.
[17:56] Steve Longenecker: We can
[17:57] Steve Longenecker: There's things if the client is small enough that we can really provide um uh what's that white glove, almost white glove, you know, service.
[18:05] Steve Longenecker: Like let's look at let's look at your folders and your in your drive and figure out, you know, where these should go, kind of a thing.
[18:15] Steve Longenecker: It's like, well,
[18:16] Steve Longenecker: Can we do that for 300 people?
[18:17] Steve Longenecker: Like that's that's a lot, you know.
[18:20] Steve Longenecker: So the COO has said, you know, I think we need to say, look, we gotta we've gotta get rid of some of this old, old mail.
[18:27] Steve Longenecker: Yeah because it's it's like bogging us down and in a migration, we're just gonna be like pulling over, you know, 20-year-old email, and I am I need to be the bad guy and say, you know, after a certain after email is a certain age, you know, it it needs to be purged.
[18:46] Steve Longenecker: We need to we need to delete it.
[18:48] Steve Longenecker: So um that will help.
[18:51] Steve Longenecker: And then on the on the file side, there are like 2,200 folders that are shared you know, with different people.
[19:01] Steve Longenecker: And like again, the scale of that, like where do all these folders go?
[19:05] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[19:05] Steve Longenecker: And so to to make the decision that we're gonna clean this up in Google, and then when we then we'll
[19:16] Steve Longenecker: So I like to always go back to the metaphor when with migrations, I'm often using um moving, like physically moving from one home to another.
[19:27] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, I use that as a metaphor a lot, and um and
[19:33] Steve Longenecker: So in some ways this this uh chief operating officer is, I think, looking at the the state of their current house, yeah, and the clutter and uh uh confusion of their current house and how he doesn't know where anything is, and he doesn't know if half the stuff is needed or not, and he's like made the decision we need to move.
[20:04] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[20:05] Steve Longenecker: Because moving is gonna force us to like look at things and say, we don't need this, we do need this, and and we're gonna pack and we're gonna say this is we're gonna be organized in the new home.
[20:18] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.
[20:19] Steve Longenecker: Um, although in some ways, like Gmail allows you to have really large mailboxes.
[20:24] Steve Longenecker: They just don't, they just don't, that's not something that Google makes a fuss over.
[20:28] Steve Longenecker: It could be that their engineering is different, or it could just be they're just a lot more generous with space in general.
[20:32] Steve Longenecker: Like, you know, nonprofits get 100 terabytes of space across their workspace tenant, and Microsoft is much more like you know, two terabytes of SharePoint space.
[20:44] Steve Longenecker: Now that's just SharePoint, so it's not right apples to apples, but mailboxes are usually a hundred gigabytes max, and that's Google's not that way.
[20:55] Steve Longenecker: So if they're gonna move to Microsoft, maybe they that's good decisions, and the COO, I think, is I am speculating about what the COO is thinking, but I would imagine the COO is thinking, no, I'm gonna view the 100 gigabyte mailbox size limit as a feature of Microsoft because I don't want my staff dragging around exactly,
[21:19] Steve Longenecker: I don't want them dragging around 400 gigabytes of email from from the last 30 years.
[21:24] Steve Longenecker: I want us to be, you know, to clean this up.
[21:27] Steve Longenecker: And if I can use the fact that we're moving as like the the hammer for this and the excuse for this, then that's actually um a good thing.
[21:39] Steve Longenecker: And uh, but back to that metaphor, sometimes is you do actually need to make some amount of uh organization and uh improvement in your situation before you move.
[21:55] Steve Longenecker: Because it's it's actually too much.
[21:57] Steve Longenecker: Like you you've you've gotta like clear stuff out or whatever.
[22:01] Steve Longenecker: Um
[22:02] Steve Longenecker: Another thing that this client needs to do, we we just said this would be so much better if you did it before we did a migration.
[22:09] Steve Longenecker: They have a lot of old computers, right?
[22:10] Steve Longenecker: Like old clunky computers, and like let's replace those.
[22:16] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.
[22:17] Steve Longenecker: You know, let's replace those.
[22:18] Carolyn Woodard: That's also part of that that debt and that attitude for the technology.
[22:23] Carolyn Woodard: And you can see how, especially the way, you know, like as we've been talking about this, and and you've told me about this migration, you can see how it's not just for this client, but for nonprofits in general, it piles up.
[22:37] Carolyn Woodard: And there are certain things in place that allow it to pile up the technical debt.
[22:42] Carolyn Woodard: And well, we've got all this storage.
[22:44] Carolyn Woodard: Why should I archive my emails from seven years ago?
[22:48] Carolyn Woodard: And coming in as the COO, you're gonna think like those are liabilities, and that is a risk.
[22:56] Carolyn Woodard: And um, you know, so I
[22:59] Carolyn Woodard: I guess I was gonna ask a little bit more about how I mean that's on the client, right?
[23:03] Carolyn Woodard: And on the executives to prepare the staff to see why we're making this move, why now?
[23:10] Carolyn Woodard: I mean, a good thing about it, if you also think about the moving house metaphor, is sometimes like we have to move by the end of the month.
[23:17] Steve Longenecker: Right.
[23:18] Carolyn Woodard: And then you just throw everything in the van, no matter what it is, and hope that you have room to put it in the new house.
[23:23] Carolyn Woodard: But if you are coming in in this situation where you have some time to plan and you think, like, let's not bring everything from the garage storage, let's take some of that to the dump or have a yard sale or something first to get rid of it before we move into our new place and you've got the time to plan that.
[23:43] Carolyn Woodard: It's goes a lot better, I think.
[23:45] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[23:46] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[23:46] Carolyn Woodard: The hasty move.
[23:48] Steve Longenecker: Yes.
[23:48] Steve Longenecker: Yes.
[23:49] Steve Longenecker: Well, and and so I think, yeah, what what maybe the the way this is going to be play out, perhaps, is you know, we'll create these shared drives and we'll say, hey, if you want this stuff to be available in the new space in a way that's accessible to people, it needs to be in this shared drive.
[24:09] Steve Longenecker: If it's not, it'll just we'll just move it to your Microsoft One drive, which is the Microsoft equivalent of the of the Google My Drive, but then it won't be shared.
[24:17] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[24:18] Steve Longenecker: And and it will create, at least initially, you know, not an insurmountable amount of confusion.
[24:24] Steve Longenecker: But like if you want it, if you want this to be smooth, yeah, then let's let's get this ready.
[24:30] Steve Longenecker: So it's kind of like, you know, the parents going to the kids and saying, okay, here are the three cardboard boxes.
[24:38] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[24:38] Steve Longenecker: If the stuff's not in these boxes, you might not know where it is when we get to the to the new place.
[24:45] Steve Longenecker: And it you might not have it for weeks while we unpack, you know.
[24:50] Steve Longenecker: So if you want to make sure that the stuff that you value is, you know, available to you, then put it in these boxes.
[24:59] Steve Longenecker: These are the boxes for that, you know.
[25:00] Steve Longenecker: And that that's that's uh metaphorically, again, I think that's kind of what how this may go.
[25:05] Steve Longenecker: So I think the the files are the are are the sticking point that um and the computers, but the computers are um, yeah, that's just kind of a classic when you're when you're underfunded, you or not even underfunded, when you just make choices, you make choices.
[25:22] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, yeah.
[25:22] Carolyn Woodard: Well, and I think I just want to end on the note that I mean, clearly talking to you, you have so much experience and our team.
[25:31] Carolyn Woodard: I've talked to you know Robin about migrations and just we have a lot of experience with helping the clients, executives think through and be organized about it.
[25:42] Carolyn Woodard: Like, well, what do we have to have staff do first?
[25:45] Carolyn Woodard: And what makes sense for them to do here?
[25:47] Carolyn Woodard: What's gonna make sense for them to do in the new house?
[25:49] Carolyn Woodard: Um we we can
[25:52] Carolyn Woodard: It can seem like an overwhelming project.
[25:55] Carolyn Woodard: And I think that's another reason why it doesn't get done for years and years, right?
[25:59] Carolyn Woodard: Because it's gonna be this big change management, it's gonna take a lot of focus, a lot of priority, a lot of funding, a lot of pain.
[26:05] Carolyn Woodard: Even if eventually we're gonna save time, effort, you know, budget on this new stack that's gonna work better.
[26:14] Carolyn Woodard: It's a big project.
[26:15] Carolyn Woodard: So don't despair.
[26:17] Carolyn Woodard: There are people out there who can help you when you come down to the idea that it really would make sense to migrate.
[26:24] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[26:25] Steve Longenecker: No, we we we can definitely help a lot with the technical process and understanding the technical process.
[26:35] Steve Longenecker: And we do do that, and it's and it's um, I think I think that's very important to successful migrations.
[26:43] Steve Longenecker: But at the end of the day, that pain part is is absolutely real.
[26:46] Steve Longenecker: And that you said, and you're correct, that comes from the client.
[26:49] Steve Longenecker: Like someone needs to say, no, this is important, and we're doing this, and um, you know, that calculation uh I can't make that, you know.
[27:02] Steve Longenecker: But this COO is committed to it and has said, yeah, I'm uh that you know, and and I was saying to uh Nura, who um has been working with the client most closely, um, you know, I kind of like it too though.
[27:18] Steve Longenecker: Like I kind of admire the the COO who is saying, You hired me to come in here and like make this place better, and that's what we're doing.
[27:31] Steve Longenecker: And if when I try to do that, it falls apart because people don't listen or people won't do it, or you know, it turns out you don't want to do what I say, well then let's find that out because maybe I'm maybe you did maybe you shouldn't have hired me and maybe I shouldn't have come.
[27:50] Steve Longenecker: You know what I mean?
[27:51] Steve Longenecker: Like this is this is what I'm here for.
[27:54] Steve Longenecker: I'm here to like do this.
[27:56] Carolyn Woodard: Yeah.
[27:56] Steve Longenecker: And if we're not gonna do it, you know, if you just wanted someone to come in and keep the same old, same old, that's obviously, you know, this just the side of a disaster.
[28:07] Steve Longenecker: Well, then, you know, I don't want to be that person anyway.
[28:10] Carolyn Woodard: That's a choice, yeah.
[28:11] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, yeah.
[28:11] Steve Longenecker: So I kind of like it.
[28:13] Carolyn Woodard: Um, that's interesting to hear that because I mean it just sounds very intentional and deliberate, and that can be a hard role to have,
[28:22] Carolyn Woodard: I definitely have friends who've gone through, like um, you know, working at a community college.
[28:28] Carolyn Woodard: And every time there's a new provost, there's a new migration, there's a new system.
[28:31] Carolyn Woodard: We got to do the thing.
[28:32] Carolyn Woodard: And it's just because they're like, I don't, it doesn't ever feel like it's because they did an evaluation and that would be the best thing to move to.
[28:41] Carolyn Woodard: It's more like, oh, I want to make my mark, or this is what I used at my old place.
[28:44] Carolyn Woodard: So that's what we're gonna use here.
[28:46] Carolyn Woodard: And so I like the story, seems to have that intentional, like we did a, I mean, our assessments and evaluations are so thorough of like going through all of the risks, all of the technology debt, all of the things that are barriers that are holding you back from being able to do your mission, right?
[29:04] Carolyn Woodard: If you've got this old, these old computers and nobody can find anything in the 2000 shared files in Google, then it's it's keeping you from doing the work that you want to be doing at the organization.
[29:18] Carolyn Woodard: So I like that too.
[29:20] Steve Longenecker: Yeah, yeah.
[29:21] Carolyn Woodard: Well, Steve, thank you so much for sharing this story with us today and your experience in the the migrations.
[29:28] Carolyn Woodard: And I really appreciate your time.
[29:30] Steve Longenecker: Oh, thank you, Carolyn.
[29:31] Steve Longenecker: And we'll we'll I'll I'll let you know how it how it unfolds.
[29:36] Steve Longenecker: We'll see.
[29:37] Carolyn Woodard: I was gonna say, yeah, let's check back in after you've had you know a year to to get it under their belt and and see how it's going.
[29:45] Steve Longenecker: Yeah.
[29:45] Steve Longenecker: Okay.
[29:46] Steve Longenecker: All right.

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