Exit Checklist

The Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Exit Checklist

Thirty-six items in six stages, from the decision to the day you cancel the old subscription. It is the list MassiveGRID's migration team works from, written so an office manager can run it without an IT department. Print it, tick it, and keep the inventory it produces; it is the document the next person will need.

See Nextcloud Hub Plans Migration Service

Items

Stages

4 weeks

Typical for 10 to 50 users

Mail lost at cutover, done this way

The checklist

Tick as you go

Before you decide

Count users today and in 18 months, and which of them need desktop Office
List every Google or Microsoft-only tool you use (Forms, Sites, AppSheet, Vault, Power Automate, Teams Phone, Intune) and decide what replaces each
Export your most complex spreadsheet and your longest document and open them in Nextcloud Office during the $1 first month
Pick the region: U.S., E.U., U.K. or Asia, per legal entity
Decide Hub plan (1 to 50 users) or dedicated instance (own domain, SSO, 50+ users)
Name one decision-maker and one person with DNS access

Inventory

Shared drives, SharePoint libraries and their owners
External share links sent to clients, with who sent them
Shared mailboxes, delegations and distribution lists
Recurring calendar events and room or resource bookings
Integrations and apps that log in with a Google or Microsoft account
Mobile devices and which apps are on them
Data volumes per user, so storage tiers are right

Pilot (week 1 to 2)

Order the plan for five users with the coupon code
Create three to five top-level shared folders with owners; do not recreate a decade of folders
Install the desktop client and set up calendar and contacts on each pilot phone
Run one live project entirely on the new workspace, including the weekly call in Talk
Note everything anyone misses and decide whether it matters

Data migration (week 3)

Export files (Takeout, admin export, or OneDrive and SharePoint sync) and import with the desktop client or WebDAV
Rebuild internal shares as group and folder permissions
Recreate the important external links as Nextcloud links with passwords and expiry; write the redirect list
Import calendars (iCal) and contacts (vCard) per user
Copy mailboxes over IMAP; leave MX records alone for now
Run a delta pass the day before cutover

Cutover (week 4)

Switch MX records at a quiet hour; keep the old mailboxes receiving in parallel
Reconfigure phones and desktop clients for mail, calendar and contacts
Sync the last messages across; verify a test mail in both directions
Run two 45-minute training sessions by role
Put the old suite into read-only mode

After (30 days)

Confirm nobody has gone back to the old tool, and why if they have
Cancel the old subscription before the renewal date; export any admin logs you need to keep
Switch the Nextcloud order to annual billing once the seat count is stable
File the inventory, the redirect list and the data processing agreement where the next person will find them

The guides behind each stage

When a line needs more than a line

Google Workspace export

Takeout, the admin export, and what each format becomes in Nextcloud.

Microsoft 365 migration

The infrastructure and data transfer sequence, including the mail workstream.

Dropbox migration

For the teams whose files live there instead.

First-month walkthrough

What to set up in the first hour of a Nextcloud Hub plan.

Training playbook

Two 45-minute sessions by role, for non-technical teams.

Migration service

Hand the whole list to us: discovery, pilot, data move, cutover, hand-over.

Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

About four weeks for a company of 10 to 50 people following this checklist: decide and inventory, pilot for a week or two, migrate data in week three, cut over mail and train in week four. Larger organisations and those with years of SharePoint take longer.

Mail cutover done before the mailboxes are copied, and external share links nobody inventoried. The checklist puts MX records last and the share inventory first for that reason.

Most export tools move the latest version of each file; history can be exported on request for important libraries. Nextcloud starts versioning from the day the files arrive.

Put it in read-only mode for 30 days after cutover, export any admin logs you need, then cancel before the renewal date. Check the cancellation notice period in your contract early.

Yes. The migration service plans and runs every stage, with a delta pass before cutover and the old suite kept read-only for 30 days; it is scoped and quoted after discovery.

Start the list with a $1 first month

Order a Nextcloud Hub plan for the pilot users with coupon code NEXTCLOUD, and work through the pilot stage with real files. The migration service is there for the rest.

Order a Hub Plan Migration Service