Help
A company's employees all set up their own "personal" accounts in Google's app suite to collaborate for work. This has been the way things have worked for years. Each employee "owns" their own documents inside their account for which the company has no administrative oversight.
An employee left the company, but was still using their personal google doc account which they created and solely knew the password for. While he worked for the company he shared some sensitive information to other employees. After he left, the other employees who had editorial powers over that document were still editing it, and adding internal, sensitive information to it. That ex-employee went to work for a competitor of the company. While still retaining complete access and ownership of the document, without anyone really paying attention or noticing, until he generously mentioned it to his former supervisor.
A decision has been made to have move everyone with these "personal-but-for-work" accounts into a company-administrated enterprise group account (Google calls it a Premiere account), so that when an individual leaves the company for whatever reason, they no longer have access to the documents they created in google docs.
The Question:
How can I migrate data from each individual's personal-but-for-work account into a new company-administrated account, while retaining their sharing preferences?
The Answer:
As far as I can tell, and as far as what I've been told by Google's support reps: you can't. The biggest issue here isn't that it's like an IMAP folder, or a calendar; it's dozens if not hundreds of documents which are owned by the individual's account, and shared from dozens if not hundreds of other users' accounts to that individual's account.
Google had us talk to a consulting agency, but they informed us there was no way to migrate the doc and spreadsheet data and preserve the sharing.
The workflow I've worked out so far has been thus:
- If user's personal account uses their work address for a login, first change the email address to user+gd@domain
- Then, create the user account in the premiere admin panel using their work email address as the login.
- Then, have them select all of the documents _they_ own in their personal account, and export them using google's built-in tools.
- Then, have them select all the documents which are shared to them, export all of those to a separate folder, and then take screenshots of that index to be used as a reference when they require someone to re-share a document with them.
- Then, have the user take their documents which had been exported from their personal account, and import them into their new premiere account.
- Once they are imported to the new account, the user can re-share these documents with whomever they wish.
As you can see, this option is tedious and ends up with a lot of redundant actions (if everyone can't move all at the same time, then many people will have to share documents again and again until their accounts are moved).
The other issue is that the URL which an individual needs to use to log in is now DIFFERENT than the old google docs URL they used; I have found that people easily forget this, and get confused as to which place they are supposed to be logging in. The users keep logging into their old accounts with the new "old" usernames (user+gd@domain).
Finally, once the account data has been migrated, there is no way to delete a personal google docs account that I've found. That would be the final step, if it was possible.
If anyone reading this has a better solution, I'm all ears.
