You can use Google Workspace Domain Transfer Divestiture to transfer specific domains from one Google Workspace account to another. You can move selected domains and their associated entities, such as users, groups, and calendar resources, from a source environment to a destination environment. Any Workspace data that’s in a domain that’s not being transferred remains with that domain in the source environment.
The source tenant for Domain Transfer Divestiture has 2 data groups that include users, domains, and other information: Org-to-move and Org-to-stay. Domain Transfer Divestiture moves the Org-to-move group to the destination tenant. You specify a list of secondary domains as a selection criteria for the Domain Transfer Divestiture. The destination tenant receives any users or groups whose primary email address is associated with your list of secondary domains.
The Org-to-stay group remains in the source tenant. If a user or group doesn’t belong to a domain that is moving out, it remains in the source tenant.
Key benefits
- Your data remains safe—No data leaves the Google environment during the transfer process.
- Data associated with the domain is moved, not copied—The original data is fully maintained and all settings, history, document IDs and URLs, permissions, etc. remain the same. The only change is which Google Workspace Domain Transfer Divestiture environment is the owner of the transfer entities.
- Content sharing with individuals is retained—Sharing with individual users or groups is not modified. However, other configurations might impact direct sharing (for example, Google Drive access lists in the destination environment). This includes cross-tenant shares. Transferring users may still have access to non-transferring data and vice versa, subject to the settings and policies on external (cross-customer) sharing.
Transfer users are removed from the source environment and lose access to nontransfer resources if their only access was through sharing with the entire source environment. Nontransfer users also lose access to transfer resources. - Content shared with the entire source environment is shared with the entire destination environment, unless otherwise stated—This applies to transferred files in Google Drive, events and resources in Google Calendar, and groups in Google Groups.
- A team of professionals guides the transfer process—During the entire transfer process (setup and execution), you’re supported by Google Cloud Professional Services.
- The transfer execution takes hours, not days or weeks—Once the source and destination environments are set up correctly, Professional Services completes the data transfer on your behalf. The process generally takes 24 hours, but it might take longer depending on the number of users, groups, files, and so on.
- Minimal downtime—Transfers execute during business hours. Your users can continue to work during the transfer with little impact.
Key constraints
- Licenses aren't transferred—There must be enough matching licenses in the destination environment to support incoming transfer users. Your users are assigned the same set of licenses in the destination environment that they had in the source environment.
- Identity merge or deduplication is not supported—If a user has an account in the source environment and in the destination environment, reconciliation of the user’s identity must be done before or after the transfer. Learn more
- Administrators can expect downtime—Admins in the source and destination environment cannot use the Google Admin console and Google Workspace Admin APIs during a portion of the transfer.
- Users can lose access to shared resources—Transfer users are removed from the source environment and lose access to nontransfer resources if their only access was through sharing with the entire source environment. Nontransfer users also lose access to transfer resources.
- There’s no turning back—Once the process starts, there’s no rollback procedure. All fixes are forward fixes and are resolved in one to 2 days post transfer. Learn more
Other considerations
- Services, functionality, and integrations that aren’t core Google Workspace services are outside the scope of this product, whether they’re listed as unsupported or undocumented—The Domain Transfer Divestiture product is solely focused on allowing the migration of Google Workspace core services. If a service or some functionality is not listed as supported, it should be considered unsupported. Any behaviors or details of items listed as unsupported are subject to change and might be inaccurate or incomplete. Mitigation for these items should be managed like any other migration project, with appropriate testing and change management in place.
- Transfer users have access to entities shared globally in the destination environment—This applies to Drive objects, Calendars, and Groups.
- Managing certain licenses might take extra time or block parts of the process—In case you want to transfer the Primary domain, make it a secondary domain to be eligible for the transfer. The existence of some licenses in the source environment doesn’t allow changing the Primary domain for example Google Voice. These licenses should be removed as early as possible or else the transfer process might be delayed. Learn more
- Verifying domains might require changing Domain Name System (DNS) records—If a different team controls your DNS records, or if you must have all modifications go through change control, it might delay the transfer process. This is especially true when the destination environment verifies ownership of the source environment domains. This procedure requires coordination between the destination environment administrators and the team that owns the source environment’s DNS records. Learn more
- The source environment remains operational—The source environment remains active and operational after the domain transfer is complete.
