What is Domain Transfer Divestiture?

You can use Google Workspace Domain Transfer Divestiture to transfer secondary domains from one of your organization’s Google Workspace accounts to another. The tool moves selected domains and their associated entities, such as users, groups, and calendar resources. If your Workspace account includes domains that you don’t transfer, those domains and their associated data stay in the source environment (original account).

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, and so on remain the same. The only change is which Domain Transfer Divestiture environment (account) owns the transfer entities.
  • Content sharing is retained—Sharing with individual users or groups within a domain is not modified. However, settings and policies for your organization might affect sharing between the source and transfer environments. Transferred users might lose access to resources in the source environment. Users in the source environment might not be able to access transfer resources.
  • Content shared with the entire source environment is shared with the entire destination environment, unless otherwise stated—Content includes 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 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—Your users can continue to work during the transfer with little impact.
  • The source environment remains operational—The source environment remains active and operational after the domain transfer is complete.

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—Users that are transferred don't maintain access to data in the source environment after the transfer. Users that aren’t transferred lose access to data that was transferred out of the source environment.
  • Only Workspace core services are migrated—If a service or some functionality is not listed as supported, it should be considered unsupported. Any behaviors or details of unsupported items are subject to change and might be inaccurate or incomplete. Manage mitigation for these items with appropriate testing and change management in place.
  • There’s no turning back—Once the process starts, there’s no rollback procedure. If problems occur, they are resolved in the transfer environment in one to 2 days after the transfer. Learn more
  • Verifying domains might require changing Domain Name System (DNS) records—Each domain involved in the transfer process must be verified. You or another admin must verify all source domains. Learn more
  • Certain licenses might delay or block parts of the process—To transfer a primary domain, you must make it a secondary domain first. However, licenses for some products, such as Google Voice, don’t allow you to change the primary domain. These licenses should be removed as early as possible so the transfer process isn’t delayed. Learn more

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