Our Principles
Most migration tools are defined by what they can transfer. We think they should be defined by how they approach the work.
Over the years, working with organizations moving between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, we have developed a set of beliefs about what makes migrations successful. These beliefs influence every decision we make, from product design to support.
This page describes those principles and the reasoning behind them.
Principle 1: We migrate business content, not data
We see a difference between data and business content.
Data is raw and unstructured, so it carries little value on its own.
Business content is carefully organized data that is meaningful to an organization: an email thread that settles a contract, a shared drive folder with external collaborators, a recurring business meeting on a calendar.
The size of emails or files, which is how data is often measured, tells you almost nothing about its business value: a few kilobytes of email can matter far more than gigabytes of media files.
VaultMe is built on this distinction. It treats every item as a business record worth preserving exactly as it was. It works at the level of the individual item, commits as much compute as a migration genuinely requires, and aims to migrate every item as completely as possible.
Because our focus is business content, everything that follows grows out of it.
Principle 2: We migrate the entirety of the content
If every item is a business record, then leaving items behind is a loss. VaultMe is deliberately designed to create complete copies: complete mailboxes, complete drives, complete calendars, and contact lists.
We do not offer the option to select content by date range or by folder, because the decision to leave some content behind may backfire. Such filters are usually set by an administrator who often has no real visibility into the value of a given account. A rule like "keep only the last five years of email" can erase the earliest correspondence that turns out to be the most important thing in the account.
Business records are not valuable only when their immediate use is obvious. They may matter later for compliance, legal review, investigations, or customer history. Increasingly, this historical context is also becoming important for AI-assisted work: the more complete the record, the better future systems can distill institutional knowledge and operate with a real understanding of the business.
For business content, completeness is the safe default. Storage is cheap, lost context is not.
Principle 3: We migrate all content types together
Email, files, calendars, and contacts belong to the same work life, and VaultMe allows migrating them together in a single workflow.
Historically, migration tools treated these content types as separate jobs, but we see no reason to keep them apart. When someone migrates from Google and Microsoft or the other way around, nearly every user account has all four types of content. Their importance differs from person to person, but most users expect a new account to fully mirror the old one.
Migrating all content types together also makes for a much simpler migration, with no need to juggle multiple tools and separate jobs.
At the same time, completeness should not mean rigidity. Administrators can choose which content types they need to migrate; the tool should support that choice rather than force unnecessary separation.
Principle 4: We focus on Google and Microsoft
We deliberately support two ecosystems rather than a long list of providers.
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are the dominant systems for business collaboration, and because our focus is business content, we chose to support them as fully as possible and continue extending that support.
This is a choice to go deep rather than wide: to preserve every aspect of formatting, in as many file types as possible, as precisely as possible, and to keep improving in countless small ways.
Google and Microsoft are genuinely complex, and properly supporting both is real work. We would rather get these two well than spread ourselves thin across many.
Principle 5: We prepare instead of troubleshooting
We built VaultMe to put the effort where it pays off: more time on preparation, not on troubleshooting.
Without proper preparation, a lot can go wrong once the migration is in progress: storage limits in the destination, licensing, permissions, and dozens of smaller things. We believe that the way to a successful and stress-free migration is to settle everything beforehand.
So before a migration begins, VaultMe checks everything it can, from available storage to the status of account licenses. If it finds anything that will or may require an administrator's intervention, it brings the issue to your attention and holds the migration start until all issues are addressed.
This means you can do everything early at your own pace and then largely step back.
Many people we talk to assume troubleshooting is simply part of the migration, and some would never start a migration before the weekend for fear of it going wrong. We want the opposite to be true. Once a prepared migration is underway, it should mostly just run while you watch.
Principle 6: We focus on small and medium migrations
VaultMe is optimized for small and medium migrations, and by medium, we mean up to a few hundred accounts.
Large enterprise migrations call for a different approach and different tooling. There are capable tools for that work, and the teams running those projects already have what they need.
What we do exceptionally well is small and medium-sized migrations, whether they are run once by an organization or performed regularly by a managed service provider. VaultMe is built specifically for these scenarios: maximum transparency on a single screen, no complex and expensive features that most migrations never need, and extensive built-in guidance that helps first-time migrators understand exactly what to do at every step.
Instead of chasing enterprise-scale projects, we would rather make sure the small- and medium-sized migrations go as well as it is technically possible, and that the person running them feels comfortable from start to finish.
Principle 7: We make support part of the product
Being supported matters as much as a good user interface or a capable platform, so we invest in it across every layer.
At one end is the instant self-service assistance: online documentation far broader than the purely technical, in-app guidance, and a fine-tuned context-aware AI assistant. Administrators are busy, so these resources are designed to provide answers quickly, without requiring hours of research or trial and error.
At the other end is a real person. No matter how good the technology becomes, there are always moments when what you need is to reach an expert quickly. Often, the challenge is not the software, but something unique about the organization being migrated. That is why we invest just as deliberately in a support team that takes the time to understand each situation and provide assistance.
Across the whole spectrum, the principle is the same: you should never feel left on your own.