How do we restrict Google Workspace features to a pilot group using feature flags and policy controls?

Potential change-freeze windows

• Thursday, October 2nd: Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti and coincides with Dussehra.
• Saturday, October 11th - Sunday, October 12th: October 11th is a regional holiday in many states, Saturday and October 12th is a Bank Holiday across all of India for Dussehra.
• Monday, October 20th: Diwali/Deepavali

Rolling out Microsoft 365 org-wide is usually a big bang — mail, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, licensing shifts and it will touch everyone. If there’s even a hint of performance regression (slow logins, mail delays, Teams lag), you don’t want to be scrambling. The smart move is to have a rollback plan + comms playbook in your pocket before go-live.

Rollback Plan

• Stage Rollout, Not Big Bang
• Enable M365 for a pilot or specific departments first.
• Parallel Infrastructure
• Hybrid mode (Exchange Hybrid, SharePoint hybrid) gives you a clean fallback path.
• Kill Switches
• Pre-define cut-over flags.
• Rollback Triggers
• If triggered- pause migrations, roll users back to old infra, and stop further onboarding.
• Snapshot + State Capture
• Take backups of mailboxes and configs pre-rollout.

Comms Plan

• Internal (IT + Helpdesk)
• Before rollout: share cheat-sheets on “common M365 issues” (password resets, sync lag).
• During rollback: broadcast in IT/ops channel → Rollback triggered, reverting to Exchange/legacy infra, ETA 30 mins for stable access.
• After rollback: log incident in post-mortem doc with metrics.
• Employees/End-Users
• Have canned templates ready.
• Execs/Stakeholders
• Keep updates non-technical: Migration triggered unexpected performance issues. Rolled back within X minutes. Productivity impact minimal. Root cause under investigation.

For the month of October 2025 in India, you should avoid enabling new Zoom Docs features during the major festival weeks of Dussehra (around October 2nd) and Diwali (around October 20th–23rd). These periods are characterized by high business activity in many sectors, reduced staff availability due to holidays, and heightened risk, all of which can increase the impact of a failed rollout.

After enabling Google Docs, support teams should be trained to handle a range of issues, from fundamental access problems to advanced collaboration and migration challenges. A prepared support team, armed with training materials and triage processes, can manage the initial surge in tickets and empower users to self-serve.

To export Google Workspace logs to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system with least-privilege scopes, you can use Google Cloud's logging and Identity and Access Management (IAM) features. This approach avoids using a broad administrative account and instead leverages a dedicated, tightly scoped service account to securely handle the log data flow.