Post-Merger Consolidation of Two Notion Enterprises
Atlas (500 people) and Beacon (400) have merged and must consolidate two Notion Enterprise workspaces within 90 days. Atlas uses open teamspaces; Beacon uses private teamspaces. Both have Engineering, People Ops, Sales, and General teamspaces, and 22 duplicated templates. Combined, the new company will have 900 members, 140 groups from two identity providers, 60 external guests, 1,800 pages shared with the entire workspace, and 300 public-to-web pages. Legal requires least privilege and working links; the CFO requires Beacon's finance pages to stay restricted to 12 people; sales needs joint deal rooms with 20 partner guests. The integration lead proposes exporting both workspaces to HTML and importing everything into a clean workspace to start fresh. The deadline is fixed, but the team has not inventoried which content is authoritative.
1. Evaluate the export-to-HTML and re-import plan.
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The plan is fast but loses the properties that make Notion usable: page history, comments, backlinks, database relations, rollups, permissions, and stable page links. Re-importing HTML also tends to flatten databases and break anchors, so Legal's working-link requirement fails and the CFO's 12-person restriction has to be rebuilt from scratch anyway.
A better approach is to choose one workspace as the primary system of record, usually the one with the stronger identity and security configuration, and migrate content natively or through the API for structured databases. Use export only as an archival snapshot, not as the migration mechanism. Keep the source workspace read-only or locked during cutover so links do not diverge. Rebuild permissions deliberately from the target taxonomy rather than inheriting two different models.
The judgement is that starting fresh does not avoid permission work; it adds link and history loss. A controlled migration with an inventory and a cutover plan is safer even under a fixed deadline.
2. Design the permission model for finance and joint deal rooms.
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Finance: create a private Finance teamspace with the 12 named people, no guests, and no public sharing. Keep Beacon's finance pages inside that boundary and remove workspace-wide shares before or during migration. Use a group for the 12 so joiners and leavers are managed in one place. If page-level sharing is needed for an auditor, use a time-bound guest invite with Can view and no re-sharing.
Deal rooms: create a Partner Deal Rooms teamspace or a per-partner teamspace with only sales-approved content. Add the 20 partner guests to the specific deal room, not to the Sales teamspace. Keep internal pricing, competitive notes, and account plans in a separate internal teamspace. Turn off guest sharing if partners do not need to invite colleagues. Use naming and templates so a deal room never contains internal child pages.
The judgement is least privilege by default, with explicit, narrow exceptions. The CFO's 12-person rule and the sales partner access are different boundaries and should not be solved with one shared parent page.
3. Sequence the 90-day consolidation.
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Days 1-15: inventory authoritative content, page counts, external shares, public pages, and groups. Pick the primary workspace and define the target teamspace taxonomy. Freeze new teamspace creation in both workspaces.
Days 16-40: map the 140 IdP groups to target groups and decide which are SCIM-managed. Build the skeleton teamspaces and permission model, including private Finance and Partner Deal Rooms. Migrate identity and groups before content so permissions can be assigned correctly.
Days 41-70: migrate high-value databases and wikis first, using the API for structured data and native moves where possible. Rebuild permissions, validate links, and pilot with one product team and one sales deal room.
Days 71-90: migrate remaining content, archive duplicates, remove public links, run access reviews, and train users. Keep the source workspace available read-only for a short window, then archive it. The sequence matters because permissions and identity must exist before content lands.