Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace Migration

Yes. Microsoft renamed Office 365 to Microsoft 365 in 2020, and for a migration they are the same product. People still search and speak in both names, and plenty of invoices and internal documents still say Office 365. Nothing about the work differs.

User mailboxes with their folders, contacts and calendars. Distribution lists become Google Groups. Room and equipment mailboxes become calendar resources. OneDrive content moves to Drive. Those are predictable. What is not predictable is anything Microsoft provides as a composite or unlicensed object — shared mailboxes, public folders, Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams — because Google has no matching object and each one has to be redesigned rather than copied.

It can, and this is worth knowing before you compare prices. Microsoft 365 gives you shared mailboxes without a licence. Google has no unlicensed equivalent. A shared address can be a Google Group with a collaborative inbox, which costs nothing but behaves differently from an Outlook shared mailbox, or a licensed account with delegated access, which behaves much more like what your team is used to but consumes a seat. Which route suits depends on how each mailbox is genuinely used, and we work through them individually at discovery rather than assuming one answer.

Partly, and the framing usually needs correcting first. Teams channel conversations are rarely migrated and rarely missed. The files people actually care about are not stored in Teams at all — they live in SharePoint, and those move as part of the SharePoint work. So the real question is not how to migrate Teams but how to move the files behind it and how the team will communicate afterwards, which is a training question more than a technical one.

Documents and libraries move into Shared Drives. What does not come across is the site scaffolding — custom metadata columns, SharePoint lists, page layouts and any workflows built on top. Those are rebuilt where they are still earning their keep, replaced with a Google equivalent where one fits, or dropped deliberately where nobody has used them in years. The audit is worth doing properly, because a lot of SharePoint estates contain more abandoned structure than live content.

On Windows, yes. Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook keeps Outlook working against a Google Workspace account, and Google was still shipping updates to it in early 2026. Two caveats worth stating plainly: it is Windows-only, with no Mac version, and using it means your team keeps the old interface and never discovers the collaboration features you are paying for. We generally suggest it as a transition aid for people who genuinely need it rather than as the default for everybody.

They are the most commonly missed item in the entire migration. PST archives sit on individual machines rather than on the server, so nothing in the admin console reveals them, and they are often the largest volume of mail in the organisation. Finding them is a question you ask staff rather than a report you run, and it should happen at discovery — not after the old system has been decommissioned.

Mailbox data is rarely the constraint. What sets the timeline is how many shared mailboxes, public folders and Microsoft 365 Groups have to be redesigned, and how quickly decisions get made about each one. A small organisation with clean mailboxes and no SharePoint estate can be done in a week or two. One with years of public folders and a large SharePoint footprint is scoped individually.

For a period, yes, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not planning the cutover properly. Licences overlap while data is copied and verified, and we recommend keeping the Microsoft tenant read-only for a while after the switch rather than cancelling on the day. It costs one extra billing cycle and it removes an entire category of risk.

Yes, and it is scoped individually. Mailbox sizes are usually larger than expected, the server is often several versions behind, and a hybrid configuration means identity and mail flow are split between on-premise and cloud in ways that need untangling before anything moves. It is entirely doable — it simply is not the same job as a cloud-to-cloud migration, and we would rather establish that at discovery than discover it mid-project.