Google Workspace to Microsoft 365

The instinct on an outbound move is to start with mail because mail is what people notice. That produces an estate where everyone's inbox is in Microsoft and every document they need is still in Google, which is worse than either end state. We sequence identity, then mail pre-sync, then Drive, then the MX change, so the two halves land together.

Identity comes first because everything else attaches to it. Accounts are created in Entra ID with the naming convention agreed in discovery, licences are assigned, and multi-factor authentication is enrolled before anyone's mail arrives. An account created hurriedly on cutover weekend is the account that ends up without MFA a year later.

Google Drive lets an individual own a file and grant access to arbitrary people, including people outside the organisation, with no site or container in between. SharePoint's model is the opposite: content lives in a site, and permissions are inherited from it unless deliberately broken. Copying one into the other without a mapping produces either files nobody can reach or files everyone can.

We produce a permission report in discovery: every shared drive, every externally-shared file, every file owned by a departed user, and every link set to anyone-with-the-link. Each shared drive gets a destination SharePoint site and a named owner. Personal My Drive content goes to OneDrive with its sharing intact where it maps and flagged where it does not.

SPF is republished to describe Exchange Online, DKIM signing is enabled on the Microsoft side, and DMARC stays at a monitoring policy across the transition so nothing legitimate is rejected while both platforms may be sending. Tightening DMARC before both senders are authenticated is the single most reliable way to lose mail during an outbound move.

We also inventory every application that sends on your behalf — invoicing, CRM, marketing, monitoring alerts — because those are configured against the old platform and will keep sending from it until someone changes them.

Some things do not come with you. Google Sites, Chat history, Keep notes and Vault retention have no supported migration path into Microsoft, and are exported as archives rather than migrated as live systems. Google Groups map to Microsoft 365 groups or distribution lists, but the mapping is a per-group decision because the two behave differently.

We would rather run a clean, well-scoped exit than talk you out of a decision you have already made on commercial grounds. We also quote moves back the other way on the same rate card, which is the only honest position for a firm that does both.