Moving from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace doesn’t have to mean lost emails, broken DNS, or a confused team. This guide covers the complete Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace migration process – from pre-migration planning through DNS cutover to team training – so you can make the switch with zero data loss.
How Do You Migrate from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace?
Q: Can you migrate from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace without losing email? A: Yes. Google’s Data Migration Service transfers email, calendar, and contacts directly from Microsoft 365. Running a delta sync after the MX cutover catches any messages received during the transition window.
Q: How long does a Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace migration take? A: For teams of 1-10 people, a weekend. For 10-50 users, plan for 1-2 weeks with parallel running. For 50-200 users, expect 2-4 weeks with a phased rollout by department.
Q: What do you need to set up before switching from Outlook to Gmail? A: Create all Google Workspace user accounts and aliases first. Then configure email authentication records (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC – these are DNS settings that prove your emails are legitimate) before switching MX records. Skipping this step causes deliverability problems after migration.
Key Takeaways
- Back up everything and inventory all users, aliases, and domains before touching your DNS
- Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before switching MX records – this prevents the most common post-migration problem (email going to spam)
- Use Google’s Data Migration Service for cloud-to-cloud migration from Microsoft 365, or third-party tools for complex setups with 50+ users
- Run a delta migration 48 hours after the MX cutover to catch emails received during the transition
- Train your team on labels vs folders – this one mindset shift determines whether people love or hate the switch to Gmail
Why Businesses Are Switching from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace
You’re paying for Microsoft 365. You’ve got Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint. It works – sort of. But the cracks show when your team grows.
Here’s what we hear from business owners making the switch:
- Too many tools, too little cohesion. SharePoint and OneDrive overlap. Teams and Outlook fight for attention. Files live in three places.
- Collaboration is clunky. Real-time co-editing in Microsoft still doesn’t match Google Docs. Teams end up emailing file versions back and forth.
- Cost creep. Microsoft licensing gets expensive once you need E3/E5 features. Google Workspace gives you most of what you need at Business Standard.
- Simplicity. Google Workspace is one login, one bill, one ecosystem. Gmail, Drive, Meet, Chat, Calendar – all connected natively.
We’ve helped thousands of businesses make this move. The migration itself isn’t hard – but doing it without losing email history, breaking your DNS, or confusing your staff requires a clear plan.
Before You Start: Pre-Migration Checklist
Don’t touch your DNS until you’ve completed every item here.
1. Inventory Everything
Create a spreadsheet with:
- Every user (name, email address, role)
- Every email alias (info@, sales@, support@)
- Every domain and subdomain on your account
- Every distribution list or shared mailbox
- Any third-party apps connected to Microsoft (CRM, project tools, etc.)
2. Back Up Your Data
Export a full PST backup of every mailbox from Microsoft 365. Store it somewhere safe – not on Microsoft’s servers. This is your insurance policy.
For OneDrive and SharePoint files, download a local copy or use a third-party backup tool. You want a complete snapshot before you change anything.
3. Check Your Contracts
Verify your Microsoft 365 billing cycle. Some licenses have annual commitments with early termination fees. You may want to run both platforms in parallel for a month before cancelling Microsoft.
4. Communicate With Your Team
Tell your staff what’s happening, when, and what they need to do. The biggest migration failures aren’t technical – they’re people not knowing what’s coming.
Step 1: Set Up Your Google Workspace Account
- Go to workspace.google.com and sign up for Business Standard (or the plan that fits your team size).
- Verify your domain. Google will ask you to add a TXT record to your DNS. Don’t change MX records yet.
- Create user accounts for every person on your inventory spreadsheet. Match email addresses exactly.
- Set up any aliases (info@, support@, etc.) in the Google Admin Console under Users > each user > Account > Email aliases.
Pro tip: Create all users and aliases before you migrate email. The migration tools need matching accounts to exist on the Google side.
Step 2: Configure Email Security Before Migration
Before any email flows through Google, lock down your security. This is the step most DIY migrations skip – and the reason emails end up in spam for weeks afterwards.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Enforce 2FA for all users. Set a grace period of 1-2 weeks so staff can set up their authenticator apps before it becomes mandatory.
Use authenticator apps or security keys – not SMS codes. SMS is vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks.
Email Authentication Records
Email authentication is how you prove to other mail servers that emails from your domain are legitimate – think of it as caller ID for email. Without it, your messages land in spam. Set these up in your DNS before switching MX records:
SPF Record:
v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~allIf you’re also sending email through other services (Mailchimp, your CRM), add their SPF includes too. You can only have one SPF record per domain.
DKIM:
- Google Admin Console > Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Authenticate email
- Click “Generate new record”
- Add the TXT record to your DNS with the name
google._domainkey - Wait 24-48 hours, then click “Start Authentication”
DMARC:
v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected]Start with p=none (monitoring only). Move to p=quarantine after 2-4 weeks once you’ve confirmed legitimate senders aren’t being flagged.
If email authentication sounds like a foreign language, our DNS Fix service handles SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup as part of any migration.
Step 3: Migrate Email, Calendar, and Contacts
Google provides two main migration paths:
Option A: Google Data Migration Service (Cloud-to-Cloud)
Best for: Teams up to 250 users migrating from Microsoft 365 or Exchange Online.
- Google Admin Console > Data > Data import & export > Data Migration
- Select “Microsoft Office 365” as the source
- Enter your Microsoft 365 admin credentials
- Select which users to migrate
- Choose what to migrate: email, calendar, contacts (select all three)
- Start the migration
The service runs in the background and can take hours to days depending on mailbox sizes. It migrates email in date-range batches, oldest first.
Option B: GWMMO (Desktop Tool)
Best for: Individual users migrating from desktop Outlook (PST files).
- Download Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Outlook (GWMMO)
- Sign in with each user’s Google Workspace credentials
- Select the Outlook profile or PST file to migrate
- Choose what to import: email, contacts, calendar
Option C: Third-Party Migration Tools
Best for: Large teams (50+ users) or complex setups with shared mailboxes, public folders, and custom Exchange configurations. Tools like MigrationWiz offer better error handling and reporting than Google’s native options.
Migrate contacts and calendars first. These are smaller and let you verify the connection works before moving gigabytes of email data.
Planning a migration? Our Tech Done team has completed thousands – get a quote.
Step 4: Switch Your MX Records (The DNS Cutover)
This is the point of no return. Once you switch MX records, new email goes to Google instead of Microsoft.
Update your MX records to:
| Priority | Value |
|---|---|
| 1 | SMTP.google.com |
Or for legacy configurations:
| Priority | Value |
|---|---|
| 1 | ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
| 5 | ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM |
Critical: Remove your old Microsoft MX records at the same time. Leaving them in place causes mail routing chaos.
DNS changes take 24-48 hours to propagate worldwide. During this window, some emails will go to Google and some will still hit Microsoft. Have users monitor both inboxes.
Run a Delta Migration
After MX records have fully propagated (give it 48 hours), run one final migration sync. This picks up any emails that arrived in Microsoft during the transition window.
Step 5: Migrate Files from OneDrive and SharePoint
For Individual Files (OneDrive to My Drive)
- Download files from OneDrive to the user’s computer
- Upload to Google Drive (or use Drive for Desktop to sync a folder)
- Verify file count and folder structure matches
For Shared Files (SharePoint to Shared Drives)
Set up Shared Drives in Google Workspace before migrating files. Map your SharePoint structure:
- SharePoint Team Site = Google Shared Drive
- SharePoint document libraries = folders within the Shared Drive
Use a third-party tool like Movebot or CloudM for large SharePoint migrations. Manual drag-and-drop doesn’t scale past a few hundred files.
Important: Shared Drives are owned by the organisation, not individuals. When staff leave, the files stay. Set up your Shared Drives with the right permission levels from day one.
Step 6: Train Your Team on Google Workspace
The biggest adjustment for Outlook users isn’t technical – it’s workflow.
| Microsoft Concept | Google Equivalent | Key Difference |
|---|---|---|
| Folders | Labels | Emails can have multiple labels (not stuck in one folder) |
| Manual filing | Search | Gmail search is faster than any folder system |
| OneDrive | Google Drive | Real-time collaboration is native, not bolted on |
| Teams | Google Meet + Chat | Integrated into Gmail sidebar, no separate app |
| SharePoint | Google Sites + Shared Drives | Simpler to set up and manage |
The one thing that trips everyone up: Gmail doesn’t use folders. It uses labels. An email can have multiple labels. Teach your team to search instead of file, and they’ll be faster within a week.
If your team needs structured training, our Google Workspace AI Training programme gets everyone up to speed fast.
Common Migration Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)
| Pitfall | Prevention |
|---|---|
| Email going to spam after migration | Set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC before switching MX records |
| Missing email during cutover | Run a delta migration 48 hours after MX switch |
| Broken shared mailboxes | Recreate as Google Groups with collaborative inbox |
| Staff resistance | Communicate early, provide training, give a 2-week adjustment period |
| Lost file permissions | Map SharePoint permissions to Shared Drive roles before migrating |
| Forgotten aliases | Audit all aliases in Microsoft before creating Google accounts |
Ready to Get This Done Right?
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Get My Migration Done: Our Tech Done service handles the entire Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace migration – email, files, DNS, security, and training. Get a Quote
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Full Video Transcript
What our job is if we’re the person managing the migration or if you’re working with IT Genius to help support you through a migration is to determine where are all the places that your emails are at the moment. And it’s not just where you access your emails day to day because it might not actually be in the same place. My business is moving from cPanel to Google Workspace and I currently use Apple Mail to manage all my work accounts. I’d like to preserve my folders and subfolders – is there a way to do so?
Let’s talk about migrations. There’s lots of different ways to migrate different email into your Workspace account. And if you’re preparing for a migration and you’ve got different sources of emails in different places, there’s different methods for how you may choose to get that data into your Workspace account and some considerations to make along the way.
So when you set up a Google Workspace account you’re going to have a set of mailboxes. Now I tend to call these buckets of email on this channel and they’re represented by your different users or staff that may be inside your business. Now if you’ve got three people in the business, let’s say you’ve got Peter here, you’ve got Bob there and you’ve got Sandy over there. Now you’ve got three mailboxes here but you’re probably going to have emails scattered in other places. So let’s say for example you’ve got your Apple Mail over here, let’s say maybe some of your email is sitting in Outlook, potentially maybe some of your email is sitting on a POP server, maybe you even have an Exchange Server if you’ve got a business, maybe you’re coming from the cloud from Microsoft 365.
Basically what our job is if we’re the person managing the migration is to determine where are all the places that your emails are at the moment. And it’s not just where you access your emails day to day, which may be Outlook or it may be Mac Mail, but it could also be where the data of your emails is actually stored. Because it might not actually be in the same place. Maybe you’re just downloading the latest 30 days of emails to your device but all of the archive data is actually sitting on a server somewhere.
Maybe you’re accessing your emails through a cPanel server and they tend to operate using technology called POP or IMAP. Now IMAP is where your emails live on the server and they take up server space, but if you’re using multiple devices you see the same set of folders and the same set of emails. Your inbox is your inbox – if you read an email on your phone it marks it as read on your desktop computer. But you may also be using a protocol called POP, and that protocol means that you’re downloading emails, you’re deleting them from the server every time you retrieve them, and you’re accessing them from your individual devices.
Now all of this goes to say that we have to do a cleanup and an archive job. We’ve got to find where those emails are and then we’ve got to work out the best methodology to get those emails into Google Workspace. And that’s why we call it a migration – because we’re migrating that data into the Google Workspace ecosystem via a number of different methods.
Now IT Genius are experts at migrations. We’ve delivered migration projects for literally thousands of companies, for tens of thousands of employees. And if you’re interested in someone to take all the pain away, hold your hand, and you don’t want to waste a weekend working all this stuff out yourself, I’d recommend you get in touch with our team.
But if you’re interested in going it yourself, I want to prepare you for what to look out for. Let’s have a look at some of the different ways that we can migrate, because they differ depending on where your mail is sitting right now.
Now if you’re using a cloud-based email service or a server-based email service, we do what’s called a cloud-to-cloud migration. So we’re going to take emails that are sitting in, for example, an Exchange server or a Microsoft 365 server, and effectively we’re going to take the emails sitting in the cloud and we’re going to migrate them into the Google Workspace mailbox. We use third-party tools that make sure that those same mailboxes automatically arrive in your individual inboxes so that each one of the user accounts is going to see the same list of emails that it saw as you were using them.
What about if we have a POP server on cPanel or you’re just using Apple Mail? Well in that case we need to use another tool and that’s what we call a manual migration. Most of those emails are actually going to be living on your desktop computer because they’ve already been downloaded from the server, deleted from the server, and now they just live on your computer. And what in most cases needs to happen is that your inbox, your outbox, and any other folders that you’ve created have to be manually dragged and dropped up to your online folders inside the Google ecosystem.
Now is it a good idea to do that? Hell yes it is. You want to make sure that you have every one of your emails, every piece of your business data uploaded and into the Google ecosystem. We don’t want to lose any emails, especially if we’re a business owner and a customer might call you 2 or 3 years from now. We need to keep our records, and uploading them all into Google Workspace means that you’ve got them in a safe place.
Okay so let’s talk about it if we are using Outlook, because Outlook is a special case. There is a special tool that we can use which is called Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook. What that tool does is it connects into your Outlook, it sucks all the email up, and then it automatically sends that email into your Google Workspace mailbox. You’re going to have to run that individually for each mailbox because it takes time for each individual mailbox to take that user’s email from Outlook and put it up online.
Now the great thing about Google Workspace is if you’ve got everything uploaded into the cloud, it’s accessible from everywhere. You can run a search and find any email from any point in time in your Google Workspace account. It’s so easy to run a search in the browser and have Google sift through years, and in my case even decades, of email and immediately find the email that you’re looking for.
Now if I open up my Gmail, I’ve got over 10 years of data sitting inside here and I’ve actually hardly deleted a single email in over a decade. In my Gmail account I have 78 GB of email which is just absolutely crazy. Yet if I choose to search for an email all the way back in 2011, boom – instantly going to bring up every single one of my emails from many years ago. There are literally 610,000 emails in my mailbox right now. It’s just crazy how good Gmail’s service is at displaying and giving you access to your emails no matter how old they are.
So we’ve wrapped up the different methods for managing a migration. Whether you’re going cloud to cloud because your emails are already in a server or they’re online with Office 365, whether you’re doing a manual drag and drop with Apple Mail, or if you’re using one of Google’s automated migration tools from Microsoft Outlook – then you’ve got all bases covered. If you’re interested in help with migration, click on the link down below this video and you’ll be able to get in touch with our team.
