Google Workspace to Microsoft 365: the Australian migration playbook 2026

Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 is the migration direction Frontrow has run most frequently in the last two years in the AU mid-market. The trigger is usually a combination of Copilot (Microsoft is two years ahead on grounded AI productivity), Defender XDR and Sentinel (the Workspace security stack does not match), and licensing economics (Workspace Enterprise is no longer materially cheaper than M365 once you add the security and compliance layers Workspace lacks). The migration itself is well-understood, but there are AU-specific gotchas worth flagging.

The licence mapping

• Business Starter / Standard → Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium (Premium adds Intune and Entra ID P1, normally needed).
• Business Plus → Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
• Enterprise Standard → Microsoft 365 E3 (probably) or E5 (if security/compliance matters).
• Enterprise Plus → Microsoft 365 E5.
• Frontline (Workspace) → Microsoft 365 F1 or F3.

Migration tooling options

1. 1Microsoft's native Google Workspace migration to Microsoft 365 — included with M365 admin centre, free, covers mail + calendar + contacts + Drive → OneDrive. Best fit for under 500 mailboxes.
2. 2BitTitan MigrationWiz — paid third-party, more granular controls, better for shared drives → SharePoint mapping. Best fit above 500 mailboxes or where shared drives are complex.
3. 3Quest On Demand Migration — paid third-party, the heavyweight option, used for very large or M&A-driven migrations.
4. 4Avepoint Fly — strong on SharePoint and shared-drive transformations.

AU-specific gotchas

• Timezone — Google Workspace stores calendar events in UTC by default; Microsoft 365 honours the time zone of the calendar owner. Recurring events created in Workspace can shift by an hour if DST conventions differ. Test a representative sample of recurring events before cut-over.
• Document formatting — Google Docs uses CSS-based rendering; converted DOCX files often look slightly different in Word. The Frontrow recommendation is to leave docs in their native format for 6 weeks post-migration and convert on edit, not in bulk.
• Shared drives — Workspace shared drives map to SharePoint sites in M365, but the access model is different. A shared drive with 'managers can move files between drives' has no direct M365 equivalent and needs a documented decision.
• Group mailboxes — Workspace groups can act as shared inboxes; M365 maps to either shared mailboxes (recommended) or Microsoft 365 Groups (different behaviour).
• Mobile devices — Workspace's MDM-lite is not equivalent to Intune. Plan for a separate Intune rollout in parallel.
• Australian Privacy Act 1988 — the data flows during migration may engage APP 8 (cross-border disclosure) depending on staging. Most migrations run inside the AU region of both clouds, but document this in the migration plan.

The 12-week timeline

1. 1Weeks 1-2 — Discovery (mailbox count, mailbox size, shared drive inventory, third-party app integrations), licence purchase, tenant standup.
2. 2Weeks 3-4 — Identity migration (Entra Connect or cloud-only, password migration via federation or cutover, Conditional Access baseline).
3. 3Weeks 5-6 — Pilot migration (10-25 users covering each user persona), validate cut-over runbook.
4. 4Weeks 7-10 — Wave migration (typically 100-200 users per wave, 2-3 days each, calendar/mail one weekend, files in the following 48 hours).
5. 5Week 11 — Cut-over communications, MX record flip, final delta sync, Workspace decommissioning plan agreed.
6. 6Week 12 — Defender XDR + Intune + Conditional Access hardening; Workspace tenant scheduled for decommissioning at 90 days.