Perform a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) migration to Microsoft 365 or Office 365
You can migrate the following functionalities from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Office 365:
- Mail & Rules
- Calendar
- Contacts
You can migrate batches of users from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Office 365, allowing a migration project to be done in stages. This migration requires that you provision all of your users who will be migrated as mail-enabled users outside of the migration process. You must specify a list of users to migrate for each batch.
All procedures in this article assume that your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 domain is verified and that your TXT records have been set up. For more information, see Set up your domain (host-specific instructions).
Note
Google Workspace migration is not currently available for Office 365 US Government GCC High or DoD.
Select your method of migration
You can migrate from Google Workspace using any of the following methods:
Migration limitations
Important
Microsoft's data migration tool is currently unaware of tools enforcing messaging records management (MRM) or archival policies. Because of this, any messages that are deleted or moved to archive by these policies will result in the migration process flagging these items as "missing". The result is perceived data loss rather than actual data loss, which makes it much harder to identify actual data loss during any content verification checks.
Effective from March 2024, to avoid flagging these items as missing, the migration tool will automatically disable MRM (also known as email lifecycle or ELC) for IMAP and Google migrations. The migration tool will also automatically re-enable MRM when the migration is Completed or Deleted. You can use the SkipAutomaticElcUpdate SkipMerging flag to keep ELC enabled during the migration, but doing so will result in the migration tool not searching for missing items to avoid this perceived data loss.
Therefore, before attempting any data migration to mailboxes, Microsoft strongly recommends keeping the automatic ELC disabling feature enabled, or manually disabling all MRM and archival policies.
Note
The largest single email message that can be migrated is based on the transport configuration for your configuration. The default limit is 35 MB. To increase this limit, see Office 365 now supports larger email messages.
Throughput limitations for contacts and calendars completely depend on the quota restrictions for your tenant's service account on the Google Workspace side.
Other migration limitations are described in the following table:
| Data type | Limitations |
|---|---|
| Vacation settings, Automatic reply settings | |
| Meeting rooms | Room bookings won't be migrated |
| Calendar | Shared calendars and event colors won't be migrated |
| Contacts | A maximum of three email addresses per contact are migrated over |
| Contacts | Gmail tags, contact URLs, and custom tags won't be migrated |
Tip
Rules will be migrated and remain turned off by default. We advise users to verify the rules on Outlook before enabling them.
If you will be starting your migration batch with Exchange Online Powershell, as described later in this article, use the -ExcludeFolder parameter to prevent certain folders from being migrated. This reduces the amount of data in your migration, and the size of a user's new Exchange Online mailbox. You can identify folders you don't want to migrate by name, and you can also identify Gmail labels that apply to multiple messages in order to exclude those messages from the migration. For more information on using -ExcludeFolder, see New-MigrationBatch.
To skip the migration of Gmail filters, use the -SkipRules parameter to prevent the migration of Outlook rules. For more information on using -SkipRules, see New-MigrationBatch.
Prerequisites
Ensure you complete the following prerequisites before initiating either manual or automated Google Workspace migration:
- Ensure you have been assigned a project creator role and you're signed into Google Workspace with the project creator credentials.
- Ensure you complete the following procedures before initiating the migration process:
- Create a subdomain for mail routing to Microsoft 365 or Office 365
- Create a subdomain for mail routing to your Google Workspace domain
- Provision users in Microsoft 365 or Office 365
For detailed information on these steps, see Google Workspace migration prerequisites.