Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 Migration: A Dubai Office Guide

Why do Dubai offices move from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365?

Rarely because Google Workspace is bad. The usual triggers are practical: a new client or parent company that works in Teams and SharePoint, an accounts or legal team that needs desktop Excel and Word rather than the web versions, a security requirement that maps more naturally onto Microsoft's device management, or simply that the office grew and the informal Drive structure stopped working. Sometimes it is licensing: a firm already paying for Office desktop applications realises it is paying twice.

Whatever the trigger, the decision deserves a clear-eyed comparison first, because a migration is disruptive and the reverse move is rarer than you would think. We set the two platforms side by side in Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace for Dubai SMEs. If Microsoft 365 is the right answer, the rest of this guide is how to get there without losing a week of work.

What migrates cleanly, and what does not?

Mail is the good news. Gmail mailboxes move into Exchange Online with folders reconstructed from labels, and Microsoft's own tooling handles this directly, as described in Microsoft's guide to performing a Google Workspace migration. Calendars and contacts travel with the mailbox. Drive files move into OneDrive and SharePoint with folder structures intact, and native Office formats arrive unchanged.

Google's native formats are the first complication. Docs, Sheets and Slides are converted to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the way across, and most convert well, but complex Sheets with scripts, Forms, Sites and anything built on Apps Script do not have a direct equivalent and need a decision. Chat history and Meet recordings do not migrate at all; if they matter, export them to a file archive before cut-over. Shared drives are the second complication, covered in the next section, because they are not a technical problem so much as a design one.

• Moves cleanly: mail, labels as folders, calendars, contacts, Drive files, Office-format files.
• Converts: Docs, Sheets and Slides to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with occasional formatting loss.
• Needs a decision: Forms, Sites, Apps Script, complex Sheets with scripts, Google Groups.
• Does not migrate: Chat history, Meet recordings, Keep notes, third-party Marketplace add-ons.

How should shared drives map onto SharePoint?

Not one to one. A Google shared drive is a flat container with members; a SharePoint site is a container with a document library, permissions, and usually a Team attached. An office with thirty shared drives that grew organically should not end up with thirty SharePoint sites, because that structure was never designed in the first place. The migration is the one chance to fix it.

The exercise is short if done honestly. List every shared drive, its owner, when it was last modified and roughly what it holds. Anything untouched for a year is archived, not migrated. What remains is grouped by team or by client, and each group becomes a site with one or more libraries. Permissions are then granted to Microsoft 365 groups rather than to individuals, so a new hire inherits their team's access and a leaver loses it in one step. Microsoft's guidance on planning SharePoint and OneDrive covers the principles; the cloud storage for business page covers how we apply them to a Dubai office.

Which migration tools should a small office use?

For most offices under a hundred people, Microsoft's own tools are enough and cost nothing beyond the licences. Exchange Online's Google Workspace migration batch moves mail, calendars and contacts using a service account you create in the Google admin console, and Migration Manager moves Drive content into OneDrive and SharePoint. Both are documented in detail in Microsoft's ways to migrate multiple email accounts and Migration Manager guides. Throughput is the practical limit: Microsoft's tools copy mailboxes in parallel but Drive migration is paced by Google's API, so a large estate is started early and left to run rather than squeezed into the cut-over weekend.

Third-party migration services earn their fee in specific situations: very large Drive estates where throughput matters, offices that need Chat or Groups migrated with structure preserved, complex permission mapping, or a hard deadline where a support desk behind the tool is worth paying for. Google's own Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool exists for the opposite direction and is not what you want here. The choice is made during scoping, not on the migration weekend.

What is the right sequence for the migration?

Six steps, in an order that matters. First, set up the Microsoft 365 tenant properly: verify the domain, create users, assign licences, and configure security before anyone signs in. Multi-factor authentication, administrator separation and device policy are cheap to switch on for an empty tenant and painful to retrofit; our Microsoft 365 migration plan covers the tenant preparation in detail.

Second, design the SharePoint structure and agree it with the people who will use it. Third, run the pre-staging: an initial copy of every mailbox and every file while staff carry on working in Google, which can take days for large estates and runs in the background. Fourth, the cut-over weekend: mail exchanger records are switched to Microsoft, a final delta copy picks up anything that changed since pre-staging, and Google is set to forward. Fifth, Monday morning: staff sign in to Outlook and Teams, and an engineer is on site or on call for the first two days. Sixth, a month later, Google Workspace is reduced to read-only, then closed deliberately once nobody has needed it.

• Prepare the tenant: domain, users, licences, security baseline.
• Design SharePoint: sites, libraries, groups; archive dead shared drives.
• Pre-stage: initial copy of mail and files while staff keep working in Google.
• Cut over: switch mail records, run the delta copy, set Google to forward.
• Hypercare: engineer available for the first two working days.
• Decommission: Google read-only for a month, then closed.

What breaks on Monday morning, and how do you prevent it?

Three things, reliably. Mobile phones: staff who set up Gmail on their phones years ago need Outlook installed and signed in, and the company mailbox removed from the Gmail app so they stop replying from the old account. Do this on the Friday, not the Monday. Shared mailboxes and group addresses: every info@, accounts@ and sales@ address that was a Google Group needs an Exchange equivalent with the right members, tested before cut-over by sending to it. Calendar invitations: recurring meetings created in Google Calendar sometimes arrive without their attendees; the organiser re-sends them once and the problem is over.

The fourth, less visible problem is links. Every document link shared in old emails points at Google Drive. Keeping Workspace read-only for a month means those links still open, which is why the decommission is delayed rather than immediate. The same month gives the backup a chance to run its first full cycle in the new tenant; Microsoft 365 does not include one, as the Microsoft 365 backup guide explains.

How long does a Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration take?

For a Dubai office of ten to fifty people with a few hundred gigabytes in Drive, expect two to three weeks from scoping to cut-over, with the actual disruption confined to one weekend. Most of the elapsed time is pre-staging, which runs unattended, and the SharePoint design, which is a meeting rather than engineering. Larger Drive estates and offices with complex Groups or Apps Script dependencies take longer because the decisions take longer, not because the tools are slow.

The cut-over itself is a Saturday for the mail switch and a Sunday for verification, so that Monday is support rather than migration. Where an office cannot lose a weekend, a phased approach moves teams in waves, at the cost of a period where colleagues are on different platforms.

What does the migration cost?

Two lines, kept separate. Microsoft 365 licences are a monthly cost per user at Microsoft's published rate, chosen by plan; the licence decision changes the monthly bill more than anything in the project. The migration is one-off project work: tenant setup, security baseline, SharePoint design, mail and file migration, cut-over and hypercare. Listonics quotes that as a fixed scope after a free assessment, and projects run from AED 2,500 to AED 30,000 depending on requirement.

What moves the project cost is mailbox count, Drive volume, how many shared drives need designing rather than moving, and whether Groups, Forms or Apps Script need rebuilding. What saves money is archiving rather than migrating dead data, and agreeing the SharePoint structure before the project rather than during it. The Microsoft 365 migration cost page sets out the quote in more detail, and our Microsoft 365 and cloud service is where the work is delivered.

Should you keep any part of Google Workspace?

Occasionally, and briefly. Some offices keep a handful of Workspace licences for a team that lives in a Google-only tool, or for a Forms workflow that would take longer to rebuild than it is worth. That is fine as a transition, provided the two platforms are not both treated as the system of record. Mail should live in one place, files should live in one place, and identity should be managed from one console, or the security baseline you set up in step one has a hole in it.

The cleaner answer is a deadline: the remaining Workspace use is listed, each item is given an owner and a date, and the last licence is cancelled when the list is empty. An office that is still paying for both platforms a year later has not finished migrating; it has started paying twice.

Frequently asked questions

Written by Srinivasan Ramachandran, Founder, Listonics · Published Sep 24, 2026 · Last reviewed September 24, 2026 · 2,055 words