Google Apps to
Office 365

A quick naming history

Google's side: Google Apps for Work launched in 2006 and became one of the earliest cloud productivity suites for business. In 2016, Google rebranded it to G Suite. In 2020, it was rebranded again to Google Workspace — the name it carries today. Same underlying lineage (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs), three different names over nearly two decades.

Microsoft's side: Office 365 launched in 2011 as Microsoft's subscription-based, cloud-connected version of its Office suite. In 2020 — the same year as Google's rebrand — Microsoft renamed most of its business plans to Microsoft 365, reflecting a broader bundle of tools (security, device management, Teams) beyond the original Office applications. Some legacy Office 365 plan names persist for specific tiers, but for the vast majority of business customers, "Office 365" and "Microsoft 365" now mean the same thing.

Does the name change affect the migration itself?

No. The rebrands were branding and packaging decisions, not technical ones. Whether you think of it as Google Apps, G Suite, or Google Workspace on one side, and Office 365 or Microsoft 365 on the other, the actual migration mechanics are unchanged: mail moves via IMAP or admin-level API access, calendar and contacts migrate alongside it, and files move from Google Drive into SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

What has genuinely changed since the "Google Apps" and "Office 365" era

While the migration mechanics are stable, the platforms themselves have moved on substantially:

• Security defaults are far stronger. Multi-factor authentication, conditional access, and threat protection are now standard expectations, not optional add-ons.
• Admin consoles have been redesigned multiple times on both platforms — screenshots and click-paths from older guides are frequently out of date.
• Microsoft 365 now bundles Teams as a core collaboration hub, which didn't exist in the original Office 365 lineup.
• Storage allowances have increased significantly — both platforms offer far more storage per user than they did a decade ago.
• Compliance and data governance tooling (Microsoft Purview, Google Vault) has matured considerably, which matters more for regulated industries than it used to.

If you're referencing an old internal runbook or a guide written years ago, treat it as a rough map rather than exact instructions — the concepts still apply, but specific menus and settings have moved.

How the migration works today

Whatever names you use for the platforms, a Google-to-Microsoft migration today follows the same structured path:

1. Discovery — inventorying every mailbox, shared drive, and calendar resource in the current Google environment.
2. Microsoft 365 tenant setup — provisioning users and licenses on the destination side before anything moves.
3. Domain verification and DNS planning — preparing MX records for a clean cutover.
4. Batched mailbox migration — moving users in planned groups rather than all at once.
5. File migration — Google Drive content moving into SharePoint Online and OneDrive, with permissions mapped across.
6. Cutover and validation — switching mail routing and confirming everything arrived intact before decommissioning the source.

This is the exact process we run for clients on our Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migration service, and the full-suite picture is covered on our Microsoft 365 migration service page.