Google Workspace adoption continues to grow as organizations modernize their collaboration environments and prepare for new AI-enabled ways of working. Gartner projects that through 2030, the number of organizations migrating to Google Workspace will triple annually as they seek to take advantage of new AI capabilities. As adoption accelerates, effective migration strategies extend moving data: They ensure the entire organization can operate seamlessly in Google Workspace. While Google’s native migration covers primary workloads such as email, calendars, contacts, and standard file repositories, additional considerations often emerge around governance, business continuity, collaboration context, stakeholder visibility, and long-term data resilience.
For many organizations, that means using Google’s native migration tools as the foundation while leveraging AvePoint’s complementary capabilities to support broader migration, governance, resilience, and operational requirements.
Start with Requirements, Not Migration Tools
Migration planning often begins with evaluating products and features. A more effective approach is to first define what success should look like after the transition is complete.
Before selecting a migration path, define:
- Which content to preserve — and at what fidelity.
- What collaboration experiences users rely on today.
- What governance and compliance requirements must continue after migration.
- What business processes depend on migrated content.
- What visibility stakeholders need throughout the project.
- What success should look like after cutover.
These discussions uncover varies workload requirements. Some organizations may prioritize moving content quickly and efficiently. Others may be focused on preserving collaboration experiences, supporting regulatory obligations, maintaining business continuity, or establishing governance from day one.
Moving content is only part of the challenge. The real measure of success is whether employees can continue to collaborate, access information, and deliver business outcomes once the transition is complete.
Where Google’s Native Migration Capabilities Deliver Value
Google’s native migration capabilities provide an important foundation for organizations moving to Google Workspace. They help migrate core workloads, establish migration plans, and accelerate the transition to a modern collaboration environment.
Google offers native migration tools for Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams — covering core workloads like email, calendars, contacts, files, and collaboration experiences. Google has also expanded migration planning capabilities through Google Migration Planner, helping organizations assess migration scope and organize migration waves before execution begins.
For straightforward projects, these capabilities may fully support the transition.
These capabilities form a strong baseline for migration success. As migration requirements evolve, many organizations evaluate how complementary capabilities can help support additional requirements related to collaboration preservation, governance, resilience, operational visibility, and long-term information management.
How Google and AvePoint Work Together for Migration Success
Core workloads – email, calendars, contacts, and file repositories – are addressed by Google’s native migration tools. AvePoint complements those capabilities by helping organizations address additional migration, governance, resilience, and operational requirements throughout the transition and beyond.
The comparison below shows where Google’s native tools end — and where AvePoint adds critical coverage to meet enterprise migration needs.
Migration Requirement | Google’s Native Capabilities | How AvePoint Complements the Strategy |
Email, calendar, and contact migration | Migrates Exchange Online email, calendars, and contacts into Google Workspace | Manage multi-workload migrations, including complex Exchange projects with advanced mailbox needs |
Teams collaboration preservation | Migrates Teams channel content with documented support for core channel migration scenarios | Adds one-on-one, group, and meeting chats plus Teams Chat file migration |
Teams conversation fidelity | Preserves supported channel content during migration | Maintains full threads, privacy settings, multiple owners, and @mentions |
OneDrive migration | Migrates OneDrive content into Google Drive and preserves the latest file version | Offers migration to My Drive or Shared Drives; preserves up to 100 file versions (API-supported) |
OneDrive consolidation | Migrates content into individual Google Drive destinations | Consolidates OneDrive content into Shared Drives for team access |
SharePoint content migration | Migrates supported SharePoint Online document content | Adds SharePoint Lists, attachments, and metadata through destination mapping in Google Workspace |
SharePoint data fidelity | Preserves supported SharePoint documents and latest file versions | Retains version history and supported list metadata for business processes |
Microsoft 365 Groups | Supports migration of Microsoft 365 Group conversations when destination groups already exist | Supports dedicated Microsoft 365 Group migration scenarios and can create destination Google Groups as part of the migration workflow |
Archive and large mailbox migrations | Supports Exchange Online migration, including supported archive scenarios | Handles large archives and extra mailbox migration requirements |
Migration planning and execution | Provides Data Import and Google Migration Planner capabilities to assess and organize migrations | Complements Google’s planning tools with redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data analysis and cleanup, discovery, migration forecasting, workload-specific mapping controls, retry capabilities, and migration policies |
Governance and resilience after cutover | Provides administration, collaboration, and AI capabilities within Google Workspace | Adds backup, governance, risk management, lifecycle, and policy enforcement |
AI readiness | Provides AI-powered capabilities through Gemini and Google Workspace | Enables governance, visibility, data quality, and information management needed for responsible AI adoption |
The right mix depends on migration complexity and business requirements. Regardless of the approach, data resilience should be part of the conversation from the start. Planning for recovery before cutover helps organizations reduce risk and maintain business continuity long after the migration is complete.
Build the Migration Strategy That Fits the Work
Organizations planning a Google Workspace migration no longer need to think in terms of native capabilities versus third-party solutions.
Google’s native migration capabilities and AvePoint’s capabilities are often most effective when evaluated together as part of a broader migration strategy.
The key question isn’t which tool does the task. It is whether the overall strategy supports the business outcomes the organization is trying to achieve. The organizations that realize the most value from Google Workspace are the ones that start with their business requirements rather than specific tools. They combine Google’s native capabilities with complementary capabilities needed to support successful outcomes before, during, and after migration.
Ready to plan your migration? Register for the Beyond the Lift-and-Shift: Strategic Governance for Your Google Workspace Migration webinar to explore how governance, compliance, and long-term adoption can shape migration success long after the cutover.
Ava Ragonese is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint, leading the GTM of data security solutions for Google Workspace and Cloud. She helps organizations focus on quality data and insights to drive innovation and how multi-cloud collaboration can impact businesses. Ava has a M.Eng. in Systems Analytics from Stevens Institute of Technology and enjoys bringing her technical acumen to complex business decisions such as AI adoption.