Workleap bought Barley, a compensation product, and later folded it into Workleap Compensation. Barley ran on Google Workspace. Workleap runs Microsoft 365.
ShareGate is Workleap’s migration product. This write-up is ShareGate describing its parent company using ShareGate. Treat it as a vendor page about the vendor’s own move.
Jafar Owainati, Barley’s CEO, thought it would be a nightmare. They used the new Gmail migration feature three days after it shipped on 15 July. Files finished in two hours. Mail finished in just over three.
If you are looking at the same route, start with the Google Workspace → Microsoft 365 playbook. Microsoft’s migration overview is the generic menu. Barley’s published version is files first, then mail, with users still in Google during the copy.
Why they moved
The acquisition set the destination. Workleap already lived in Microsoft 365. Two stacks at once meant people were working in Gmail and Outlook together, which slowed them down.
ShareGate lists sensitive customer data, shared inboxes, and day-to-day operations as the things that had to survive. Notion and Slack stayed out of scope.
The page does not publish a user count, a Drive size, or a license delta, so I am not inventing those.
They mapped for days, then copied for hours
The two-hour and three-hour numbers are the copy windows. The prep was longer.
They pulled Google Workspace reports for Shared Drives, owners, large folders, labels, mailbox sizes, shared inboxes, shortcuts, orphans, and huge attachments. That inventory became the source of truth.
Each Shared Drive got a SharePoint site. Each My Drive went to that person’s OneDrive. Mailboxes and shared inboxes mapped to Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes, with aliases planned.
Google roles became Microsoft groups. Owners to site owners, managers to members, viewers to visitors. External shares were noted so they could be rebuilt after cutover under the new domain. They created a temporary Google super-admin with least privilege for the jobs.
On the Microsoft side they pre-created SharePoint sites, OneDrives, and mailboxes, added the domain, lowered DNS TTLs, and lined up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They wrote a short “what is changing” note and a help channel. No long training.
A small drive and a non-critical mailbox ran as a pilot for speed, counts, and permission mapping. Then they scheduled the full move with rollback points.
Files, then mail
Users kept working in Google while ShareGate copied. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides became Office files so people would not land on read-only links. Long paths, odd characters, and orphans were flagged first. Delta passes picked up late edits.
Jafar said one kick-off call and then two hours for the file move.
Mail was a one-to-one mailbox map. They captured aliases, send-as, on-behalf-of, and delegation. Gmail labels, including nested ones, became Exchange categories. Key filters and forwarding became Exchange rules. Messages, attachments, timestamps, and read state came over, including shared-inbox history.
They tested send and receive inside the company and with outside partners, plus big threads and large attachments. A delta ran before the MX switch, and one more sweep after. Phones signed into the new profiles.
ShareGate’s result lines are zero data loss, no disruption, and permissions intact. Those are the vendor’s claims on a page about its own product.
What the vendor page skips
Chat, Meet recordings, Sites, and Forms are not in the story. The playbook treats those as their own maps. Docs-to-Office conversion can drop formulas, comments, and history. ShareGate says version history and metadata stayed useful. I cannot open the libraries to check.
External shares were rebuilt, which means they were not a clean copy. Someone had to re-share them.
They decommissioned legacy access after sign-off. The page does not say how long Google stayed readable as a rollback.
If you need to go back, the reverse playbook is Microsoft 365 → Google Workspace.
What I would copy
Do not start the copy on day one of an acquisition. Spend the days on the inventory. Shared Drives, shared inboxes, aliases, and external shares are where these projects break.
Pilot one drive and one quiet mailbox. Confirm item counts and a permission sample before you touch finance or support.
Copy files first. Keep Google writable. Then copy mail, switch MX, and run one more delta. That is the sequence ShareGate published.
Convert Google files to Office before people land in OneDrive. A folder of read-only Docs links is not a finished move.
Rehearse the domain, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before the MX change. Mail that arrives at the wrong host is harder to unwind than a file delta.
The Google Workspace → Microsoft 365 playbook is the checklist I would run. Use the ShareGate write-up for the files-then-mail order, and remember it is the vendor writing about itself.