Solving enterprise friction without compromising the financial models.
Platform migrations fail for four repeatable reasons: prolonged downtime, broken spreadsheet logic, interfaces that bury simple tasks under menus, and local file-path sync crashes. This blueprint addresses each one directly, and gives you working simulators below so the claims can be tested rather than taken on faith.
What breaks today, and what replaces it
Select any item to read the technical resolution.
Microsoft Office interoperability & Excel fidelity
The primary concern is the complex financial workbooks. Google Drive opens, edits and
co-authors .xlsx and .docx files natively — no conversion step,
no changed file extension. For macro-heavy workbooks, the conversion utility and the
hybrid coexistence model below remove the remaining risk.
Native .xlsx editing & formula compatibility
- ✓Extensions are preserved. Files stay
.xlsxin Drive, so external Microsoft users open them with no degradation. - ✓Array and lookup functions run natively.
XLOOKUP,INDEX/MATCH,IFS,SWITCHand pivot tables execute in the browser runtime. - ✓One file, full history. Every edit is versioned, which ends the
_v2_final.xlsxproliferation.
Pick a legacy macro capability to see how the Macro Converter handles it — including the two cases where it does not.
Split-delivery coexistence
Finance does not have to move. Mail and files route by department under one domain, so Operations can transition while Finance keeps desktop Excel and Power Query intact.
@emcsindustries.comAcross the boundary: Operations opens Finance's .xlsx
files directly in Drive using Office compatibility mode. Formatting is not rewritten.
The delta migration engine
The multi-year migration fear comes from tools that copy files while people are using them. Google Workspace Migrate runs server-side against Microsoft Entra ID with certificate-based authentication, moving the bulk of the data long before anyone changes how they work.
Four phases, in order
Coevera CRM modernization pipeline
Coevera is retired without losing history: structured records are extracted through its REST API or CSV export into BigQuery or Sheets, and AppSheet interfaces replace the workflows on top. That removes the per-seat licence while giving shop floor and field teams a mobile-responsive front end they currently do not have.
Eliminating path-length sync failures
The recurring sync failures and workstation lockouts are not a SharePoint bug — they are the
Windows MAX_PATH constraint, a hard 260-character ceiling on a fully qualified
file path. Drive for Desktop streams files through a virtual volume, so the local path never
reaches that length.
MAX_PATH evaluator
Edit the path to see where each sync engine gives out. Deep project folders cross the line fast.
Financially backed SLA
The uptime commitment is contractual, not marketing: falling below it entitles you to service credits. Updates ship continuously, so there is no scheduled weekend reboot window.
| Monthly uptime | Service credit |
|---|---|
| < 99.9% – ≥ 99.0% | 3 days |
| < 99.0% – ≥ 95.0% | 7 days |
| < 95.0% | 15 days |
Credit tiers per the Google Workspace Service Level Agreement. Confirm current terms at contract signing.
Removing interface bloat
Enterprise software fails on the floor when a two-second task takes fifteen clicks. AppSheet separates the data from the view, so each role gets only the controls that role actually uses — the same records underneath, a different surface on top.
Role view simulator
Switch roles to see what each person is shown — and what is stripped out.
Closing the workaround loop
When staff hit a gap in a system, they invent a local workaround and nobody hears about it. A standing Google Forms → Sheets intake lets anyone log a blocker in seconds, and the responses land in one triage queue instead of in someone's inbox.
Zero trust, and keys you hold yourself
The security model is not a tighter Windows lockdown. Access is evaluated continuously — identity, device health and context are checked at each request rather than once at the VPN edge.
Data is encrypted in the browser before it leaves the device. Decryption keys sit with an external key service you control — Google cannot read the content.
Identity, location, IP and device posture are evaluated per request, which neutralizes a stolen credential without adding VPN overhead.
Airbus moved on the order of 130,000 employees from Microsoft to Google Workspace while handling classified design data — an existence proof at far greater scale and sensitivity than ours.
What the seat actually costs
The comparison that matters is not Workspace against Microsoft 365 Standard — it is Workspace with AI included against Microsoft 365 with the AI add-on bolted on, plus the CRM licence Workspace lets us retire.
Monthly cost per user, AI included
Estimated CAD list pricing · see assumptions below
Consolidation savings
Put in your own invoiced rates — nothing below is fixed.
Licence consolidation only. Excludes migration effort, training time and any Workspace seat cost — those belong in the full business case, not in this figure.
Run a 30-day sandbox before committing to anything
Stand up an isolated Google Workspace tenant for a small Operations group while Finance stays on Microsoft 365 under split-delivery routing. Nothing is decided at the end of 30 days except whether the claims above held up against our own files.
- Approve the sandbox scopeName the 5–8 Operations users and the file set they will work from. No production mailbox moves.
- Configure split-delivery routingMX gateway rules so the two environments coexist on one domain. Reversible at any point.
- Load real work, not demo dataCopy live estimate workbooks and inspection reports in. Test the actual macro-heavy files, including the ones expected to fail.
- Review against these claimsAt day 30, walk this document with the sandbox open and mark each guarantee held or not held.
- Coevera seat cost — you set it
- The field in Section 07 opens at $65 USD as a placeholder only. Enter the invoiced rate, pick the currency it is billed in, and every figure on the page follows.
- Copilot add-on — you set it
- Opens at Microsoft's published list price. Counts as a saving only if we would otherwise have bought it.
- Exchange rate — you set it
- Opens at 1.35 CAD per USD and applies only to fields left on USD. Switch a field to CAD and no conversion is applied to it.
- Per-seat platform pricing
- Chart values are estimated CAD list pricing and exclude negotiated or nonprofit discounts.
- Airbus scale — ~130,000 users
- Public case study. Cited as precedent, not as a like-for-like comparison.
- Uptime and credit tiers
- Per the published Workspace SLA. Confirm the terms attached to our own contract.