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Haniel Croitoru's avatar
Haniel Croitoru
Learn Expert
Oct 01, 2017

SharePoint Migration Tool - First Impressions

Last week, at Microsoft Ignite, the new SharePoint Migration Tool was announced with a goal to simplify moving your content from your on-premises SharePoint environment or file shares to SharePoint Online.  This first product release offers a simple user interface, with which you can list all the documents for migration in a CSV file, thereby targeting multiple sources and destination in one batch migration.  If you need to do a simple "lift and shift" migration, where the main goal is to move files as-is from source to destination, then this tool may work well for you.

 

 

File Versioning 

Unlike a simple upload operation into SharePoint, the tool can upload previous versions of the same file and set date ranges when migrating from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online.  

 

 

User Mapping

You also have the option to create a user mapping from your source to your destination.  This helps with maintaining ownership of documents throughout the migration process. 

 

 

 If you don't leverage the mapping CSV, then for file share migrations, the "Modified By" field takes on the name of the user as it appears on the on-premises network.  If you use the mapping, the actual user name will appear.

 

 

 

OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT

 

As I've mentioned earlier on, for simple "lift and shift" migrations, you can start using the tool in its current state.  However, to make this tool a viable option for more complex migrations, there are some key limitations to consider:

 

Reporting

As migration often require large amounts of data to be moved, it's important to get a detail report on the progress and outcome to determine if there are any follow-up actions required.  In its current version, the SharePoint Migration Tool stores a number of files in an obscure location (e.g. C:\Users\haniel\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MigrationTool\haniel@2toLead.com\WF_8af8b419\Report\TaskReport_b1ce57ad).

Unless you book marked the location of these reports, there is no easy way to get back to them.  The reports themselves also make it tedious to get to the bottom of issues as they don't provide any insights on what caused a failure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metadata is key

One of the main reasons that organizations choose to move their files to SharePoint Online is to better organize the files and improve their discoverabilty and searchability.  A key aspect that helps achieve this is using metadata.  Currently, the tool does not consider any content types or additional metadata.  Without the ability to assign these, there will be additional work required to fill these gaps.  

 

I look forward to provide feedback on Uservoice as there is a definite need for such a product. 

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