Forum Discussion
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.
24 Replies
I am prepping an file share to SharePoint online migration, i made use of the tool for the pre migration checks. I got rapports with thousands off documents where the length was to long. 256 presumable.
Today i ran an pre migration report with another tool, that gave 0 errors?? after looking left and right i found out that SharePoint online can have a 400! url length! something that that tool was aware of, the free migration tool wasnt? Or am i missing an certain option?
I am keep getting "Scan File Failure:Not enough disk space to pack the file" error. Any suggestion how to resolve this issue?
I also received the Scan File Failure:Not enough disk space to pack the file.
This is using version 0.2.68.0
I have run test runs successfully on previous versions of this tool and foolishly upgraded to the latest version before attempting to go live this weekend with the full site. My previous migrations were just taking a subdirectory of my source and migrating that. The only issue I was having was the permissions getting reset on the destination sharepoint directory and locking everyone out (but easy enough to fix).
My source directory is 22.3GB of content with 24gb of free space and my temp drive (which I am assume it is writing to) has 203GB free. The log file directory is being written to %appdata% which in my case is a network share if that would help diagnose the issue.
For those of you who have problems with this tool - it looks like the official support forum is at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?forum=SharePointMigrationTool
Greetings, you have a picture of the error
Regards, about 1 month ago I am working with the tool and in some occasions I have generated internal errors, today in particular I
generate the error of the image, my user is office 365 tenant administrator, could you give me some solution for this error , Thank
you.
- Great info here. Did you try this with OneDrive as well?
I saw this demo'ed at Ignite too and it looked really useful.
Downloaded this afternoon and pointed it at some of our data....
My first impressions were it looked and worked nicely although could have some tweaks (see below)...Then someone pointed out they could no longer see our entire documentation library.......the permissions seemed to have been wiped.
1. It would be nice if we could migrate a subfolder of a share to a subfolder of a document site. For example migrate s:\clients\TestClientA to tenant.sharepoint.com/sharepointlibrary/TestClientA. This way it allows me to run a couple of tests up to make sure it works. Currently I can only migrate the onprem TestClientA up to tenant.sharepoint.com/sharepointlibrary/ so everything is one directory higher than it should be. In my test folder that wasn't a big deal to then select the couple of files in the root of the library and move them into TestClientA
2. Logging as mentioned goes into a random directory. Would be nice to have this linked in the gui somehow.
3. I think I lost access as the permissions on my existing share directory was for InternalDomain\UserGroup1 that does not exist in Office365 (the equivalent would be TeamTechs) (not sure why as I'm not involved in the AzureADConnect side of things) and as this does not exist in Office365 it replaced the existing permissions with a blank set of permissions as opposed to leaving the existing permissions there and still granting my TeamTechs access.
4. No smiley/sad face in the gui to add feedback information and no link to the appropriate uservoice (or other official) feedback locations.
5. I think the default option to migrate Onenote folders as a Onenote Notebook should be enabled and not turned off by default. Is there a reason this is disabled by default?
On the plus side it did migrate my files across nicely and fortunately I still had access to grant permissions back to my TeamTechs group again.
Great tool and a great potential, if the make it possible that also MetaData and Contenttype's are given to files during the migration than i have all i hoped for.
Anyone knows if its also posible to copy the versioning on a fileshare aswell? the options are availible and im sure it will work on version from a on prem sharepoint farm to sharepoint online but from a file server to sharepoint online can i copy all the versions than aswell? and if yes are they availible als verions of that document or will they be different document. Like docname.docx, docname(1).docx etc.
Hi Rob Giesen,
As far as I know, when you migrate from SharePoint on-premises, it can take multiple versions and bring it over to SharePoint Online. However, I didn't see a way to map multiple files in a file share to a single docment with versions in SharePoint Online.
- Thank you for the reply and information!
Hi Haniel Croitoru,
I had a play with the same tool last week and I found that all my files from a filesystem were marked as not needed to be migrated:
https://veenstra.me.uk/2017/09/29/sharepoint-migrations-without-3rd-party-tools-soon/
Did you come across the same issue?
Hi Pieter Veenstra,
When I tried a couple of migrations, one worked fine and brought all the documents over. The second one reported errors on all the documents, but the messages were very cryptic to the point that I couldn't really tell the cause of the failure. I haven't had a chance to dig deeper and find the source of this problem.
The SharePoint Migration Tool looks promising!
We are looking for SharePoint Online to SharePoint Online migration support. Will support for this be added in the future? When can we expect this functionality?
- I have this need too. It happens a lot when people create sites willy-nilly or test things that turn out to be Amazing content that needs to be moved. I also see this as a normal use case when we end a Project and is turned over to maintenance. Project are to Close and a new site to open. Some stuff we want with history. I see pages as very important to move with metadata (author, date etc)
Hi All,
I see that most of the conversations are about using the tool to migrate to SP online.
I need to migrate SP2013 on prem to 2016 on prem.
Is that tool suitable for that?
Thanks
Interesting feedback Haniel, I particularly agree with the metadata point. This would make the tool even more useful and tie in with the whole raison d'être of SharePoint with collaboration in mind.
I'll look to incorporate some of your feedback into my https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/40238.getting-started-with-the-sharepoint-migration-tool-from-microsoft.aspx article as well.
