Migrating from Stream (Classic) Group channels

Copper Contributor

We have 21,000 videos in Stream (Classic). Most of our videos are in group channels rather than 'company wide' channels. We use group channels so the videos for a particular teaching department could only be accessed by students and teachers in those groups. The creators of the videos within each channel vary and in some cases they've left. We would like to be able to migrate videos by selecting each group channel and choosing a Sharepoint to move them to but there doesn't appear to be a way to do this. If there was this would be a huge time-saver. Without this it will make the migration of our videos extremely difficult. The difficulties we have are:

1) If we migrate to the individual one drives this will also include hundreds of Teams meetings (we recorded all lessons during lockdowns) and then each of those staff members has to manage the move of those videos into Sharepoint whilst being careful they're not making private meetings available to others.

2) When the migration tool supports 'orphaned' videos I understand that it will move all the orphaned videos into one location - they won't be categorised and all the thousands of videos created by ex-staff will be in one folder. It is going to take many many hours for us to find the videos for each department out of all those videos.

 

If we could migrate the videos from a group channel to a location this would resolve these issues for us. Please can you consider this as an option?

11 Replies
Are you groups assigned as owners of those videos along with the user who uploaded them? If they are, then based on the hierarchy that the migration tool uses, ALL of the videos would be moved to the associated Microsoft 365 group SharePoint site. That will get them all moved at one time to one SharePoint site.

If the group has not been added as an owner to the videos, then you would have to manually add it to use this method. Unfortunately, we have been told that the Stream Classic platform doesn't won't allow any type of scripts to be run against it. :^( However, once you do this, then they all move cleanly as one container of videos into one SharePoint site associated with the group.

I hope this helps as I had to do this recently for a client.
No the groups are not owners of the video because that would mean the students would be able to delete/edit them! I certainly don't want to add our students as owners of the videos.
Nick there is a difference between a group owning a video in Stream Classic and students belonging to a group as group members when it comes to migration. When you set a group in Stream Classic as the owner, then run the migration tool it will move the files to the associated SharePoint site of the group. What the students can do when the videos get to SharePoint depends on how you handle this. I would honestly, setup a document library called Videos in the SharePoint site, select all those videos and move them into that document library. I would set permissions on the Videos library to only give the students Restricted View rights to the library. I know it's an extra jump to have to make, but it's an easy one. Let me know if you need some help in how to adjust the permissions on the Videos library.
Thanks Karen. I was aware I could do this, but this still requires a lot of work from me. I've got to change the ownership of hundreds of videos manually (as you said in your first post). I've then got to migrate the videos and either deal with creating the permissions for each of the large number of sharepoints and moving the video files and do this relatively quickly in case students realise they are owners of the files. All of this requires a lot of micro-management and time. Whereas if the migration tool could migrate videos from a group channel this could all be done very quickly.
I definitely agree with you. I wish the migration tool would let you tell even a container of videos where you want to move it to instead of having a default location and then having to make an extra jump. However. . . every data migration I have ever done never is perfect or easy. There are updates they are making to the tool to help some use cases, but they won't get all of them. I'm feeling for all of you in education. You have some challenges that that rest of us really don't have.
@NickWalker666 - What did you end up doing? We have a similar situation.

We have Steam Channels set up, and would like to migrate from Stream Channel "ABC" directly into a new TeamSite Channel "ABC". To us, it seems if the same person created different Stream Channels, all those Stream Channels are included in one extra large "container" - irregardless of the Stream Channel it came from.
@MrJohn you are not going to be able to migrate from a Stream channel to a channel in a team because the storage of files in a team site channel is in a folder within the Documents library. The migration tool will let you select the site which will put the files into the documents library. I can't remember if it will let you select the library, but that is as far as you can select. You cannot put the files into a specific folder in a document library. You could, however, migrate to the Documents library of the team site and then once the files are there you could manually select them and move them to the channel folder. Just an extra step.
@NickWalker666 did you know that you can use the script that you can download to do this? The instructions are here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/streamnew/migration-details#script-to-fix-permissions-on-st...

I haven't used this yet, but it should work for your situation if you haven't solved this already.
@karen_dredske - I believe it now let's us choose a Channel under the Documents folder. I did not hit the [Migrate] button, but it did let me navigate to the right Channel. We created a new channel on the Team called "Recordings", and we are planning on putting all recordings into that channel so people can view/search. {Our current thinking anyway}.

Unfortunately, we cannot limit the copy by which Stream Channel the videos came from...
@MrJohn Have you thought about using tags? I have heard Varun talk about them on some calls and some users have found this useful and mentioned it as being an easy way to control what gets migrated where.
Check out the information on it. Here's the link directly to Tags, but there are more options described above it on this page.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/streamnew/understand-the-tool#tags

Yeah, Tags have been really helpful. You will need to assign Tags in the 'Scan' tab. If videos are already in the 'Migration', you can delete them from migration, re-assign tags under the 'Scan' tab, them move them back to migration. A little tricky to do but it is worth it once you get it figured out. This helped with managing the waves and clean up as well.