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Groups: Tenant to tenant migration

Brass Contributor

After a merge we are in the process of moving as much content as possible from one tenant to another.

The process a moving a unified group looks easy.

  1. Evaluate which groups should be migrated (and which groups should be abandoned)
  2. Create the corresponding group in the new tenant
  3. Use a migration tool to copy the content between mailboxes
  4. Use a migration tool to copy the SharePoint content between tenants.

There are a few things that are not so easy however:

Planner migration (which I suspect will be a manual process)

Connector migration which will absolutely be a manual process

I'm still investigating OneNote migration options.

 

Any thoughts, tips and pointers will be appriciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

46 Replies

We are the best tool for tenant to tenant out there. Do you do everything? No. But unfortunately no one does. It has to do with the fantastic pace Microsoft has putting new workloads out there and the adoption of those workloads. We don't do Teams (yet!) but we definitely do Office 365 groups in an automated and effective way. i.e Do you know any tool out there that does Public folders to Office 365 groups? Apart from ours I don't. I know what groups are, I have the luck of being a Microsoft MCSM. Not the typical "marketing oriented" bot posting here that you see many tools using.
And finally I absolutely agree with you in your last point. No utility is able to do everything that needs to be done in a T2T (PowerBI is just another example). The dev effort to keep up with this new workloads and its complexity from a migration perspective is huge, to say the least.

Hi.

 

I want to keep my current email so, if someone sends me an email, i will can receive in my current (an old) email and in my new (target) email.

Javier, 

 

Unfortunately, I don't know any free tools available for your scenario. For your email question, you can set some forwarding rules. You can contact the friendly team at Cloudiway, they can help you with all the process :) 

Public Folders to Office 365 Groups - Absolutely!  https://www.quadrotech-it.com/qt-files/Public-Folder-Brochure.pdf

 

As to saying that you're the best tool... well, I guess that's entirely in the eye of the beholder. I haven't yet tested BitTitan's ability to move Office 365 Groups between tenants to ensure that everything is transferred properly, so I cannot say. What I would advise people who need this capability is to contact the vendors in this space and test the software that is available to decide themselves what is the best tool in their environment.

Last I've heard Quadrotech don't migrate posts in a scenario of PFs to 365 groups, which makes it useless in most scenarios. But I am not 100% sure so anyone reading this don't take my word for it. Microsoft also has a native tool to migrate PFs to 365 groups but their initial version didn't do posts. Now they claim that they do it, I never tested it. Again I agree with you, testing is key. Creating 2 endpoints to connect to a source and a destination is one thing (i.e connect to Public folders as a source and 365 groups as a destination), moving all of the data you want is completely different. I don't usually spend much time analyzing other tools, native or not, because it's not part of my job, but I do know that the key in this market is not from and to where one can move, but what's gets moved. The example of doing Public folders to groups without doing posts is just one.

You should test our SaaS, you'd be surprised. I am sure we have friends in common and you can always reach out to me directly if you need some test licenses.

"Last I've heard" is a pretty nice way for a BitTitan representative to slander another company's product. I have asked the Quadrotech people to respond. @Steve Goodman did a review of Public Folder Shuttle and I am pretty sure that he would have found a gaping hole like the inability to move posts. 

Which part of the "if someone is reading this don't take my word for it" don't you understand? I just told you the initial version of the native tool, that you conveniently didn't mentioned when referring tools that do Public folders to Office 365 groups (great way for an MVP to ignore a native tool), didn't do posts, and now they do. Office 365 groups can get posts ingested, shared mailboxes cannot. Public folders have much more than posts and it's all about the way you design it. You have your opinion. Apparently to you the best tool to migrate Public folders to Office 365 groups is the Quadrotech tool, which I respect. I know they do it, I know the native tools do it (your welcome) and I know Bittitan does it. I am not here to slander anyone's product. Not my MO. Never did it and won't do it. Saying you're the best at something is not the same as saying the others are not good. And believe me there's a lot of migration tools out there that are just not good enough, but you'll never hear me name one. And before you speculate I am not referring to Quadrotech.

I wrote about the Microsoft approach - see https://www.petri.com/migrate-public-folders-office-365-groups. This MVP has not ignored the native tool, but I have pointed out the deficiencies that exist when you need to migrate more than a few public folders. Perhaps you didn't look to see what I might have said?

 

My position is that there is no perfect tool. There are a set of migration tools available to move public folder content and it's up to tenants to decide what is best for them. Each tool has its own unique capabilities that make it attractive and more appropriate to specific conditions, which is why people should get trial copies and test.

 

 

My assumption was based in this conversation only. I haven't read your blog post, yet. There's a lot of deficiencies when it comes to Public folder migrations and native tools. They come from the underlying technology. The lack of flexibility is also a problem specially in the public folder space.
And on that we 100% agree. Test and evaluate and measure impact of the tool you want to use. Furthermore don't look at one tool for all workloads as potentially being THE TOOL. A good example is SharePoint and tools that are dedicated to that space but just don't do other workloads.  And then there's pricing vs benefit. We don't disagree on the core message of this post, not in my view.

I am the Product Owner for Public Folder Shuttle and I can verify that it will migrate a public folder post into an O365 Group.  In fact, it can create the group for you, migrate the content, and add permissions.

I'm not sure where Antonio got his information but it is incorrect.  

Excuse me?.

Is this reply for my question about migration?

Javier,  did you managed to find a solution for your migration?

No, it was an answer to the assertion:

 

"Last I've heard Quadrotech don't migrate posts in a scenario of PFs to 365 groups, which makes it useless in most scenarios."

 

It just corrected the record.

No, I don´t.

I saw this link https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-migrate-mailboxes-from-one-office-365-tenant-to-anot...

 

But I don´t know if really this is correct process. In addition, I was tying to do from Office 365 Admin Panel: migration from Exchange online but I´m going crazy

That support article is old at this point and involves a manual movement of mailboxes from one tenant to another. Microsoft already said at Ignite 2017 that they will allow you to move mailboxes between tenants using the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS), and even that is much better than the method described in the article.

 

But Office 365 Groups are a different matter. You need third party code to deal with the mailboxes (because MRS does not move group mailboxes) and the other resources associated with the group (like SharePoint, Teams, and Planner). It's not a black and white situation.

Hello Tony.

 

My case is very much easy: i don´t have on-promises, I only have Online and I want to move to another Online.

 

Thanks

MRS will handle tenant to tenant transfers... that's the idea.

 

Even you are only online, you still need third party tools.

How many groups do you want to move?

 

1/ First, have you picked a third party tool? As Tony mentioned, you will still need that to get the job done properly. Even for online to online it's a massive headache!

2/ Of course if you're a code genius you could use manual commands and scripts but you will never get the same results to a migration tool. (Not worth your time) And you will not be able to do pre-staging.

3/ Ask for some budget to your management team and test the migration tools available.

Antonio is giving me the option with a tool but I would preffer don´t pay. teh reason is that this is not for me, this is for my Company.

Anyway, I´m searching the free form to voe or migrate my mailboxes to another domain keeping my current domain as an alias in the future and this is very extrange that there is not a free form from Microsoft to do it; in addition, my mailboxes are in the Cloud (Office 365 Exchange online), I don´t have AD (on-premises) and the endpoint is the same one that me, another Office 365 (Exchange online)

Well if it's for a company I would not take the risk of moving data like that... Javier, you're planning a tenant to tenant migration and this is a real job (Making the alias is not a big deal). Of course, my advice is biased but I would recommend this tool -> Tenant migration video tutorial  - It's worth your time and your project would be finished by the end of the week. And you could go back to the beach and enjoy a fruity cocktail :)

 

At least try the free trial it costs 0 and you can migrate up to a certain limit of data.