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How to migrate OneNote.one from existing teant to another tenant?

Brass Contributor

We migrated over 200 users to their own O365 tenant with a third-party tools called "Share Gate". It was mainly used to migrate each user’s old ODFB location (source Office 365 tenant) to their new ODFB location (destination Office 365 tenant) for each user. The only down side is that the migration tool migrates an original .one notebook from the source to the destination ODFB by creating a folder with the same name as the name of the original .one notebook title and then separates all the sections that were in the original .one notebook and places them in the folder as their own separate .one files. To explain better, here is an example: "Instead of one .one notebook named "8th grade classroom" containing 10 sections each containing one students name on that section. There is now a folder called "8th grade classroom" and 10 separate .one files, each with one of those student’s name on it."


Please let me know if you need a better explanation. We still have access to the original full OneNote .one notebooks if we need to move them a different way. Though we currently can't figure out a way to move them and have them show up in the user's new ODFB location as they did in the user's old ODFB, a complete One Note notebook.

In testing we tried to export the OneNote notebooks to a .onepkg but when I opened the .onepkg in the user's new ODFB location, I was unable to use it in the OneNote online editor which is the whole reason that users and teachers created these OneNote files. No matter what I did the .onepkg would try to open the file in the OneNote 2016 desktop application. We can't seem to find a way to just download the notebook and upload it to its new location like an excel spreadsheet. We can't manually create new OneNote notebooks for each of the 200 users since each user has multiple .one Notebooks. A manual approach will not suffice. Please let us know if were are doing something incorrectly or a solution to get these .one file to move as a whole to each users new ODFB location.

I felt like I needed to rewrite my original email as it didn't explain the problem well enough. If needed I can provide "before and after" screen shots if seeing what we are experiencing would help us figure this out.

14 Replies
Not necessarily the answer you are looking for but maybe worth looking into. It was not in mass, but I was manually moving one of our user's old notebooks from their OneDrive Personal account to their OneDrive for Business account (we were on Live@edu which used Microsoft Accounts and SkyDrive before the migration/upgrade of Live@edu to O365 for Education). It was a manual process of saving the OneNote notebook in the OneNote desktop client to the local synced OD4B folder location. The OneNote 2016 desktop client wouldn't let me directly share/move the notebook to O365 as it kept falling back to consumer/Microsoft Account authentication.

Up to this point the scenario is different that your, but just as you noted in your experience, this notebook was displayed online in OD4B as a separate table of contents file with a separate files for each section. I opened the table of contents file online and it was a little slow opening up each of the sections, but it did. I didn't document my exact next steps, but I had given up on combining the files into one view online (I know online that it is still actually a folder with multiple files contained within but to the end user, it looks like a single file online and also if "synced" back to the desktop as a special shortcut).

What happened at some point in the next hour or less is what might interest you. I logged back on to OD4B online and the notebook "Folder" containing the separate files had "Converted" itself to a single OneDrive file. I'm not sure if it was a process that occured automatically or if it was because i opened the TOC and sections online or if it had to do with opening the notebook in my desktop OneNote 2016, but something flipped a switch in the online few and made it display just as you are wishing.

You might test a little bit more with your migrated notebooks and see if you can determine if the same will occur for you users' notebooks.

Thank You for your response. I was in a hurry Friday so after I read what I posted I thought it might not not of explained myself clearly. I am going to try your potential solution because if it works we can create a document for each end user to follow. I am gong to edit my original post to make it flow better and more readable. I will let you know if what you did works for me in my testing. Thanks again for the response!

I have figured this out in two different ways on how to migrate these One Note .one files from an old O365 tenant ODFB location to new ODFB in a totally separate tenant. I will only post the easier way since it took me using the harder way to figure out the easier way. It's easy to overlook how to do the migration as a whole file instead of a folder with separate .one files within. which is what happend the first time I tried to do this. It took me most of yesterday and today to finally figure this out. I'll be posting my full solution in the next day or two as soon as I have the documentation ready. I think others will find this migration method very helpful. If you find flaws in it, please let me know as I have tested it at least 10 time and it seems to be a solid solution.

@Richard - I look forward to your solution.
best response confirmed by rdza (Brass Contributor)
Solution

I have attached step on how to do this migration that worked for me. Good luck!

Rich,

 

We've always handled any movement of OneNote to/from SharePoint by opening both files in the OneNote client then moving the sections 1 by 1 into the new location, while it's quite long winded I'm not sure that it's not quicker than your process, and also allows you to merge together old and new content into one notebook.

I have added an updated document to this post that has some process change and corrected spelling and grammar mistakes fixed. This is close to a final draft. I need fresh eyes to point out any mistake you see the I may have missed. Please mark as an accepted resolution if you couldn't find any mistakes. Thank you.

@Scott Fouts @Steven Collier @Jared Pickerell I have added my solution to a nice document. Please check if it works for you. For some reason I can't delete the first document I uploaded as I uploaded a better version this morning. Don't use the one that is Microsoft verified use the one that was most recently uploaded.

best response confirmed by rdza (Brass Contributor)
Solution

Here is my final Draft for these steps. These steps are so you don't as a sys admin have don't have to move 20 sections out of one Notebook into a whole new one when a user has 20 notebooks with 30 sections for each notebook. These steps are to move a full Notebook with all sections intact from one One Drive location to another One Drive location in Office 365. I was able to move 30 notebooks within less than 15 -20 min. Where recreating them would have taken hours. Hope this helps someone else. Thanks @Steven Collier for you input.

Maybe it's the update to the forums, but I cannot see your attachment at all, just a paperclip that it exists?

The document link is actually down the bottom of the reply. The visuals are very confusing with the paper clip at the top of the reply.

Thanks for that! The bundle method does look better than the page by page approach.

@Rich Drzaz amazing piece of content, thank you so much for sharing this workaround, it worked perfectly on my end. You would think Microsoft would have a more elegant solution for this but... no, unfortunately! Thanks again, much appreciated!

2 best responses

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by rdza (Brass Contributor)
Solution

I have attached step on how to do this migration that worked for me. Good luck!

View solution in original post

best response confirmed by rdza (Brass Contributor)
Solution

Here is my final Draft for these steps. These steps are so you don't as a sys admin have don't have to move 20 sections out of one Notebook into a whole new one when a user has 20 notebooks with 30 sections for each notebook. These steps are to move a full Notebook with all sections intact from one One Drive location to another One Drive location in Office 365. I was able to move 30 notebooks within less than 15 -20 min. Where recreating them would have taken hours. Hope this helps someone else. Thanks @Steven Collier for you input.

View solution in original post