Given that Microsoft Teams has more than 300 million monthly active users, it may now be the most widely used Microsoft collaboration tool. Every day at business, partners, and clients utilize Microsoft Teams. I frequently get inquiries about moving Teams in my capacity as a product manager for content migration tools. Due to this extensive use, Microsoft Teams migration is now essential for every tenant-to-tenant transfer. As a result, I created a list of the top 10 things to accomplish for a successful Teams transfer.
Finding out about your source tenancy is one of the first steps in a team migration. This can assist you in estimating the scope of your migration project and locating any particular requirements for planning. The Teams Administration Center (shown in the picture below) is where certain information may be gathered.
The logical place to start would be to examine the number of active teams on the source tenants.
The size of Teams content is challenging to obtain as Teams content is generally kept in multiple storage locations.
However, it is recommended to identify Teams with over 1TB of SharePoint content and/or 1000s of channel conversation messages. These Teams often take more time to migrate than others, which are smaller in size.
I also recommend identifying the use of private and shared channels and the count of Planner tasks.
Make a migration strategy.
Making sure the below actions are carried out will assist in creating a migration strategy for your project:
Determine the dependence on migrations of other workloads (such as Mail and OneDrive).
As a last step, prepare to move Teams private conversations. Only recently used conversations (older than 30 days) could be migrated, with the rest being archived.
Prior to moving private conversations, provision and migrate the OneDrive sites. The Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder in OneDrive houses the files from private conversations and Teams sessions. If the OneDrive sites are not provided, the files are not transferred.
after a Teams migration, transferring team membership. You would have the most recent membership if you did this.
To prevent being throttled, take into account the migration throughput limitations.
Make the target ready.
The target tenant has to be ready once the plan is in place. There are various steps involved in getting the target tenant ready for migration. Some (but not all) of the preparation-related activities are listed below:
Set up migration accounts with the proper access levels.
Establish target user accounts with Teams licenses.
From source users to target users, create a user mapping.
To utilize Teams, the target users must have a license.
OneDrive sites should be moved at least once.
Provide teams with 24 hours notice.
Determine what cannot be moved
Due to API constraints, some team components and content cannot be moved. The following are a few potential restrictions:
Wiki Pages – because new Teams do not utilize them.
It may be best to avoid changing Education Teams’ structure and content because doing so is difficult.
Configuring web components and using site home pages both provide some difficulties.
For material that hasn’t yet been moved, you cannot establish a tab on a Teams channel.
Set Users’ Expectations
Users frequently have their own expectations and presumptions. Inform consumers of:
The migrations can take longer than expected to finish.
Each workload’s material is not maintained up to date between renters.
Migrations of chat are slow.
Files that are checked out are not moved.
Give your users’ chat migrations top priority.
Counting the number of messages is one of the main problems with private chat migrations. The typical user has roughly 3500 chat messages, according to recent private chat migrations using Quest’s migration tools. Throughput performance is significantly influenced by the quantity of messages.
Prioritize writing the most recent user messages to the live chat while planning your chat migrations. After that, export the rest of the chat conversations to an archive (such an HTML file). Users that need to migrate their communications for business continuity, legal or regulatory reasons should be given priority. Other users’ messages might not be as important while migrating.
Prepare to Move Private and Shared Channels
The Team provisions general channels as part of its provisioning. However, private and shared channels must also be provided, and this process might take an additional 24 hours (and occasionally longer). The only shared channel that may be established is the first one. There are no supplied shared channels in any of the other Teams. Other shared channels that already exist in other Teams must be shared and built from scratch, along with any special permissions.
As a result, you should schedule extra time for providing. Additionally, you can get migration-related warnings that show the private or shared channels are not yet accessible.
Decide on the migration order
The option of order is frequently between a cutover (Big Bang) and a gradual migration. However, there is a slight catch with the Teams migrations. Organizations often decide whether to migrate whole Teams one at a time or to migrate each individual piece of information across all Teams.
By migrating complete Teams one at a time, you are giving priority to each Team’s material being fully moved. If you need to rapidly set up some Teams on the target so that users may begin viewing the material on the target tenancy, then this makes sense. Additionally, while planning, you might want to refrain from doing incremental migrations on Teams content.
The second strategy is employed when moving the workloads—SharePoint content, channel messages, and Planner plans—is the top priority. For big companies that utilize Planner frequently, this strategy makes sense. Since they could need to change the migration account during the transfer, they will want to move all of the Planner plans for all Teams at once. A single account is only permitted to generate so many Planner tasks. Therefore, it is best to migrate Planner all at once and transfer accounts afterward.
