It seems that every week I am having conversations with more schools that are wanting to explore how they can reduce their on-premise servers and leverage the power and flexibility of the cloud more effectively. These conversations usually follow a similar narrative, identifying the “low hanging fruit” – in other words, which servers/services are easiest to migrate first.
The answer almost invariably is local network file shares, and migrating data into SharePoint Online libraries is the easiest and most cost effective way of achieving this. Happily, Microsoft have recently announced the new, first party SharePoint Migration Tool which schools can use to easily migrate both on-premise SharePoint libraries and local network shares to the cloud.
Download Preview of SharePoint Migration Tool
For a video introduction and overview of how this new tool works, please see below:
This is going to be a fantastic aid for schools to accelerate their move to Cloud services and I encourage you to read the full announcement here. Some key links include:
- How to use the SharePoint Migration Tool
- How the SharePoint Migration Tool works
- How to format your CSV file for data content migration
- Create a user mapping file for data content migration
- SharePoint Online and OneDrive Migration Speed SharePoint Online provided Azure containers and queues for SPO Migration API
Just a reminder that this tool is still currently in Preview so take the usual precautions when using this (recommend a test environment first before launching into your production environment). I expect the functionality will also improve over time, however the ease of the tool currently is what I expect will attract a lot of schools to it. Pleasingly, there is the ability to have more complex workloads included as well through the use of CSV and API.