Are you ready to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365?

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and to reflect current Microsoft 365 terminology and products.

TL;DR: Moving from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365 is one of the easier paths. But sort out your identities (AD FS, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Entra Connect), inventory everything, and tag each item Remove, Migrate, or Rebuild before you start.

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What does it take to migrate on-premises SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365? There are a few things you need to understand and plan for before you upgrade SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365.

While sitting on a panel at a SharePoint conference, I heard a very good question: "We're on SharePoint 2010 and are planning to go to SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365. Is there anything we should do to get ready?"

I imagine the person who asked the question isn't the only one in this situation. As Microsoft 365 becomes more and more appealing, those still on SharePoint 2010 will eventually find themselves facing a similar dilemma.

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Sort out your identities first

Coming from SharePoint 2010 is a good scenario when moving to Microsoft 365. There aren't that many potential issues to watch out for, although there are some important things you should know.

We have to look at what we're going to use for our identity store. SharePoint 2010 on-premises uses your Active Directory to see users and groups, as well as for authentication. Of course, you may have set up SharePoint differently. But in most situations, that's what's going on.

So before even starting a SharePoint upgrade, we have to figure out what we're going to do with this. There was another very interesting question at this same panel: what's the difference between AD FS, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Entra Connect, and Microsoft 365 users?

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AD FS

‍Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is a secure tunnel between your on-premises servers and your Microsoft 365 environment. The purpose of this tunnel is to keep all your users, and the management of identities, in your own Active Directory.

In short, Microsoft 365 trusts this tunnel and can therefore offload identity management and authentication to your servers. Technically that's not exactly what's happening, but you can think about it that way in order to better understand it. The downside of AD FS is that it requires a server to install and set up.

Microsoft Entra ID‍

If you don't know this already, Microsoft 365 is really just a brand that packages a bunch of cloud services together under one roof, one licensing model, and one administration console. When you create new Microsoft 365 users, they're actually created in Microsoft Entra ID—the cloud identity service tied to your tenant. (You might know this by its old name, Azure Active Directory; Microsoft renamed it to Microsoft Entra ID.) This is the scenario for all organizations that don't use AD FS and simply create users directly in Microsoft 365. The downside here is that if you also have an on-premises environment, you now have two places to manage users and passwords.

Microsoft Entra Connect

That's why there's something called Microsoft Entra Connect (you may remember its ancestor, DirSync which is now retired and no longer works). Microsoft Entra Connect essentially syncs your users from your on-premises Active Directory, along with some properties and, if you want, a password hash (it's not the actual password being copied), into Microsoft Entra ID. It's easier to set up than AD FS, but it still means your users live in two locations — and on its own, that's not single sign-on, it's "same sign-on."

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Before you upgrade from SharePoint 2010, you should understand what you're going to do with your identities, because you're not simply upgrading SharePoint—you're also going to the cloud. It's worth looking at how to connect Microsoft 365 to your Active Directory before upgrading, so you can see how it's done in the console and on your servers.

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Inventory everything you have

Even if I told you everything that doesn't migrate well from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365, if you don't know what you have or where it lives in your environment, then it's useless information.

Your SharePoint inventory is crucial for this upgrade, but in my opinion it goes way beyond just this project on your hands. You should always keep a detailed inventory of SharePoint to help you better manage it in the future.

Where are all the sites that have workflows, the lists with custom content types, and the pages with Content Editor Web Parts? We need to know who the site owners are so we can go talk to them and ask relevant questions.

There are some ways to inventory SharePoint:

• ‍Third-party tools: If there's a need for something in SharePoint, you can bet someone has built something to help with it. The ecosystem is large, and you can easily find something to help you. Obviously I work for ShareGate, so the one I'll recommend is our own migration and governance tool for Microsoft 365, since it doesn't require any server install and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. You can try it out for free. That said, I do recommend you check out all the different tools out there that can inventory your SharePoint, so you can find the one that's right for you.‍
• PowerShell: PowerShell is extremely powerful and can do your inventory for free. The downside is you need to know how to properly use it. But it can be done.

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Rethink, don’t just migrate

With search, Viva Engage, and the wider Microsoft 365 experience now working closely with SharePoint, you can't simply copy-paste what you had. Some things will work differently, and others will need to work differently to provide value to you. That's why this is the perfect time to change things while you upgrade.

You'll see the value of the inventory you built immediately during this process. Let me give you our secret here at ShareGate when migrating any environment to Microsoft 365.

We've implemented a model we've found to work very well: "RMR," aka Remove, Migrate, or Rebuild.

We essentially tag items in our inventory with one of these three actions, helping us understand what we'll need to Remove, Migrate, or Rebuild during the upgrade.

Of course, you can change these words to include other actions that make sense for your scenario. But we don't stop there—heavily influenced by SCRUM in the way we work, we also assign a "point" from 1 to 10 that represents the effort required to complete each action.

For example: if I have a site in my inventory that we've tagged as "Rebuild"—and I know it has a lot of customizations and there will be some unknowns in Microsoft 365—well, I'll also tag it with an 8 or even a 9 with my upgrade team. This way I can always set milestones and expectations by saying, "In the next three months we'll be able to do a total of 50 points. Which ones from the inventory would you like me to tackle?"

Of course, this is from the perspective of a consultant, but it works just as well internally. Once again, building the inventory is extremely important.

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Make the switch

It doesn't have to be an overnight thing. SharePoint has the advantage of being a web platform; it's all hyperlinks, and you can create your own.

What I mean by that is that even if one side is SharePoint 2010 on-premises and the other is Microsoft 365, the user won't know and won't care. Look at what needs to be done; maybe you can do the migration over the weekend, or maybe it'll take a few months—just remember, they don't have to live separately.

Luckily enough, the upgrade from SharePoint 2010 isn't a hard one in terms of technical features. What you need to watch out for, other than the items mentioned earlier, are things like customizations through code, workflows, and Content Editor Web Parts that hold content they were never meant to.

Usually it's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that you'll find in there, and it simply doesn't play well after the upgrade. Oh, and yes—you can forget about that beautiful design you built in SharePoint 2010. That's not going to follow you.