How MVP Mark Rackley delivers faster, smarter Microsoft 365 projects by partnering with ShareGate 

Microsoft MVP and consultant Mark Rackley shares how he uses ShareGate as a key part of his project delivery toolkit. From simplifying large-scale migrations to improving governance and preparing clients for Copilot, Mark explains how ShareGate helps him deliver value quickly and predictably—without overcomplicating the stack.

If you’re a partner navigating tight budgets, evolving client needs, or the pressure to deliver fast, this interview highlights the practical ways ShareGate supports smarter, scalable Microsoft 365 projects. Watch each clip and explore Mark’s insights on why ShareGate is his go-to, and how it can help you streamline your services too.

Let’s start off really basic. Can you tell us about the company you work for and your role there?

I work for a company called Protiviti. I’ve only been there for about six months, and I'm the Director of their Microsoft practice. My main focus is to help grow that practice—making sure we’re creating the right offerings for our clients.

We do Microsoft consulting services, and we’re also strong in the auditing and security space—that's really how the company built its name. Now we’re expanding the Microsoft side of the business. Protiviti operates in 29 countries with 90 office locations, so it’s a fun company to be a part of.

What I really like is that they’re always asking, “Where should we go next?” They’re looking for the right path forward, and I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time to help them grow.

Especially now—it’s the season of Copilot. And the team’s really looking to me to help figure out what that means from a practice perspective. Everyone’s offering deployment services, but what’s the next layer? What’s the deeper offering?

It’s great that they’ve given me the opportunity to define that—what our offerings should be and how we should structure them. It’s an exciting space to be in.

When was your first time using ShareGate?

I have no idea the first time I used ShareGate. It's just, it's always been there.

It feels like they created SharePoint and then ShareGate was just magically there with it. It's been many years because I connected to SharePoint 2007, so it's been that long at least. So it's been a long time.

"It feels like they created SharePoint and then ShareGate was just magically there with it."

What are problems that you're seeing with your clients right now that have you looking for specific tools?

What we're really looking at doing and what's really driving us for a lot of those conversations is value. Because everyone's looking at how can they save money and not spend money they don't have to. Especially with Copilot and that $30 per user per month, clients are just being so price conscious.

"We don't go into a client anymore asking, 'Which tool should we use?' The question we would ask is, 'Why would we not use ShareGate?'"

But I mean luckily with with ShareGate, it's never a huge uplift to say, here's a tool that can check all these check boxes:

• Modes that make it run faster so that we can get the big jobs done sooner.
• It migrates all the content types, not just files.
• It has all the bells and whistles you need.

For the amount of content it migrates and for the value that it offers, it's typically a no brainer.

We don't go into a client anymore—sorry for any of the partners that are listening—asking, "Which tool should we use?" The question we would ask is, "Why would we not use ShareGate?"

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We've recently added Copilot Readiness Assessment to ShareGate. Is that something that you could see yourself using with clients?

Absolutely. I don't know much about your new Copilot Readiness Assessment, so I'd love to learn more about it.

One of the main concerns that our clients are facing is that readiness. What content is out there? What stale content is out there? What content's overshared? What should we do to help clean it up? And having tools out there that can do that would be helpful.

Microsoft has tools that can do that, but most of them come with some sort of price tag. They recently announced that SharePoint Advanced Management is actually included now in your Copilot license, which I think is a good deal to help with the beginnings of that assessment. But it's very much the beginning. It helps you maybe identify that stuff, but then you still have to remediate it all.

You still have to dig deeper to find out that maybe it's not just that site that was already shared, maybe there are some files in there that need to be secured.

So there's this great opportunity for someone to create an easy-to-use tool—which I think you're kind of known for—that allows you to report on what you have, dig into it deeper, and take action on it to help keep things clean. And if that can be worked in with a migration tool, maybe this would be a great opportunity to use a migration tool to help you actually archive some of that content.

So I just think in that landscape of what can be done, it would absolutely be an add on.

With more organizations rolling out Copilot, do you think adoption is an even bigger priority for organizations in 2025?

Absolutely. I mean, especially with things like Copilot, it's only as good as your content.

And I don't think people fully grasp that. That if you have bad content, if you've got old content, if you've got content that's not being updated, it is going to hurt your adoption because you're never going to get good responses from Copilot. Or you're going to get good responses sometimes and bad responses other times. So, it's critical to Copilot adoption to be able to to keep everything organized and clean in the right workspace.

Have you ever had a client question the value of ShareGate?

It has probably been years since I've had a client question the use of ShareGate. But that's a fantastic question because I want to think about it.

But it's a no. It's just part of the invoice.

In these large migrations where there's some technical work involved, there's a lot of modernization work happening now where we're having to recreate functionality that they had before that they must have again. We've got to get that content migrated, sometimes consolidated into a single SharePoint site.

And so putting ShareGate as a line item in this Statement of Work saying, "Here's what it's gonna cost you," I've never had a client say to me, "Wait. What's this? Why should we pay for that?"

"It has probably been years since I've had a client question the use of ShareGate."

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