How to migrate SharePoint from one tenant to another

To migrate SharePoint from one tenant to another without disturbing workflows, organizations need a well-defined action plan. Additionally, it is crucial to understand how to migrate SharePoint sites between different tenants effectively. ShareGate’s easy-to-use migration tool lets you leverage automation to migrate data with minimal issues.  

Whether it’s because of a merger, acquisition or rebranding, when you’re going through an organizational restructuring that involves migrating a SharePoint site to another tenant, you need to account for every project detail to transfer seamlessly and maintain productivity. 

Here, we break down the entire cross-tenant SharePoint migration process and give you best practices to avoid unnecessary bumps along the way and stay organized. Let’s begin! 

What is a cross-tenant SharePoint migration?

A SharePoint Online tenant migration involves moving the users, resources, and data in your SharePoint sites from one SharePoint tenant, known as the ‘source tenant’ to another, known as the ‘target tenant.’  

When planning for a tenant-to-tenant migration, you need to create a roadmap before the transition that outlines your approach to the migration process. Once it’s done, follow up with a post-migration report to validate the migration process. 

Playbook

Tenant-to-tenant migrations

How to efficiently plan and execute migrations for mergers & acquisitions or a reorganization.

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5 steps for a SharePoint Online tenant to tenant migration

Follow these five simple steps to make the transition a breeze: 

1. Pre-migration 

During the planning stage, consider everything, including: 

What needs migrating: Conduct a detailed audit to inventory your existing SharePoint Online content and identify which source site elements will move to the destination site: content, metadata, site collections, workflows, files and folders, file shares, Teams channels, messages, OneDrive, etc.  

This should include determining the size and total number of elements, so nothing gets left behind! 

Required resources: Assess which human resources, tools, or other resources you need for an effective migration. Consider using third-party tools to simplify and streamline the migration process to preserve data integrity and reduce downtime. 

Required effort and time: Estimate the workload and timeframe for your tenant migration process. 

Your checklist: Cataloguing each action step helps everyone track your progress. Unsure how to create your checklist? We’ve got you covered! Our SharePoint migration checklist outlines how to deploy faster from pre- to post-migration. 

Migration projects made easy

A thorough SharePoint migration checklist

Reduce downtime. Deploy faster. Crucial checkpoints, practical advices, and pro tips to help you master your migration.

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2. Clean up your data

Before you start, it’s extremely important to correct existing issues and fix any warnings or errors to prevent problems during the live migration. 

3. Get ready and prep users

Schedule your migration: Set a time and date for your cross-tenant SharePoint migration event when it least impacts end users. 

Communicate to all users: When conducting any migration, update all concerned users beforehand to keep them in the loop.  

Enable read-only mode for all migrated resources: This is crucial for preserving data integrity! 

4. Migrate SharePoint Online

Finally, it’s time to start your migration. Even though you’ve planned everything thoroughly, you can still encounter hiccups in the migration process. Common SharePoint migration issues include invalid source folder or folder name, duplicate task errors, etc. 

You can easily tackle these issues with ShareGate Migrate, our end-to-end migration solution. Built for this very purpose, it lets you sit back and relax while it automates the migration process and handles any complex administration. 

5. Post-migration

Test and validate: Once you’re done, test and validate your new SharePoint environment to avoid post-migration errors. ShareGate’s automated reporting simplifies validation, giving quick information about successfully and unsuccessfully migrated items.  

Check with end users: Ask impacted users to check whether all their content moved successfully. 

Monitor the source data: Even after migration, store source data for a few months, in the worst-case scenario of missing data. 

You can also simplify management of your new SharePoint environment and all Microsoft 365 data with ShareGate Protect, a governance tool that safeguards your environment against security threats. 

Best practices to enhance your SharePoint tenant migration process 

Keep workflows undisturbed 

60% of Microsoft 365 groups have an attached team. When migrating a SharePoint tenant, take along any associated content stored in Teams as well as your SharePoint site content, so that everyone has what they need post-migration. It is crucial to ensure data integrity when migrating to a new tenant to avoid any disruptions. 

Leverage ShareGate’s incremental copy feature 

ShareGate’s incremental copy feature speeds up the entire migration process and prevents users from overwriting newer files at the destination site.  

With this feature, you can examine a file at both the source and destination to see if it needs updating. It will then update the data if a destination file is missing or is outdated compared to the source. 

Don’t worry, it’s not an exact syncing feature. If you delete a file at the source, you won’t delete it at the destination. 

Harness unlimited content management and data 

Post-migration, you need a structure to manage your SharePoint site content.  

With ShareGate Migrate and Protect, you can easily take everything with you and manage it too.  

You can organize your SharePoint site content according to organizational needs using our robust SharePoint content management features, such as: 

Drag and drop: Move content anytime and anywhere with ShareGate’s easy-to-use interface that lets you transfer lists, libraries, workflows, sites, and more, hassle-free. 

Bulk editing: Save time when restructuring or organizing content by bulk editing document permissions, metadata, and file structures. 

Unlimited migrations: Retain control of content management by moving as much data as you want, whenever you want. The best part? No extra costs! 

Accelerated migrations: Install ShareGate on multiple workstations to enable concurrent migrations and mitigate throttling to ensure you complete your migration on time. 

What’s the best tool for migrating a SharePoint site to another tenant?

The truth is, you’ll inevitably face issues trying to migrate a SharePoint site from one tenant to another with traditional tools such as Microsoft PowerShell.

Tenant migrations can be especially tricky with multiple site collections. Luckily, a SharePoint migration tool like ShareGate Migrate makes moving a SharePoint site to another tenant a piece of cake.  

You can simplify any Microsoft 365 migration project from day one with a single, trusted end-to-end solution that accelerates your migration from planning through to adoption. 

Want to learn more about cross-tenant SharePoint migration? We’ve written a lot on this subject! This popular article covers two ways to migrate from one tenant to another.