With this release, we’ve made it easier for you to perform Teams migrations in increments, and you can now also migrate a new Teams object: Planner plans!
With Microsoft Teams now being the most used product in Microsoft 365, ensuring your end users have everything they need to be productive in Teams is critical. Helping you get your Teams environment just right so people in your organization can work without skipping a beat is our top priority at ShareGate.
Get the full picture: here’s exactly how the ShareGate SharePoint Migration tool compares to Microsoft’s SPMT
That’s why we’ve been spending a lot of time improving our Microsoft Teams migration tool to cover every possible use case that you might have. From migrating a whole Teams environment from one tenant to another after a merger or an acquisition to moving just a few channels between teams, our goal is to help you move exactly what you want, right where you need it as quickly and as easily as possible.
With ShareGate 15.0, we’re adding two new capabilities that will make your Teams migrations even smoother.
Here’s what’s new with ShareGate 15.0:
Migrate Microsoft Teams incrementally
We know that when you’re in the middle of a migration, it’s not really possible for you to ask end-users to stop working in Teams until you’re done with moving their content to a new location. As you’re performing migrations, people just keep on working. And if their new environment isn’t ready yet, people will just keep on using their old one, which obviously makes your life more complicated.
That’s why we’re excited to launch incremental migrations, which means you’ll now be able to copy only what’s changed since your last Teams migration. So, if Mike, Ana, and Stu continued to chat in Teams and work on documents while you were migrating their team or channel elsewhere, you’ll be able to schedule another migration to bring over that new conversation plus whatever else changed since your last migration, like updates they made to documents.
How it works
Running an incremental Teams migration with ShareGate is really simple. First, pick the completed migration task for which you want to do an incremental migration for.
Second, click on Start incremental copy and pick the teams and channels you want to copy changes for.
Run your migration—and that’s it.
ShareGate will update your destination with changes made at the source since your last migration. Those changes include:
- New chat messages and new replies to messages that were posted prior to the initial migration
- New documents, changes to existing documents, and changes to document libraries or their settings
- Changes to the team’s settings and configuration
- Changes to membership (members, owners, and permissions)
- Changes to channels (new settings or configuration)
- Changes to the team’s Planner plans (updated tasks, new tasks, and plans)
- Changes to tabs and apps (new ones and name changes)
That way, you’ll be able to copy new source items that don’t exist at the destination, replace items at the destination with their most recent version from the source based on their last modified date, and finally overwrite items with the same name, unless versioning is enabled which will add a new version at the destination.
It’s important to note that ShareGate never deletes anything at the destination. So, if someone deletes a channel at the source after your initial migration, that channel won’t be deleted at the destination when you perform your next incremental migration.
Incremental Teams migration will also make correcting migration errors way easier. From your migration report, you’ll be able to see which teams and channels had errors and how to fix them. Once you’ve fixed those errors, you’ll be able to run an incremental migration for just those items, speeding up your migration.
Check out our incremental Teams copy documentation to learn more about how it works, exactly what is copied, and its limitations.
Migrate a team’s Planner plans
Microsoft Planner gives people a great visual way to organize teamwork, delegate tasks, manage deadlines, and follow up on projects more efficiently. It’s a no-brainer to migrate planner data when you’re migrating Teams, which was not possible until now with ShareGate.
We are happy to finally be able to support this object as part of your Teams migration, just like you can copy chat conversation history, private and standard channels, files, tabs, and more.
How it works
When you migrate teams and channels, you have two choices for how you want to copy them at the destination. This will have an impact on which Planner plans will be copied.
- If you’re copying a team as a new team at the destination, every single plan that is attached to that Microsoft 365 group will be migrated over. So, if you’re migrating the Marketing team from tenant A to tenant B as a new team, all of Marketing’s plans will be copied in the new tenant.
- If you’re copying a team’s channels into an existing team, only the plans that have been added as a tab in one of those channels will be migrated over. So, if you’re migrating the Product team’s “Feature launch” channel into the Marketing team, only the plans that have been used in a tab in that channel will be brought over to the existing team.
When you copy over a Planner plan, ShareGate copies its buckets and its tasks, along with the order that they are presented in. It copies updates on tasks along with assignees and timestamps. Comments are also copied, but to speed up migrations and to avoid a large number of notifications going out to users as we copy plans, all comments will be aggregated under a single one.
Here’s an example of what a copied plan will look like at the destination:
Read our Teams Planner migration documentation to understand exactly how it works and grasp its limitations.
A quick refresher on all the Teams objects you can migrate with ShareGate
Here’s the full list of objects you’re able to copy when you’re migrating a team with ShareGate:
- Teams settings and descriptions
- Membership (owners and members)
- Permissions
- Conversation history (including sender, threaded messages, links and timestamps)
- Standard and private channels
- Lists
- Files (along with their history and metadata)
- Tabs
- Default wiki pages
- OneNote
- Planner plans
- Apps and bots (those available in the Teams App Store)
- SharePoint site customizations
Want to migrate more workloads associated with Microsoft Teams? Let us know!
Here at ShareGate, we’re always open to your feedback on how we could improve our software. Help us build the best Teams migration tool out there by letting us know what you need.
Got another workload associated with Teams that you’d like to migrate? We’d love to hear about it! Submit your idea on our suggestion forum or vote for your favorite one.
Not a ShareGate customer yet? Sign up for your free ShareGate 15-day trial!
Put your Microsoft Teams management on autopilot with your ShareGate subscription
Your ShareGate subscription makes it easy for you to migrate, manage, and secure Microsoft Teams. Once you’ve structured your Teams environment the way you want it with ShareGate, you can manage your teams across their entire lifecycle and protect their contents post-migration with ShareGate, our automated governance platform for Microsoft Teams.
If you’re a ShareGate user, your subscription also gives you full access to ShareGate at no extra cost! Activate your ShareGate account by signing in here. Make sure to have your ShareGate license key handy—you’ll need it to complete your activation.
By activating ShareGate, you’re ensuring the ongoing success of your Teams deployment through simple and automated governance policies.
