Put your M365 migration in full throttle: 3 biggest takeaways

Get expert tips to accelerate your migrations and learn about ShareGate’s new and upcoming feature releases in our recap from our recent event.

Did you know that according to ShareGate’s research, the average Microsoft 365 migration takes nine months longer than anticipated? That’s nearly an extra year of business disruption, not to mention paying for Microsoft 365 without getting to leverage all the benefits it offers.  

That’s why we wanted to host an event to help IT pros learn how to accelerate their migrations, particularly with ShareGate.  

During the first half of Put your M365 migration in full throttle, the ShareGate team covered ShareGate’s migration and security features, upcoming releases, and how to use multiple machines to migrate concurrently—while mitigating throttling. We also introduced our new end-user Microsoft 365 training to help increase adoption.  

The second half featured a video chat with one of our partners, Maggi Honda. Maggi is a Senior Principal Microsoft Consultant at CDW, where she leads a team of engineers that scopes and executes Microsoft migrations for their clients. She shared her experiences leading Microsoft migrations using ShareGate, followed by a Q&A with the audience. 

Read and watch on to get the highlights, or you can watch the recording of the event anytime. 

1. How to put your Microsoft 365 migration in full throttle, without the throttling

The main highlight of our event was when Lisa Webber—Senior Product Marketing Manager at ShareGate—walked us through concurrent migrations. Lisa explained what concurrent migrations are, what the value of using them is, and how to run them while avoiding throttling.  

While everything Lisa said was important, a few of our favorite moments were her discussion of the benefits of concurrent migration—namely how you can reduce downtime, reduce costs, accelerate data transfer, use resources more efficiently, and get value from Microsoft 365 faster—and her explanation of how to use ShareGate to mitigate throttling. 

ShareGate facilitates concurrent migrations with specialized licensing that doesn’t require a separate license for each machine as most tools would. The ShareGate Migrate Pro plan provides up to 5 machine activations for less than the price of two individual license activations! 

2. Advice from a Microsoft 365 migration expert

At ShareGate, we have a lot of long-time users, which is something we take a lot of pride in. But we don’t have many users who have performed more than 1,000 migrations. That’s just one of the reasons why we were so excited to have Maggi Honda join us to talk about migrations during our event. 

Maggi is a Senior Principal Microsoft Consultant at CDW, and she leads a team of engineers that helps their clients run complex Microsoft migrations. Maggi’s been using ShareGate for over a decade and over 1,000 migrations. 

One of the main pieces of advice Maggi gave was that the most important stage of any migration is the assessment: 

“We always do a pre-assessment, so they understand how long it’s going to take to migrate … then we do a deep dive assessment. It is essential to understand how bad it is. Did they install in 2010 the fab 40 that Microsoft never intended to migrate? How many webparts do they have? I’ve had clients who say, ‘I have no webparts, we’re clean!’ and then I find 100 webparts.” 

Maggi explained that one of the reasons the assessment is so crucial is because people often don’t know what’s in their environment. Whether it’s because the person who set up the system is no longer with the company or you’re dealing with a merger or acquisition, most IT teams don’t have full visibility into what they have in their tenant.  

You don’t want to move old, orphaned, inactive, and irrelevant data to your new tenant. That’s why Maggi loves ShareGate’s assessment capabilities. She said that most people view ShareGate solely as a migration solution, but she uses it as an assessment and management solution as well. 

Migrations can get complex, especially if you’re migrating from an old version of SharePoint on-prem—which a lot of people will be doing this year with Microsoft’s announcement that it will end support for all SharePoint on-prem in 2026—or you’re merging multiple tenants into one.

The theme that kept coming up was assessment, assessment, assessment. The more you can clean up and organize before you migrate, the smoother and faster your migration will be, and the easier it will be for your end users to function in their new environment.

3. ShareGate’s new end-user Microsoft 365 training

ShareGate is always looking for ways to help make life easier for IT pros. Elle Crosby, Senior Content Producer at ShareGate, explains why we felt it was so important to add turnkey Microsoft 365 training for end users to our offering.  

Change management is a real challenge for anyone managing a migration project. Employees are often busy or uninterested in learning about new tools. The problem is , low adoption can lead to drops in productivity, poor collaboration, increased clutter, and security risks. 

But the responsibility is falling on IT teams to oversee their organization’s adoption—even though it’s not really in their team’s core competency to create and deliver training.   

Now, ShareGate can help you get your organization up to speed, hands free. 

Not only will your IT team not have to set up weekly lunch and learns, but your job will be easier if your end users know what they’re doing in Microsoft 365.  

Your environment will have less clutter, there will be fewer tickets for help with basic Microsoft 365 tasks, and—as a pretty big bonus—company data will be safer in the hands of upskilled users who are less likely to accidentally share sensitive information or resort to shadow IT.  

Did you know that Microsoft says 80% of employees use shadow IT?  

Why do so many employees use shadow IT instead of the tools IT so painstakingly set up for them? Because most people prefer to stick to the tools they’re familiar with. ShareGate’s end-user training will ensure they get familiar with Microsoft 365, taking the burden of training off your shoulders.  

Bonus—ShareGate’s roadmap 

It’s hard to talk about highlights without mentioning Ben’s announcement of ShareGate’s latest and upcoming releases! 

Benjamin Niaulin, Microsoft MVP and ShareGate’s VP of Product, shared some information about our recent product updates. Our users had been asking for mailbox migration, and in early 2024 it launched! 

These migrations include any attachments, flags, customizations, or other critical information. It also migrates calendars, contacts, and server-side rules. It’s already comprehensive, but we still have a team dedicated to adding even more functionality to it—stay tuned! 

We’re also excited to leverage ShareGate’s migration engine to migrate Google Workspaces to Microsoft 365. We’ve supported Google My Drive migrations for a while, but now we’re excited to also support Google shared drive migrations, so you can help your whole organization move from Google to Microsoft 365 the right way. 

Soon, we’ll also have a Copilot readiness assessment, to make sure you have the best data available for your AI helper to be as effective as possible.  

If you want to see any of ShareGate’s features in action, book a call with one of our experts who can walk you through the product, whether you’re already a customer or not.  

And, of course, if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions of what you’d like to see on ShareGate’s roadmap, reach out to us! We’re building this product for you, so we’d love to get your feedback!