The most important pre-migration step is taking inventory of your current environment. ShareGate helps you prepare and plan your migration, avoid potential errors, reduce downtime, and ensure that your SharePoint migration project runs smoothly.
If you know us by now, then you know it’s important for us to keep offering powerful tools for your big migrations and your everyday Teams and SharePoint operations.
ShareGate’s Source Analysis Report gives you a detailed inventory of your source environment, including its size and the total number of sites, site collections, and workflows. You get a complete understanding of your environment’s inventory and usage. Knowing exactly what you have—and where it’s located—will help you assess what should and shouldn’t be moved.
That and more! Let’s take a look…
In this article:
Preparing for your SharePoint migration
ShareGate’s source analysis feature
Preparing for your SharePoint migration
Like any other migration, the first thing you should do is prepare accordingly. Our ultimate SharePoint migration checklist is an invaluable resource when it comes to avoiding costly mistakes and ensuring everything runs smoothly from start to finish.
Choose your migration strategy
There are two ways to migrate:
- Several small steps: A phased approach to SharePoint migration allows you to move small sections of your environment at a time. During this type of migration, users can work continuously and keep productivity going. ShareGate’s incremental copy feature allows you to move only what’s changed since your last migration. See how it works here.
- One giant leap: A single-event migration allows you to move your environment in one go. Although this approach reduces the time you spend on migration, it poses a higher risk. This is where a third-party tool comes in handy to automate the process and ensure the least possible impact on end users and your organization.
Get a complete understanding of your environment’s inventory and usage
It’s important to properly plan a migration with a solid audit of your environment. Running ShareGate’s Source Analysis as a pre-migration step will help you make better decisions about what to migrate, and determine how long it will take to upgrade your end users into their modern workspace.
You need to know what’s under the hood, and ShareGate can help.
Using ShareGate, you can run a source analysis to determine things like:
- the size of your environment
- the size of your file shares
- the number of site collections
- the number of sites
- the number of unused or abandoned sites
- the number of files and folders
- the number of workflows
- Potential issues
After scanning your environment, ShareGate will give you a quick summary of what you have, as well as list potential warnings and errors you might run into during your migration, so you know exactly what to fix before you start.
You can also export a spreadsheet containing additional information on the errors flagged during the inventory scan. This spreadsheet contains the error or warning types, titles, and locations as well as details on the issues themselves. Each one also links to a help page containing more information on how to fix these potential problems.
To export your own, just click on the “View details” button beside the primary source analysis, filter to errors, and then export.
Our Source Analysis Report feature is perfect if you’re trying to get an idea of how complicated or large your migration will be. It’s a great way to estimate the overall effort required, how complex your migration will be, and decide how to carry it out with the least possible impact on business operations.
And it’s available without limitations in ShareGate’s trial version.
How ShareGate helps you plan your migration
Make key decisions that will streamline Microsoft 365 deployment and user adoption with the help of our built-in reports.
Let ShareGate’s comprehensive SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool handle the heavy lifting, so you can focus on what matters most – a successful migration.
In addition to the Source Analysis Report, you can also take advantage of the following built-in SharePoint content and usage reports to help plan your migration:
Permissions Matrix Report: See who (and which groups) can access what, including external users and content shared via anonymous links.
Site Collection Report: Assess your environment with insights on your top-level site (e.g. site collection admin, size, date created, date last modified).
Workflow Report: View all your list and site workflows.
Sites with Custom Permissions Report: View all sites which don’t inherit permissions from their parent.
Site Report: View crucial information (e.g. owner, size, date created, date last modified) about the sites in your source environment to help organize and streamline your migration plan.
Unused Site Report: Get a list of unused or abandoned sites that you may want to exclude from your migration, then download their content and delete them if necessary.
Insane Mode helps you migrate to Microsoft 365 faster with help from Microsoft
The challenge when migrating to Microsoft 365 is speed. Thankfully, ShareGate has Insane Mode, backed by a strong collaboration with our friends at Microsoft.
Insane mode is a setting in our ShareGate migration tool that allows you to migrate or import your content and objects faster.
You can use Insane Mode with both on-premises and Microsoft 365 environments.
With Microsoft 365, Insane Mode uses Microsoft’s Migration API to move larger volumes of data, facilitated by your Microsoft Azure storage account. With on-premises, Insane Mode uses the Server Extension (version 1.8.3 or greater) on your destination server to improve migration performance and speed.
“The effort would quadruple if we had to do everything manually…it almost couldn’t be done without ShareGate.
Doug Punchak, Application Development Manager, Avvenire Solutions
For more about how Avvenire optimized their migration with ShareGate, check out the full story here.
