Achieve successful Microsoft 365 adoption with your ShareGate subscription

ShareGate’s VP of Product, Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), gives a tour of ShareGate’s top features and shows how they can help solve common issues at each stage of your journey to Microsoft 365 adoption.

We’ve helped thousands of customers move to Microsoft 365 with ShareGate’s migration tool. In that time, we’ve learned there’s a lot you need to do to be successful in the Microsoft cloud.

Migration is only the beginning. Deploying and scaling collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams requires a well-defined strategy and consistent effort on the part of IT.

At ShareGate, we want you to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 investment. We want you to be confident in your rollout, and help you empower your users to use Teams and SharePoint the right way.

That’s why we’ve built the complete Microsoft 365 management solution for you. Everything you need to migrate and manage your content, understand your inventory, clean up and govern your tenant, control permissions, and guide users to use the right tools the right way is right at your fingertips in one simple and affordable multi-tool.

In this article, I’ll show you how some of ShareGate’s top features can help you solve common issues at each stage of your journey—so you can get the most out of your ShareGate subscription.

Microsoft 365 deployment: More than a SharePoint migration

You did it! You got through everything on ShareGate’s ultimate Microsoft 365 migration checklist and moved to the Microsoft cloud! All of your work is finished now, right?

Not quite… A common misconception that organizations have about Microsoft 365 adoption is that it’s a ‘once and done’ activity—that you can just make the investment, roll out the features, and all of the work is done.

But when you move to Microsoft 365, you’re not just migrating SharePoint On-prem to SharePoint Online. Once you get to Microsoft 365, you still need to make the transformation to what Microsoft has dubbed “the modern workplace“.

The modern workplace is a new way of working that Microsoft believes will empower everyone to achieve more. And with the productivity suite in Microsoft 365—including new concepts like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and modern group-connected team sites—Microsoft has provided technology that enables your organization to benefit from these new ways of working.

But this vision requires a few changes. To embrace the modern workplace and get the most out of your Microsoft 365 investment, you need to:

• Modernize your classic SharePoint sites
• Flatten your SharePoint infrastructure by promoting any subsites
• Embrace self-service functionality
• Adopt a cross-product governance strategy

Moving to the cloud isn’t a one-step process that can be done overnight, and a successful cloud adoption strategy shouldn’t end when you introduce your organization to the cloud.

In reality, the path to successful cloud adoption requires more than the typical technology deployment steps. It requires a smart migration tool and an approach that makes Microsoft’s vision of the modern workplace attainable.

Microsoft 365 cloud adoption framework: An ongoing and cyclical process

We’ve realized that Microsoft 365 adoption isn’t a narrative with a clear beginning and end. Rather than being linear, the journey to successful cloud adoption is ongoing and cyclical, with organizations jumping in and out of stages as they make progress or have new concerns to address in their journey.

While every organization will have its own journey to Microsoft 365 adoption, certain stages should be part of every successful cloud adoption strategy.

In our work with customers, we’ve identified the following main stages that hold true for most organizations:

Pay close attention to how you can improve your IT modernization strategy so your organization can stay current on the most modern Microsoft 365 tools.

Is there a proper order? Shouldn’t you modernize as you migrate?

Frankly, there isn’t any particular order, and that’s the message I want to share. User adoption of new tools is ongoing, governance policies should be reviewed regularly to account for new risks, and management processes can be improved on and streamlined to save time.

Succeed at every stage of Microsoft 365 adoption when you use ShareGate. Enhance adoption of new tools like Microsoft Teams to increase productivity from day one of deployment. And monitor and secure your environment while saving time on administrative tasks.

Wherever you are in your cloud journey, ShareGate provides you with tools to simplify it.

Planning: Prepare your source for a snag-free migration

Whether you’re moving from SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online or getting ready to migrate to the Microsoft universe for the very first time, planning for your migration—including taking an inventory and assessment of your data—is a crucial part of an effective cloud adoption strategy.

Before you get started, you need to know what you have, what to look for, and what actions might need to be taken to ensure every item reaches the new destination.

What’s more, following key steps for a cloud migration plan can also help you prepare for an effortless migration task.

Know what you have

• Do you know where all of your information is stored? (File shares, SharePoint, cloud storage, somewhere else entirely?)
• Do you know the hierarchy of those data repositories?
• Do you know their sizes?
• Is the data actually being used?

Migration is a great opportunity to take a close look at your existing content. And making an inventory is the first step towards any successful SharePoint migration. You need to identify what you want to migrate, as well as any actions you might need to run on certain items.

As you identify your existing content, you might find duplicate content, content that’s no longer up to date or valid, or content that can be archived or deleted. In fact, it’s a good idea to always keep an active inventory of what you have to maintain and uphold your SharePoint governance rules over time.

Having an inventory of your source environment makes it easier to estimate the effort required for your migration.

Over the course of our many migrations, we at ShareGate created an inventory strategy that we like to call RMR: Remove, Migrate, and Rebuild. It’s an easy model to differentiate between what you don’t need, what you plan on migrating as-is (or with a few minor tweaks), and what you plan on rebuilding from scratch at the destination.

Know what to look for

Being able to identify and fix potential issues is an equally important part of migration planning. After all, you’re going to migrate something from Source A to Source B, you want to make sure it gets to the destination with all of its access and permissions intact.

There are also considerations for migrating your business processes and workflows. If you haven’t heard, Microsoft has retired SharePoint 2010 workflows (and confirmed that SharePoint 2013 workflows will be deprecated at some point in the future). We can still copy them, but they won’t run in your environment.

So, you need to be aware of these notions as you plan for migration; you need to know where these workflows are, what they do, and whether or not they’re critical for your organization. Are they stopping you from migrating? If so, how can you rebuild them as SharePoint 2013 workflows or transition to Power Automate flows?

How ShareGate helps you plan your migration

Make key decisions that will streamline deployment and user adoption with the help of our built-in and custom reporting for SharePoint and Teams.

• Inventory content and estimate the effort required
• Identify, analyze, and solve potential issues
• Uncover user and group access permissions
• Find SharePoint and Nintex workflows

We’ve brought together everything that can help you with migration planning and put it in one convenient starting place: ShareGate’s ‘Plan’ screen.

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.

Once you have a clear picture of the size and contents of your source, you can accurately estimate how complex your migration will be and decide how to carry it out with the least possible impact on business operations.

The Source Analysis report also pinpoints potential issues you might run into during your migration, so you know exactly what to fix before you start.

Our Permissions Matrix report uncovers the access permissions your users and groups have for a given site—quickly telling you who has access to what and the various users who may be inside. The idea at the planning stage is: Are these the permissions I want to have when I migrate to the destination? It’s also a useful snapshot of your permissions pre-migration; so when you’re finished, you can compare your source to your destination.

You can also take advantage of the following built-in reports to help plan your migration:

• 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.
• Site collection report: Assess your environment with insights on your top-level site (e.g. site collection admin, size, date created, date last modified).
• Checked out documents report: Find all checked-out files and files with no checked-in versions, and check them in before copying them so no data is left behind.
• Sites with custom permissions report: View all sites which do not inherit permissions from their parent.
• Unused site report: Get a list of sites which were not modified in the last 6 months that you may want to exclude from your migration, then download their content and delete them if necessary.
• Documents with migration limitations report: Find all documents that will slow down your migration to Microsoft 365 by making it fall back to normal mode.
• Workflow report: View all your list and site workflows.
• Lists with workflows report: View all lists with workflows to avoid losing progress while a list is being copied.

Looking for something specific? You can always create your own custom report from the ‘All reports’ screen.

Finally, when should you schedule these reports and why? Check out our article on SharePoint reports to schedule regularly. We think you’ll like it.

Migration: Migrate to SharePoint or Microsoft 365

At the migration stage…

• Understand where you’re going and what the limitations are at your destination
• Make sure there’s no (or minimal) downtime caused by the migration
• Identify what did/didn’t work so you can fix issues as fast as possible

SharePoint migration is the process of making existing content accessible in SharePoint or Microsoft 365. Generally, this means copying, or “migrating”, content from a source environment—such as file shares, SharePoint Server, Box, or Google Drive—to SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365.

For me, the migration itself is just as important as the planning. If I’m bringing my business to the cloud with a promise of better ways to work, I want to make sure there’s no downtime and that everything I want to migrate is copied to the destination successfully.

Looking to get started with your Microsoft 365 migration? Check out our meticulously crafted Microsoft 365 migration checklist, designed to minimize disruptions and streamline your migration process.

Know where you’re going

Do you know the difference between SharePoint team sites and OneDrive and when you should migrate to one versus the other? For migration to be a success, you need to really understand where you’re going and what the limitations are at your destination.

And don’t forget, Microsoft has introduced throttling limits in order to maintain optimal performance and reliability of their cloud servers. To minimize the impact on your migration progress—and make sure there’s minimal downtime caused by the migration—we recommend beginning your migration project outside of normal working hours for your region.

Once your migration is finished, check to make sure that everything you wanted to move arrived at your destination intact. Identify what did (or didn’t) work so that you can fix any issues that occurred as fast as possible.

Migrate to SharePoint or Microsoft 365 with ShareGate

Simplify your Microsoft 365 migration with unlimited data, no server installation, and the help of our award-winning technical support.

• Migrate your entire environment or migrate incrementally
• Keep metadata intact throughout the migration process
• Schedule your migration for whenever works best
• Automate and test your migration using PowerShell scripts

ShareGate is known to be one of the simplest, if not the simplest, approaches to migration. Just go to the ‘Copy’ screen, choose the tab that best describes the context of your migration project, and follow the steps.

But ShareGate’s migration features aren’t just easy to use; they also make it easy to execute your migration on your own terms. Migrate incrementally, update links, target content to ‘migrate by’ date, flatten your folder hierarchy—you get total control to migrate with the least possible impact on regular operations.

Customizable copy options give you the flexibility to promote subsites to top-level sites, convert classic sites to the modern experience, and set up automatic export of your post-migration report while you migrate.

And thanks to automatic mapping, you don’t need to map all of your users and groups manually (although you can map users and groups to replace users that are not valid to existing ones on the destination site so everything works as intended).

You can also:

• Map site templates to apply your source site templates at the destination.
• Map permission levels to replace the permission level used at the source for a different one at the destination.
• Modify source properties to map the value of that property to the defined destination properties (only applies if using Copy content, Import from file share, Import from Google Drive, or Bulk edit content actions).
• Map content types at the destination that are different than the source content types (only applies if using Copy content and Bulk edit content actions).
• Migrate messages, attachments, and folders with automated and custom Exchange Online mailbox mapping.

When everything is set how you want it, test-run your migration with ShareGate’s pre-check report. Detect possible warnings and errors before you run your actual migration, and correct potential issues so that your live migration runs as smoothly as possible. Then, schedule your migration to run automatically during off-hours to avoid throttling.

Finally, once your migration is finished, check the automatically generated migration report to see a summary of your migration, including details of any warnings or errors that might have occurred so you can fix issues fast. That way, you know your migration was a success.

Want to automate further? ShareGate’s migration engine is completely accessible through PowerShell. Learn more about our available PowerShell cmdlets.

Modernization: Adapt your architecture to enable modern workloads

At the modernization stage…

• Modernize existing classic SharePoint sites
• Promote subsites to top-level site collections

What do I mean by ‘modernizing’ your environment?

As organizations started to migrate their SharePoint assets into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft introduced two game-changers: the modern SharePoint experience and Microsoft 365 Groups.

Now, you can’t simply move to the cloud and expect everything to stay the same. Once you get there, there are still a few changes you need to make to leverage the full potential of Microsoft 365.

Classic vs. modern SharePoint

You’re probably aware that there’s the classic SharePoint (the older look and feel) and now there’s the modern SharePoint experience (a new look and feel with new features). But Microsoft’s vision goes beyond just classic to modern experience in SharePoint.

Aesthetics aside, if you want the full Microsoft 365 experience, you’re going to want to modernize your classic SharePoint sites. One of the key differences between classic and modern is that a modern site is connected to a Microsoft 365 group. Once connected to a Microsoft 365 group, your site can benefit from all the other group-connected services like Microsoft Teams and Planner.

Going flat to go modern

Microsoft 365 Groups can be attached to an existing SharePoint site. BUT: You can only attach groups to the root site of a site collection, not to subsites. So, if you have a top-down infrastructure and you want to start using Microsoft Teams, you’re going to have to promote all of your subsites to top-level site collections, first.

How ShareGate helps you adapt your architecture to enable modern workloads

Effortlessly modernize your site architecture to leverage powerful new tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups.

• Migrate existing modern SharePoint sites
• Promote subsites to top-level site collections
• Deploy Microsoft Teams for existing SharePoint sites

ShareGate makes it easy to take your site architecture from top-down to flat to enable powerful collaboration features in Microsoft 365.

Not in the midst of a migration? No problem. ShareGate’s ‘Promote’ feature enables your existing subsites to benefit from modern workloads in Microsoft 365 in just a few clicks.

ShareGate converts your subsite to a site collection by migrating it to the same level as your other site collections.

And thanks to our customizable options, you can change the site template of the new site collection to a modern SharePoint team site—which automatically connects it to a new Microsoft 365 group!

After that, it’s easy to attach a team to your existing SharePoint site!

Administration: Monitor and manage your SharePoint environment

For ongoing administration…

• Ensure user and group permissions are up to date
• Validate external users on a regular basis

Our data tells us that, on average, 5,406 items in SharePoint Online have unique permissions. Do you know who has access to what in your environment at any given time?

After completing your migration, you need to run regular reports to keep an eye on what’s happening in your environment and make sure users are complying with your governance policies.

Simplify your SharePoint administration routine with ShareGate

Save time and streamline administrative tasks by managing permissions, metadata, and file structure in one convenient place.

• Reorganize and restructure SharePoint content
• Manage permissions and metadata in bulk
• Monitor and secure your environment with built-in and custom reports

Once you’re finished your initial migration, keep using ShareGate to streamline your administrative tasks and take action on SharePoint items via a single unified interface.

The ‘All reports’ page gives you access to all of our built-in reports, or acts as the starting place for you to build your own!

There’s a big difference between being able to find something and being able to take action. ShareGate’s ‘Explorer‘ screen allows you to navigate your entire environment, see everything that’s happening inside, and take immediate action.

And the ‘Security’ tab brings together built-in reports that will help the ongoing security of your environment:

• Permissions matrix report: Helpful beyond just migration planning, get a full overview of which users and groups have access to which site collections and content.
• Audit report: Get a user-friendly log of all the operations performed by one or more given users on a specific target.
• Orphaned user report: View all orphaned users and decide whether or not to remove them from your environment.
• External sharing report: View and monitor all content shared outside your organization to help prevent security threats.
• Sites with custom permissions report: View all sites which do not inherit permission from their parent.
• External user report: A comprehensive list of external users and their level of access to help you keep your Microsoft 365 environment secure.

Team creation: Make sure users create the right things in Teams

To manage team creation…

• Keep ‘self-service’ features enabled to encourage adoption
• Make sure the right settings are applied as new teams are created

So, you finished your migration. You modernized your SharePoint and promoted all your subsites. And then…. Microsoft Teams happens.

Everything in the cloud scales a lot faster, and suddenly you find yourself with multiple Microsoft 365 groups and more teams than you can keep track of.

When that happens, there are certain questions that can no longer be easily answered by IT. Questions like: Should that team be sharing files externally? and What’s the purpose of that team named “Project Falcon”?

Here at ShareGate, we believe the key to successful Teams adoption is to keep self-service enabled and guide proper usage of the tools. You want people to adopt the products in Microsoft 365 and use them properly, not turn to other solutions outside your environment (shadow IT).

That being said, with new teams getting created everywhere, it’s really important to make sure that as new teams are created, the right settings are applied. You don’t want to block creation, but you do want to make sure they’re being used for the right purpose.

How ShareGate helps make sure users create the right things in Teams

Understand why users create new groups and teams without adding friction or negatively impacting productivity.

• See newly created teams and understand how they’re being used
• Automatically collect information from owners via Teams chatbot
• Organize and govern teams according to their business purpose

Creating a new team is easy. What can be hard is trying to figure out the purpose of every new team. And that makes life a lot harder for someone working in IT—especially since governance policies should ideally be customized based on the purpose and level of data sensitivity of each Microsoft 365 group/team.

When you log into ShareGate for the first time, the app will walk you through the process of assigning a purpose to all of your existing groups.

ShareGate’s ‘Group categorization’ feature helps you understand how users collaborate in Teams, and allows you to organize your teams and Microsoft 365 groups by business purposes. That way, you can apply the proper settings to each one.

Choose from one of the following default options based on some of the most common reasons users create teams:

• Department: Used for an ongoing project or collaboration between employees who are part of a specific department (i.e. marketing or HR).
• External project: Used for projects that involve collaboration with people outside the organization (i.e. collaboration with an external vendor).
• Internal project: Used for projects that involve collaboration with people inside the organization (i.e. implementation of a new system).
• Office location: Used to gather employees working in different geographic locations (i.e. New York office)
• Particular topic: Used to communicate and collaborate on specific initiatives or topics (i.e. planning the holiday party).

You can also edit or add to these options in ShareGate’s Settings tab based on the needs of your organization.

But as an IT admin, you might not know why a new team was created. You’re going to need to ask someone who would know: the owner of that team.

Instead of reaching out to each owner manually, you can activate ShareGate’s bot for Microsoft Teams to ask owners about the purpose or sensitivity of their teams and groups, to alert owners when it’s time to review external sharing links and guest access, and what to do when their teams or groups become inactive.

On your end, in ShareGate’s ‘Groups’ tab, you can see a list of all your teams and Microsoft 365 groups, along with each one’s assigned purpose in the ‘Group purpose’ column.

And organize and filter all your teams by business purpose, making it easy for you to configure the proper settings based on how a team is being used.

Lifecycle management: Guide users towards productive and secure collaboration in Teams

For ongoing Teams lifecycle management…

• Keep your Teams organized and up to date
• Make sure someone is accountable for every team

According to our data, 60% of Microsoft 365 groups have a team attached—yet 25% of Microsoft 365 groups show no recent activity and 7.3% have no valid owner.

All of those inactive groups are cluttering up your environment, making it harder for users to find things quickly. You need to keep your Teams environment organized and up to date to improve navigation and make sure there’s nothing hindering end-user productivity.

And those groups without owners have no one with the unique permissions that make them vital to the proper functioning of each team.

For example, only team owners can:

• Edit the team name and description
• Delete the team
• Add members to the team (if it’s private)
• Promote a member to owner status
• See the name/owners of all private channels*
• Delete any private channel

*Team owners can only access a private channel’s conversations and content if they’ve been added.

Team owners are accountable for managing a team and its content throughout its lifecycle—and common best practice says you should have at least 2 owners to make sure someone is accountable for the management of each team.

Guide users towards productive and secure collaboration in Teams with ShareGate

Detect problem areas like inactive and orphaned groups, and collaborate with owners you trust to keep Teams tidy and secure.

• Get full visibility across each team’s lifecycle
• Ensure every team has at least one owner
• Entrust owners to archive inactive teams and eliminate sprawl

ShareGate’s Teams management features make it easy to keep things organized in Microsoft Teams, and give you better visibility across the entire lifecycle—from creation all the way through to archival.

See potential problem areas at a glance on the ‘Dashboard‘ screen:

ShareGate crawls through your teams, including their associated Outlook inboxes and SharePoint site collections, and identifies inactive and orphaned teams. (You can also see any uncategorized groups here)

But, as I said before about SharePoint, being able to find something is only part of the equation; the real value comes from being able to quickly take action. And that’s where ShareGate truly shines.

Select one of the tiles to promote an owner or archive inactive groups yourself.

When you archive a team through ShareGate, the group/team is deleted from your tenant and we keep the content as long as you like—no 30-day ‘soft delete’ limit!

You choose the timeframe (30 days? 60 days? 90 days?) that defines when a group or team becomes inactive by setting the ‘Inactive groups’ policy. And decide where you want archived content to be stored—the Azure storage solution provided by ShareGate, or your own Azure storage.

Security and compliance: Ensure sensitive data stays secure

For ongoing security and compliance…

• Configure guest access settings for secure collaboration in Teams
• Conduct regular access reviews to ensure data stays secure

Part of what makes Microsoft Teams so great is that it enables users to collaborate internally and with users from external organizations—such as clients, vendors, or partners.

Once you enable guest access in Teams, users can invite anyone with an email to join existing teams and channels, where they can access team resources, conversations, and shared files.

That freedom and flexibility are great for encouraging user adoption of tools. But excessive access rights pose a threat to data security.

Consider the following:

• When a new employee joins your organization, how do you make sure they have the right access to be productive?
• As employees move between project-based teams or leave the company, how do you ensure their old access is removed—especially when it involves guests?

The convenience of self-service has led to a need for better access management capabilities. You still need a strategy in place to govern its use according to your company mandates. The best way to start? Configure guest access settings to ensure collaboration in Teams stays secure.

As an IT admin, you need to proactively engage with team owners to make sure they review who has access to their resources. In other words, you need to conduct external access reviews on a regular basis.

Ensure sensitive data stays secure on an ongoing basis with ShareGate

Keep sensitive data secure at all times with full visibility into each team’s external sharing links and automated sharing link reviews.

• See what’s been shared externally and with whom in each team
• Schedule regular reviews for owners to validate their team’s external sharing links
• Easily perform internal audits

ShareGate gives you full visibility into what’s been shared by each of your groups or teams.

In-app, you can see at a glance which teams have active external sharing links:

And drill down to see what’s been shared by each of your groups or teams. Even better, as an IT admin, you can revoke access to sensitive files yourself in one click—without having to be an owner of the group.

But having better visibility into external sharing in your tenant is only half the battle; you still need to figure out if those files should be shared, or in some cases should still be shared.

Instead of manually reaching out to owners and asking them to validate every external sharing link, set up ShareGate’s external sharing policy to ask owners for validation automatically.

Periodically, at a time interval of your choosing, ShareGate automatically contacts owners by email or chatbot and asks them to confirm whether the links shared by their team should still be shared.

Owners can delete links to sensitive files through our easy-to-use interface instead of having to go to each of their SharePoint team sites to revoke access.

On your end, in the app, you can track the progress of each external sharing review once it’s started—so you can follow up with owners or take action yourself if you need to.

And ShareGate logs every action taken during each review, so you can easily perform internal audits.

Mergers and acquisitions: Adapt your environment to a merger or acquisition

For a business merger or acquisition…

• Tidy up your environment(s) beforehand
• Bring along everything your users need

In some cases, you might make it through all the stages of Microsoft 365 adoption only to find yourself back at the beginning, faced with a business merger or acquisition—not a “migration” in the classical sense of the term, but bringing one Microsoft 365 environment into another.

Similar to a classic migration, you’re going to want to plan ahead, create an inventory, and tidy things up in your environment so you only bring the things you need.

The flip side of that is, the interconnected nature of Microsoft 365 means people use more things! And the hub of all that collaboration and work? Microsoft Teams. So, while you don’t want to bring more than necessary, you do want to make sure you bring along everything your users need to be productive and do their work.

Adapt your environment to a merger or acquisition with your ShareGate subscription

Easily manage a corporate merger or acquisition with powerful migration and consolidation capabilities.

• Copy content and permissions between Microsoft 365 tenants
• Merge existing sites without losing data
• Migrate Teams data from one tenant to another

Identify problem areas—like inactive or orphaned teams—before your merger or acquisition with ShareGate’s smart monitoring and lifecycle management features. That way, you only bring the things you need.

Once you’re ready, ShareGate’s migration tool makes the merger/acquisition itself a breeze! Everything you need is back in the good-old-trusty ‘Copy’ screen.

Merge existing sites without losing data, copy content and permissions from one environment to another, and move content between Microsoft 365 tenants.

And seamlessly migrate Microsoft Teams from one tenant to another with ShareGate’s migration tool—ensuring users have everything they need to succeed in their new Teams environment.

When you use ShareGate, you can easily handle a merger or acquisition with minimal downtime and no negative impact on productivity.