We recently hosted the Summer Edition of What’s up ShareGate, a webinar series where members of our Product and Product Marketing teams discuss all things ShareGate. Find out where we’re at, what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes, and what you can expect in the near future.
In this article, we’ll roll out the main topics Benjamin Niaulin, Head of Product, and Antoine Bousquet, Senior Product Owner, discussed in the webinar, especially the releases expected for the second half of 2022. Here, you’ll take a first glimpse at some features that might change the way you migrate and manage Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Let’s get to it!
Watch the webinar or read through our recap of the key points and Q&A from the webinar.
Jump to…
ShareGate today
ShareGate was launched in 2009 with one goal: to be the simplest SharePoint migration software on the market. That was our focus for a long time, and it paid off, but times change—and so did technology and our customers. Environments are more complex with remote workforces and data security is an increasing concern: both factors contribute to IT admins being overwhelmed with their everyday tasks.
With this reality, today, we envision ShareGate as your go-to Microsoft 365 management solution for big migrations and everyday Teams and SharePoint operations. We aim to empower users to make the best out of Microsoft 365, organizing and securing their tenants in one platform.
This is what you’re able to accomplish with ShareGate today:
- Migration – Migrate and manage your SharePoint content, Teams, Planner, and much more.
- Reporting – Understand and monitor your environment with centralized, actionable reports.
- Automation – Clean up, organize, and govern your tenant through collaborative governance.
- Permissions – Ensure the right people have access to the right things with membership management, external sharing, and guest access.
The year so far: our latest releases
Nowadays, there are tons of apps and products allowing you to do many different things, and our bet is you can’t afford the distraction. That’s why we want ShareGate to be your go-to tool, one solution for everything related to migrations and Microsoft 365 management.
To achieve this vision, we had some key releases earlier this year. Let’s check them out:
- Unified ShareGate account – Before, we had two separate apps: Desktop (for migrations) and Apricot (for Teams management). Now you have one ShareGate account with all the features for your Microsoft 365 management and migrations.
- On-demand external sharing reviews – Stay on top of externally shared links and guest access, whether you prefer to automate the review process or to ask owners of specific teams or groups.
- Planner migration – Migrate the Planner plans you want, right where your users need them. You can move Planner within a tenant or from tenant to tenant, move plans between groups and teams, and copy a Planner template over to another tenant.
What we learned from our users
We’re constantly talking to our customers, keeping our ear to the ground to make sure ShareGate solves their pain points. Here are three key learnings and takeaways since our latest releases:
- Microsoft 365 management is growing – In ShareGate, the active number of monthly users leveraging our reporting management features has already matched our migration numbers. This is why we’re investing and building more in the management space, so you take care of your environments and put the right guardrails in place.
- Migration is still a thing – Although our users are using ShareGate more and more as a management tool, migrations are still happening—a lot. This is especially true of Microsoft 365, which is by far the #1 destination for all our migrations. That means we’ll keep adding value to your migrations, improving experiences, and adding features.
- Teams copying is on the rise – Moving teams between tenants is a necessity in many different scenarios and situations, such as mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation of businesses, or when an ongoing project is relayed to a different team. Our telemetry shows that this is a rising trend among ShareGate users.
Besides all that, one of the main findings of our research is learning how people can feel frustrated and not in control while managing Microsoft 365. Users described how the lack of visibility in their environments, the constant Microsoft updates, and the dreaded sprawl can make work more complicated, while their day-to-day is affected by tickets and interruptions.
To solve this, we know IT admins want ShareGate to help them with a few things:
- Enable self-service and empower end users to get work done without “gatekeeping”
- Guide end-users to use the tools the right way
- Keep a clean and organized environment
- Ensure data security
- Automate reports, processes, and workflows
What we’re building
When we gather all these learnings with our mission, it feeds into our vision for ShareGate, and we’re on track to building the right things and delivering on our promise.
We’re determined to enable close collaboration between IT admins and end users for their day-to-day migrations and Microsoft 365 management.
How will this happen? One of ShareGate’s main upcoming releases is a new end-user application that allows for the decentralization of some of your team’s requests. You’ll be able to provide more self-serve options (either copying teams, running reports, creating automation, and so on) while making it possible for IT managers to monitor these activities with the highest visibility possible.
Here’s an illustration that gives you an idea of how this new structure will work:
The ShareGate roadmap
So, it’s time to see what’s in line for ShareGate in the upcoming months. We hope you’re excited about it as we are!
Cloud Copy
With this release, we’re bringing part of the Teams migration online so you can do small, quick copy operations directly from your browsers, like copying an entire team as a new one or just copying channels into an existing team. We’re also working on making it possible to merge entire teams into an existing one.
Once you start copying, the operation will start on our server. Just leave your computer turned on and ensure your network is stable: nothing will be running in the background and taking up RAM. While ShareGate is running, we’ll be taking over the more annoying part from you. Eventually, this capability will be extended to your end users, so they can do small migrations without having to raise a support ticket!
Provisioning
What’s provisioning, in the first place? Think of it as a solution to a challenge. In this case, it’s having more control over what’s created in Teams, guiding users to create the right things for their needs. In a nutshell, you’ll be creating templates for them to use.
When you create those templates, you’ll define their set of rules (public or private, number of members, permissions), their channels, and the content inside them (such as descriptions and greeting messages). From the end-user app, users will be able to create new teams and sites (not at launch) from the template directory you’ll make available, removing some of the friction they live by trying to find the content and the workspaces they work with.
There are also a few more guided self-service provisioning actions we’re considering adding in the upcoming year:
- Merging channels
- Converting channels to public or private
- Organizing teams & sites
- On-demand reporting (sent by IT or made available)
- Self-service cloud copying
Reporting
In ShareGate’s Teams management module’s Manage page, you find an overview of all teams and groups in your tenant and can filter them based on the governance policies you’ve set. In the next releases, additional reporting capabilities will be added to this page to allow for more customization and increasing visibility:
- Support for communication sites
- More properties and filters
- Custom actions
- Exporting views
- And more.
Migration
We’re looking to support more diverse migration scenarios in the upcoming months. Teams migration is a lot of where our focus is, of course, but given the results mentioned before, we’ll concentrate most of our efforts on Microsoft 365, which is the big winner in our migrations.
One of the improvements we’re working on is migrating all messages instead of porting them in the History tab, for example. To make it happen, we’re collaborating with Microsoft to sort out some of their API limitations. Given the number of migrations done with ShareGate, we’re very confident we’ll find a solution soon. Stay tuned as more info will be shared later this year!
Now, before the new features are released, we’d love you to do one thing: get in touch. Fill out this survey; we absolutely love your feedback. We take it to heart, and it’s part of what makes ShareGate such an exciting solution for your migrations and Microsoft 365 management.
Also, be on the lookout for the next webinar so that we can talk a little bit more about 2023!
Q&A
What about the subscription?
Many of the questions we got during the webinar’s Q&A were about pricing: would the new features, such as cloud copy and the end-user app, need a different subscription or have a different price tag than what’s available with ShareGate now?
The answer is: no. ShareGate has a single license model, which means that what you pay includes all features and capabilities. ShareGate is one handy multi-tool at one fixed price.
What about supporting organizations with over 10,000 teams/groups?
We’re working on optimizing the way in which we can increase this limit, but there is no plan nor timeline in place to address this in the second half of 2022.
Will ShareGate support shared channels?
We’re evaluating adding shared channels to our migration tool since Microsoft just recently released the ability to collect them from the Graph API. The way Microsoft built them brings us some challenges, but we have developers looking into the code to see how to solve this.
What about including Power Automate in future ShareGate releases?
Power Automate is definitely on the radar, as well as Power Apps. Our goal is to support as many Microsoft 365 workloads and products as possible, so you can manage them and collaborate with end users. So Power Automate might not be on the roadmap right now, but it was top of mind after communication sites support, and we’ll look into that.
A third-party tool like ShareGate, our migration and content management tool, can help you save time and streamline everyday Teams and SharePoint operations.
Manage permissions, metadata, and file structure in one convenient place. Get the visibility you need in your environments, run pre-built and custom reports, and close security gaps. And effortlessly modernize your classic SharePoint sites to leverage collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups.
Take ShareGate for a spin with a free trial!
