How CDW delivers petabyte-scale, regulation-ready Microsoft 365 migrations with ShareGate

As CDW's Senior Principal Engineer, Maggi Honda leads a team of delivery engineers that provide end-to-end migration services for mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. Her team moves massive amounts of data for companies with 500 to 400,000+ users.  

Maggi oversees migrations, builds tools that streamline delivery, and trains her team on new approaches. She also teaches clients how to understand their data and perform their own migrations—setting everyone up for a smoother project.

All of this ladders into her core role: architecting each migration—shaping the roadmap, setting standards, training engineers, and guiding customers through change.

And ShareGate ties it all together—it’s how her teams explain reality, earn trust, and accelerate delivery. “It cuts our time in half and it’s almost point and click. It just gets the job done,” Maggi explains.  

Scoping complex Microsoft 365 migrations with confidence

After decades of projects, Maggi keeps seeing the same patterns: environments with years of history, people wary of change, and delivery teams asked to move fast without breaking anything.  

One of the biggest recurring challenges: moving clients from legacy on-prem SharePoint to the cloud. These projects are large, complex, and often overwhelming for clients.

Many customers come in with deep folder structures, custom workflows, and years of history. This creates a lot of unknowns.

Maggi says that clients also feel anxious about moving into a new kind of environment: “The challenge with on-prem to cloud migration is educating clients not to be afraid of making that change.”  

Many CDW clients don’t realize they’ve inherited data issues—bloat, duplicates, orphaned users—until the migration reveals them.

“This one client I worked with, using ShareGate I found that they had five files that had 9,500 copies of itself. Why do you need that many versions? You don’t. The client didn’t know because you can’t see that in SharePoint. Once I put limits that files couldn’t have more than five versions, they realized they didn’t have that much to move. It can be really eyeopening.”

All of this is why Maggi has to diagnose issues fast, map workflows clearly, and build secure, reliable migration plans.

For customers in heavily-regulated industries, unknowns don’t just cause clutter, they cause compliance risks. You don’t want to spend time and resources migrating duplicate or unnecessary data. But you also can’t risk leaving behind data that you need to keep in your records.  

You need to be able to see what’s in your tenant and then determine if you’ll migrate it or archive it. But Microsoft’s native tools don’t give you an easy way to get that kind of visibility.  

Live tenant‑to‑tenant projects add even more pressure. People keep working in the source while the destination comes together. That rules out destructive re‑copies and one‑off fixes. Cutovers need verification and a short window, not a weeks‑long freeze.

ShareGate gives Maggi’s team the clarity and speed to handle it confidently.

ShareGate gives Maggi a structured, flexible way to run end-to-end migrations without the usual friction. For the past 14 years, she’s used the solution to perform more than 600 migrations. She’s become a ShareGate expert and evangelist, recommending it to every CDW client.

From there, Maggi’s teams follow a simple, repeatable playbook that provides structure while still leaving room for engineering judgment: assess → migrate → verify.  

Comprehensive Microsoft 365 assessment reports that get client buy-in

Seeing is believing. When clients get rapid, comprehensive visibility, they align on the facts faster—so decisions come sooner and the migration plan is cleaner and lower risk. ShareGate helps with that.  

“ShareGate is known as a migration tool, but I also like to think of it as an assessment tool,” Maggi explains.  

ShareGate lets partners assess their clients’ tenants in just a few minutes. You get all the information you need around file and folder inventory, SharePoint, OneDrive, or Google Drive structure, permissions, users, and potential migration blockers and risk indicators.  

The result is stakeholder‑ready: a clear view of what’s there, what has to change, and what can be left behind.  

This kind of data, in a client-friendly summary, can make a huge difference in a client’s understanding of what goes into a migration.  

“One of the most helpful things ShareGate does is help me show the client how ugly their tenant might be. I can pull up a report and say, ‘These are all your orphan users, and just this one is touching all these other data points.’ And when they see that, it’s like a light bulb turns on and then they say, ‘Okay, yeah, let’s move forward.’”

That clarity also reveals cleanup opportunities that you can’t always see in a GUI. In one project, Maggi dug into logs after she was told ‘PowerShell wouldn’t open.’ Using ShareGate, she found 3,000+ SharePoint errors—the kind of blocker you deal with before you move.  

Maggi empathizes with her clients, especially since so many of them are handed these legacy-heavy environments: “I have this client who has over 400 workflows and 250 InfoPaths, and there is no migrating those to Microsoft 365. I need to understand what their workflow does and diagram it because they don’t even know. They were handed this set of tools and they inherited the whole entire problem.”

With the assessment done, Maggi works with her clients to agree on rules before the move. No two tenants’ security stacks are exactly alike, so M&As often expose discrepancies. With ShareGate, it’s easy to give security teams the documentation they need when changes are made.

Secure and accurate Microsoft 365 migrations

Maggi works with tenants that have petabytes worth of data across different countries and regions. These types of migrations don’t happen over a weekend. So, the ability to migrate in stages is critical.  

“Very few people can do delta migrations for SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Exchange Online correctly, but ShareGate does.”  

Instead of re‑copying everything, ShareGate stamps what moved, checks what changed, and migrates only what’s new. That keeps work going while the target takes shape.  

Practical guardrails matter here. Version limits help reduce what moves. Throughput guidance helps teams choose the right batch sizes and pace. And PowerShell helps tailor steps without breaking the playbook.

When the CDW team needs custom migration solutions, ShareGate's embedded PowerShell makes it easy for Maggi to write automation scripts.

"If you're doing tenant-to-tenant migrations, you might deal with PowerShell and other applications. I've written PowerShell scripts inside ShareGate to handle those migrations for us."

ShareGate's Permissions matrix report also simplifies tenant-to-tenant migrations by providing Maggi with reports on permission rules across different tenants.  

"If I have tenant A and I'm moving tenants B and C into tenant A, I need to know what rules these people have. ShareGate lets me do an assessment and pull out that data set," Maggi says.

ShareGate is also useful when working with government clients who need additional security. “Because ShareGate is trusted by the government here in the US, we use it to migrate government data sets,” says Maggi.

Post-migration verification

Once migration projects are finished, ShareGate's reporting engine gives Maggi the detailed reports her team needs to know exactly what was moved, from where, to where, and who has access to it.  

As part of migration wrap-up, Maggi and her team also teach their clients how to use ShareGate to bulk edit metadata, labels, and permissions in Microsoft 365, so they can be sure their environment is set up for success from the start.  

Training and team development

CDW engineers juggle 13–15 projects at a time each, so the approach has to be repeatable and teachable. For partners, that repeatable playbook is a force multiplier—more projects in flight without ballooning headcount or delivery risk.

“We train engineers to use ShareGate as a migration tool in our Associate Consultant Engineer (ACE) program. We’ve cut down our training from two years to eight months.” Maggi explained.  

“Everything is dedicated to ShareGate all the way through. ShareGate is a good tool for our new engineers to learn because it has PowerShell. It also has beautiful screens and dashboards that teach them how to be consultative."

Excellent support and partner program

When complex issues come up, Maggi relies on ShareGate’s fast, human support to keep projects moving.

“I like the way ShareGate’s support engineers respond to stressful scenarios. It’s a talent because it’s hard to find engineers with consultant capabilities,” Maggi says.

ShareGate hosts live Q&A webinars every Tuesday and Thursday where engineers and admins can get expert advice.  

“One of the most wonderful things that ShareGate has done is creating the Ask the Expert calls. I asked all my engineers to join the calls. It doesn’t matter how novice or experienced you are, they have the patience to respond and really help,” Maggi says.