Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Workload Migration

In late June I was approached to record some short technical overview videos on Microsoft 365 Business, and now that they are recorded and published, it’s time to review them, and provide some additional resources and any important updates since the content was created. This is the fifth video in the series, the focus is on workload migration.

At a high level, this is probably one of the easiest conversations, because migrating existing workloads into Office 365 isn’t something new. There are a plethora of third party tools available, as well as an increasing set of migration capabilities available from Microsoft. The tools that are discussed during this recording are the Mail Migration Advisor, the SharePoint Migration Tool and the recently introduced Known Folder Move for OneDrive for Business.

One of the things that I didn’t mention during the video that’s worth considering when you start thinking about mail migration is how you should approach email archiving. This is regardless of which migration approach you are taking, and the thinking should apply to what currently sits in a users mailbox, as well as tackling the long standing issue of many – addressing the PST files that are still floating around in many organisations.

I’m sure more than a few of you have encountered what you thought was a well maintained Exchange on-premises environment, and then discovered there was a network share that was hundreds of gigabytes of PSTs that hadn’t been touched in a long time. If those PSTs are for current users, get them into the online email archive in Microsoft 365 Business. Don’t clutter the user’s new mailbox if they don’t need this older content, let them know it’s available, and show hey they can access it.

The SharePoint Migration Tool makes it easy to migrate data from your file servers to SharePoint Online, but use the opportunity to decide what needs to be kept, and how to structure it in SharePoint Online with the benefit of that organisation’s hindsight. If you’ve already rolled out Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups, you might already be thinking they could influence the target structure in SharePoint Online.

Known Folder Move should be fully rolled out to Office 365 tenants by this point in time as far as I am aware, so it’s another way of migrating and protecting more folders and files with an online replica. Remember that OneDrive for Business gives you File Restore capabilities, which should give an extra incentive to ensure that you are using it inside your organisation.

You can check out the other posts in this series below

Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Partner Overview Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Assessing Existing Environments Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Cloud Identity Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Hybrid Identity