SharePoint On-Premise To Online (Office 365) Migration Best Practices Using Sharegate

Overview

Migration is the most popular word while we are working with the SharePoint. Most organizations frequently migrate their existing SharePoint farm to Office 365. Nowadays organizations prefer to have their own content on the cloud to decrease the Server Management cost.

There are many tools available for SharePoint migration, such as Metalogix, Sharegate, and many more. During this entire article series, we will talk about migration using Sharegate.

In SharePoint, we can migrate our farm/content in different ways.

Migration from On-Premise to On-Premise
Migration from On-Premise to Office 365
Migration from Office 365 to Office 365

During this article, we will talk about general scenarios for migration from SharePoint On-Premise to SharePoint Online. We will use the Sharegate tool for migration.

We will cover the following points throughout the series of SharePoint migration.

So, now, let’s get started with the first part of the series.

Get Started with SharePoint Migration – Preparation of the Site Structure and Permission

In SharePoint, site structure plays a key role in organizing the structure of the organization. Sometimes, in many organizations, with the On-Premise environment, many web applications are in place.
Within the Office 365, there is no such concept of Web Application. We can only create a site collection in SharePoint Online.
We suggest to first list down all the Web Application with its Site Collection and size of the content. Then decide in SharePoint Online, how you wish to arrange the sites.
For an example, for On-Premise, if in one web application if there are 25 site collections, we suggest you create 25 site collections in SharePoint online to manage them in an easy manner.
Before you start the migration, I suggest you perform the farm analysis using different PowerShell script or some third party tool like SPDocKit.
SPDocKit provide you farm analysis about how much web applications, site collections, sites and subsites are there in a farm with its content database size. It also provide you the details about the number of farm solutions available in the On-Premise environment.

Note
There is no way to migrate farm solution to SharePoint Online. We can’t migrate WSP to SP Online. You need to find some alternative solution to achieve the same functionality.

Tips

If your existing farm has any InfoPath forms, I prefer you not migrate it in SharePoint Online. Use PowerApps in the option of InfoPath forms.
If there is any WSP in an existing environment, I suggest redeveloping WSP functionality using SPFx, CSOM or JSOM model.
If there is any large lists and libraries, I suggest you design the list in such a way that doesn’t meet the threshold limit of 5000.
If there is any SPD workflow in place, Sharegate will migrate it to SP Online. It would be great whenever you have time, you will convert your Workflow logic with MS Flow.
I personally suggest to migrate existing video libraries to MS Stream. MS Stream have lots of good features.

Permissions required before we start the Migration

We need the following permissions before we start the migration process.

Permission Levels
Site Collection Administrator	Recommended for all procedures in Management and Migration for both source and target site collections.
Farm Administrator	Needed to copy site collections from a web application when running a Copy Structure in Migration. The user account through which you perform the migration should have farm administrative rights on your on-premise environment.
Term Store Administrator	Needed to copy managed metadata for all actions in Migration.
Full Control	Recommended when running a Copy Content, Import from File Share, and Import from Google Drive in Migration.
Manage User Alerts	Needed to copy user alerts in Migration.
Read-Only Lock	Should be removed on your source Site Collection before running a migration action with Sharegate Desktop. Some SharePoint services do not respond correctly when the Site Collection is on read-only mode (even if they are only used to read information), and the requests will not be processed as intended.

Conclusion

For SharePoint migration, these are the few basic steps to start with. In the next series of the Migration article, we will talk about the overview of the Sharegate and start migration using Sharegate.

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Happy SharePointing!