This is the complete workflow for migrating from SharePoint Online to SharePoint Online. SharePoint On-Premise is not supported.

This guide does not support GCC High or China migrations. For a GCC High or China migration, use the steps in the following migration guide instead: SharePoint to SharePoint Migration Guide for GCC High/China Migrations.

This article outlines the workflow for migrating document libraries from a SharePoint source tenant to SharePoint Online destination tenant. This migration requires licenses.  This guide may also be used to migrate Microsoft 365 Groups (Documents) and File Share instances. 

We recommend reading through the complete guide before starting the migration to understand the process, timeline, and prerequisites.

If this is your first time performing a migration, we have created a Migration Planning & Strategy Guide to walk you through planning, set-up, and general migration best practices. If you have never performed a migration before, we suggest reading that before beginning the steps outlined in this scenario. 

MigrationWiz is a migration tool, not a syncing tool. We do not have “live” monitoring of changes (as with a sync agent) and we cannot handle scenarios such as conflict resolution without user interaction. 

Due to limitations on connections allowed by GoDaddy, we do not support migrating to or from GoDaddy using this migration type.

Information about the types of items migrated with this scenario, including metadata and versions, can be found in the following dropdown. More information about metadata and versions can be found at Versions & Metadata Migration for SharePoint & OneDrive.

Document Properties Limitation

Microsoft Word document properties in Content Controls are not retained at the destination after migration. References to custom metadata values within a document appear broken after being migrated to the destination document library. This is a Microsoft limitation and can be replicated by copying a basic document to a new document library within the same tenant without the use of MigrationWiz. 

We have provided a workaround for this issue.   

Microsoft 365 Groups (Document) Migrations

Effective June 28, 2021, Microsoft 365 Group (Documents) source and destination endpoints will be deprecated. Microsoft 365 Groups will be migrated as part of SharePoint to SharePoint migrations. 

Preparing the Source

Optional: Save library templates. This step is only required if you want to apply templates from your source libraries onto your destination libraries. 

Application Permissions for SharePoint

Follow the steps to enable permission level at the source. This authentication process gives you control over who is entitled to use the source.

1. Sign in as a Global Admin.
2. Go to MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl and consent to the app access when prompted.
3. Navigate to the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal and create a new Security Group named “MigrationWiz”. 
4. Create new user.
5. Add new user to previously created MigrationWiz security group as a member. These user credentials are also required during setup of the SharePoint source endpoint.
6. Add the following advanced option to the project during the advanced option phase: UseApplicationPermission=1 

Steps to remove these permissions are provided below in the Post-Migration section.  

Prepare Azure Environment

Microsoft-provided Azure storage

We recommend using Microsoft-provided Azure storage for this migration. Refer to Microsoft documentation for more details. If you choose this option, skip to Prepare Destination Environment.

Own Azure storage

If you plan to use your own Azure storage, refer the following steps to prepare your Azure environment. We recommend that you create your Azure storage account in the same Microsoft data center as the destination Microsoft 365 tenant. You do not need to create any Azure containers for this migration.

1. Estimate Azure storage costs. This step is optional but is useful in order to provide the customer with up-front storage costs ahead of time. 
2. Buy an Azure subscription (or use the free one-month trial, and be aware that this option is only viable if you are performing a very small migration). 
3. Create an Azure storage account. You will need to set up a STORAGE (General Purpose v2) account rather than a storage blob.
4. Take note of the storage account name and the primary access key. (In Azure, from the storage screen, click Manage Access Keys at the bottom of the screen.) These need to be entered into the MigrationWiz migration project when specifying the destination settings. 

To create the Azure storage account:

1. 1. Visit the Azure portal.
   2. Click New.
   3. Select Storage > Storage account.
   4. Enter a name for your storage account.
   5. Choose Resource manager for the Deployment model.
   6. Choose STORAGE (General Purpose v2)
   7. Record the storage account name (-accesskey, example: “accountname”) and primary access key (-secretkey, example: “W1RrDfkPNkfYfdVqizMNJjn5mXchwMP5uYBY8MsMqWTA7EubG911+4fZlki0Gag==”)
   8. In the Replication field, select Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).
   9. Select the subscription in which you want to create the new storage account.
   10. Specify a new resource group or select an existing resource group.
   11. Select the geographic location for your storage account.
   12. Click Create to create the storage account.

Now the storage account appears in the storage list.

Prepare Destination Environment

1. Create a service account which will be used for the migration.  You can use an existing account/admin if desired, but that is not required.  The account used here does not need any special permissions outside of what is outlined in the "Application Permissions for SharePoint" section below.
2. Ensure that SharePoint has been provisioned within your environment and that the default SharePoint site is created.
3. Ensure all necessary users are set up at the destination  If any permissions have been applied to groups, ensure that matching groups have been created on the destination.

If you wish to maintain the same look, feel, and design of your source libraries on your destination, follow these additional steps before starting the migration project:

1. Create the structure of the document libraries.
2. Create the actual document libraries on the destination SharePoint Online site. To learn how, follow the steps from Microsoft: Create your document library.  Note: MigrationWiz can create the subsites and libraries as part of the migration if needed, you would only need to pre-create them yourself if you want to apply special templates/formatting to them.
3. Save library templates from the source and apply them to your destination libraries.

Application Permissions for SharePoint

Follow the steps to enable permission levels at the destination. This authentication process gives you control over who is entitled to use the destination.

1. Ensure you are signed in as a Global Admin.
2. Go to MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl and consent to the app access when prompted.
3. Create a new Security Group named “MigrationWiz” on the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal.

4. Create a new user that is not having data migrated in the project. This account does not require any administrator roles to be assigned. (If you already have an existing user, that should be fine) This user must have a SharePoint/OneDrive license applied.

5. Add the user from step 4 to the previously created MigrationWiz security group as a member.
6. Record these credentials for use during destination endpoint setup.

Steps to remove these permissions are provided below in the Post-Migration section.  

MigrationWiz Steps

Licenses

This migration scenario uses the Shared Document License type. 

• One license per line item in project (i.e. per document library migration).  License cannot be shared between multiple line items, regardless of how much data is migrating.
• Data limit: 50GB or 100GB depending on which Shared Document license you purchased

To purchase licenses:

1. Sign in to your BitTitan account. 
2. In the top navigation bar, click Purchase.
3. Click the Select button and choose the license type you need.
4. Enter the number of licenses you want to purchase. Click Buy Now.
5. Enter a Billing address if applicable.
6. Click Next.
7. Review the Order Summary and enter a payment method.
8. Click Place Your Order.

​​Licenses are released once payment has been received:

• If you purchase via credit card, licenses will be available immediately upon payment.
• If you purchase via wire transfer (100+ licenses), licenses will be available once payment has been received and accepted.

Set up a Document Migration project

1. Sign in to your MigrationWiz account.
2. Click Go To My Projects.
3. Click Create Project.
4. Click on Document Project to create new project.
5. Click Next Step.
6. Enter a project name and select a Customer. 
7. Click Next Step.
8. Select a Source Endpoint from the endpoint dropdown menu. If you have not already added the source endpoint, you will need to click New to create the source endpoint. Fill in the fields below to set up a new source endpoint:
   • Name: Type any name you want for the endpoint.
   • Endpoint Type: Select SharePoint from the source endpoint type drop-down list.
   • URL: Enter the URL for the source SharePoint tenant. (This is not the SharePoint Admin Center URL. Examples can be found further down in this guide)
   • Administrator Username/Password: Enter the email for the user authorized to run the migration for the source tenant. This is the user added to the MigrationWiz security group for the source tenant.
   • Click Add.
9. Click Next Step.
10. Select a destination endpoint from the endpoint dropdown menu. If you have not already added the destination endpoint, you will need to click New to create the destination endpoint. Fill in the fields below to set up the destination endpoint:
    • Name: Type any name you want for the endpoint.
    • Endpoint Type: Select SharePoint Online from the destination endpoint type drop-down list.
    • SharePoint Online Tenant URL: Enter the URL for the destination SharePoint tenant. (This is not the SharePoint Admin Center URL. Examples can be found further down in this guide)
    • Office 365 Username/Password: Enter email for the user authorized to run the migration for the destination tenant. Use the credentials of the Microsoft 365 user which was added to the MigrationWiz security group for the destination tenant.
    • Select Which Azure Storage to use
      • If using Custom Azure Storage enter the Storage Account Name and Access Key that was acquired in the `Prepare Azure Storage` section earlier in this guide.
      • When entering the Azure Storage Account Name for the destination endpoint, only numbers and lowercase letters can be used. If you enter an upper case letter, your migration will fail.
    • Click Add.
11. Click Save and Go to Summary.
12. Click Save Project.

Add Line Items

There are three options for adding items. Choose which one you will use, then follow the steps below. While Autodiscover is recommended, Bulk Add and Quick Add may also be used.

Discovered Sites

Autodiscovery discovers both Communication and Team sites but it filters out the Team sites which are linked to Teams channels. Currently a Microsoft Teams site can be created in one of two ways:

1. Adding Team site from SharePoint - which can be later linked to Teams channels.

2. Creating a Teams channel - which creates a SharePoint site by default.

Autodiscover will filter out out the second one automatically, and may filter Team sites connected to some Teams channels in the first case. 

Important: Currently autodiscovery will not be able to filter out Teams Private channels, so those need to be manually removed.

Autodiscover Prerequisites

1. The source tenant must have one of the following permissions enabled:

   1. MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl - Recommended. Use with the Advanced Option set as UseApplicationPermission=1 or UseApplicationPermissionAtSource=1

   2. MigrationWiz-SharePoint-Delegated

Important: If you are using Delegated permissions with Global Admin credentials, this process will only discover the SharePoint sites for which the Global Admin is also site admin. For example, the Global Admin should be present here under Site admin in Permissions for this site to be discovered.

 

Steps to Enable Autodiscover

This section outlines the workflow to use the SharePoint Autodiscover option to automatically discover all document libraries for the sites and subsites available for migration under the SharePoint site URL provided in the source settings.

1. Create a new Document Project and set the URL under the source endpoint to the required root site. Details on allowed source URL configuration can be found later in this article.

2. If MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl permissions are being used at the source, set the UseApplicationPermission=1 or UseApplicationPermissionAtSource=1 as Advanced Options.

3. Click the Autodiscover-items button.

4. Click Start Autodiscover.

5. Once discovery is complete, click on ‘Import Items’ to add the discovered sites and document libraries as line items to the project.
   
   

   

    

6. Once imported, the discovered items will show up as line items.
   
   

   

Source URL Configuration

Limitations

1. Currently the MigrationWiz-SharePoint-ReadOnly permission at the source is not supported and will show a permission error.
2. For sites with a high number of items (Document libraries + subsites) it might take a bit longer. A higher number of subsites is more likely to increase this time than a high number of document libraries, although there are exceptions. 
   For example, our tests show that, for 3k+ items, it takes between 30 minutes and an hour to auto-discover.
3. If the root URL is provided, it will show all the sites under it (including all sub sites).
1. This will exclude Teams Site URLs, but will still include Teams Private Channel URLs due to a Microsoft limitation. 
2. After importing, the specific document libraries can still be removed from the line items before starting migration
4. On-Premises SharePoint is not supported

Manually Add Items

Quick Add: This option allows you to add items o​ne at a time. You have to enter Source library and destination library path for each line item.

Bulk Add: This option allows you to add multiple items at once by copying and pasting from a spreadsheet or by importing a CSV file.

Add the source and destination Document Library path for each line item. We recommend that you use the document library path from the URL.

The following examples show the breakdown of each type of URL.

Example 1: Document library located under a site:

Example 2: Document library located under a sub-site:

Example 3: Document library located directly under SharePoint Online root site:

Example 4: Document library located directly under SharePoint Online root sub-site:

Example 5: Site and Document Library names may contain special characters, but the URL may not reflect the same. It’s important that the document library path is captured correctly from the URL.

Site Provisioning

The following section will explain how to provision sites. 

Licenses

This is a pre-migration step and does not consume licenses as long as it is done with the "Trial Migration" option.  If you run the site creation step with either a Pre-Stage or a Full Migration, a license will be used but will then continue to be used for the data migration step. With this new feature, we are now able to provision sites at the destination, similar to how we provision document libraries that do not yet exist. This is an optional step. 

Prerequisites

The source tenant must have either one of the following permissions enabled:

1. MigrationWiz-SharePoint-FullControl (Recommended)
   (with AO set as UseApplicationPermission=1 or UseApplicationPermissionAtSource=1)

2. MigrationWiz-SharePoint-Delegated

Recommended steps to provision sites

Create SharePoint-SharePoint Online project 

Only SharePoint source and SharePoint Online destination endpoints are supported currently. ​

Create a line item

Use Quick Add/Bulk Add/ Auto Discovery to add the source and destination library paths for a line item in the project.

Add the ‘TestSharePointWithProjectConfigUrl’ Advanced Option

Go to the Advanced options page and add TestSharePointWithProjectConfigUrl=1 . This allows you to verify credentials even if the destination site does not exist.  If this option is not added, the site creation will fail since it will attempt to verify before it tries to create the site.

Select ‘Setting Up SharePoint’

To provision sites and subsites before performing migration, click on the Full Migration and select only the Setting Up SharePoint --> Sites Creation step and proceed with ‘Start Migration’. This will create all the required sites and subsites at the destination.

Select Migrate Data

Once the “Setting Up SharePoint” step is complete, proceed with “Migrate Data” to complete migration of the site content.

Supported authentication mode

*Applies to both source and destination.

Set the Project Advanced Options

In the Support tab, add:

• TestSharePointWithProjectConfigUrl=1 This allows you to verify credentials even if the destination site does not exist.  If this option is not added, the site creation will fail since it will attempt to verify before it tries to create the site.
• InitializationTimeout=8- This increases the initialization timeout window to eight hours. This value is in hours, up to a maximum of 100 hours. Values above 100 are in milliseconds. For example:​
  • InitializationTimeout=2 will increase the timeout to 2 hours.
  • InitializationTimeout=8 will increase the timeout to 8 hours.
  • InitializationTimeout=14400000 will increase the timeout to 4 hours.
  • InitializationTimeout=21600000 will increase the timeout to 6 hours.
• Add UseApplicationPermission=1 if you did not do so during the app permissions phase. This is required for the application permission to function at the source.
• Migrations of over 15GB are now supported. These settings will prevent timeout errors when a Speedster import takes more than 10 minutes to complete.
  • Set LargeFileMigrations=1
  • Set LargeFileMigrationsTimeout=7200000
    • 720000 value is an example; time is measured in milliseconds

If the UPN prefix changes

User mapping: By default, we match users from the source to the destination based on the prefix in their User Principle Name (UPN). For example, if the user UPN is “name@domain.com”, we match the “name” portion.

If there are multiple people with the same prefix at the destination (e.g. name@domain1.com and name@domain2.com, or the prefix of a particular user is changed in the destination (e.g. name@source.com → name.full@destination.com), it is necessary to use the advanced option UserMapping="name@source.com->full.name@destination.com" to set the new or correct name for each user.

1. The User Mapping command goes in the Support Options section and will require one line per user that needs mapping. Click the + to add additional lines. Replace the UPN addresses in the example with the actual UPN addresses. 

Under Source/Destination tab

Set number of Versions to be migrated as per project requirement and click Save.

• The minimum number of versions is 1, the maximum number is 25. 

Verify Credentials

You may verify the credentials of items in MigrationWiz without migrating data or consuming any licenses.

1. Open the project containing line items you wish to validate​.

2. Select the items you wish to validate.

3. Click on the Start button in your dashboard.

4. Select Verify Credentials from the drop-down list.

5. Once complete, the results of the verification will be shown in the Status section.

Perform a Full Migration

• SPO Migration API migrates documents and permissions together. We recommend you select & migrate Documents and Document Permissions together.

• To migrate metadata, the metadata checkbox must be selected during the first migration run.  

To initiate migration of document libraries:

1. Open the Project containing the items you wish to migrate.

2. Select the items to migrate.

3. Click on the Start button in your dashboard.

4. Select Full Migration from the drop-down list.

5. Ensure that the Documents, Document Permissions, Metadata, and Versioning checkboxes are selected. By default, the latest three versions will be migrated. The number of versions to migrate can be updated in the Advanced Options section on the source/destination tab. See the Versions section below for more information.

   

6. Click Start Migration.

7. Once complete, the results of the migration will be shown in the Status section.

Post-Migration Steps

1. To prevent users from inadvertently using the Source SharePoint libraries, decommission the Source SharePoint server, libraries, or user accounts.

2. Delete all the Azure containers used for this migration. This will prevent incurring post-migration costs. Be careful to only delete the containers created for this migration.

Remove App Permissions

1. Remove the newly created user.

2. Remove the MigrationWiz Security Group.  

3. To remove the app from the source or destination, perform the following steps:

   1. Launch PowerShell.

   2. Connect PowerShell to Microsoft 365.

   3. Enter the command: Connect-AzureAD

   4. Enter the admin credentials in the prompt.

   5. Enter the command: Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -SearchString Migration

   6. Look for the ObjectId of the app you want to remove and enter the following command: Remove-AzureADServicePrincipal -objectId <the object id>

Group Permissions

MigrationWiz will migrate group permissions if the same group name exists at the destination. If the identically named group is not created at the destination prior to migration, group permissions will not migrate. MigrationWiz will not create groups at the destination, this must be done manually during destination setup.

Group permission migration does not support the RecipientMapping or UserMapping advanced options. 

Can I set up source & destination endpoints with SharePoint site URL?  

Yes, you can set up your source or destination endpoints with site-level URL.  

For example, if all of your document libraries at the source or destination are directly under a single site, you may prefer to set up the endpoint URL in this format: https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/site-name 

If your source/destination endpoint is set up with a SharePoint site URL, your line item should only include the library name and not the site path.