Research shows that Microsoft 365 migrations can streamline IT assets and ease management challenges — as well as save money.
However, the devil can be in the detail. Microsoft MVP Andy Huneycutt, writing for the ShareGate M365 migration tips blog, emphasised best practice from pilot design onwards.
“Two things that are especially important in M365 migration: running a pilot migration and then rolling out the full migration with minimal, ideally zero, downtime,” Huneycutt said.
In summary, a pilot should involve a subset of data or users as proof of concept and a trial that essentially follows your migration runbook, but smaller.
In addition, a lot of groundwork should take place before you reach the migration stage. Clean up data and content, make a solid plan, and align your team, Huneycutt noted.
“Select pilot participants and content representative of your broader migration but low-risk enough that any issues won’t severely impact the business,” Huneycutt added.
“This could be one or two non-critical departments or a mix of volunteers from different teams.”
Designing your M365 migration pilot
Yet your sample must be big enough for feedback to mean anything. Migrating a single user’s files might not tell you much. However, a small department’s SharePoint site, OneDrives, and mailboxes might.
“Include a mix of content types,” Huneycutt said. “Test the range of migrations you’ll be doing. See how well everything works before scaling up.”
Test your chosen migration tool for performance, errors, slowdowns or connector issues. How long did it take? Did any content fail to migrate? Understand why, and fix issues where possible.
“What did users experience? Interview or survey them. Were they confused at cutover? Did they find their files?” added Huneycutt.
Subsequently, you can use the pilot findings to tweak your migration plan. Consider technical adjustments like updating a mapping file or allocating more bandwidth.
Also, think about procedural tweaks like reworking a comms email or assigning IT buddies for cutover support.
“Migration tools like ShareGate support this by letting you re-run migration jobs and only copy what’s changed.”
The same idea applies to mailboxes. So you can use a staged Exchange migration or a third-party tool to gradually sync mailboxes, Then you can switch MX records or run a final delta sync at cutover, Huneycutt said.
ShareGate’s free video series “Master hacks: Migrate like a pro” is here. In addition, the vendor of tools like ShareGate Migrate offers more tips on M365 migration best practice at this link.
