Maintaining migration success: Pre-migration tips for moving Teams data

As our world grows increasingly digital, the importance of an effective virtual workplace becomes a greater priority for businesses everywhere. With many companies relying on remote workforces, tools like Microsoft Teams have become critical to enabling collaboration and engagement among remote employees. As a result, Teams adoption has skyrocketed. In July 2021, Microsoft reported 250 million monthly active users on Teams.

As corporations continue to leverage cloud-based solutions to enable remote work, the need to keep their digital environments secure and organized remains vital.

Why MSFT Teams?

Thanks to cloud-based technology, there are many ways for remote workforces to stay connected.  With Teams, businesses no longer must use multiple applications to satisfy their communication and collaboration needs, such as chat, file-sharing, shared document storage and teleconferencing. As the adoption of Microsoft Teams has grown, the need to migrate data as part of a larger tenant-to-tenant project has also increased.

However, because Teams is a relatively young technology, migrating data between instances of Teams is complex and challenging. And unfortunately, many IT managers don’t fully understand the nuances of Teams, which can ultimately impact how well a migration project goes.

There are a few things IT managers need to know about Microsoft Teams before launching a migration to ensure success.

Understanding sprawl

A common challenge is Teams sprawl, defined as the uncontrolled overflow of unused, outdated, or duplicated data within Teams. This irrelevant information can cause issues for users attempting to access the data and result in possible security issues.

The emergence of sprawl has significantly increased since the rapid shift to remote work for companies across the globe.  The issue of sprawl can be compounded during mergers and acquisitions, which is when migrations typically occur.

The most significant issue sprawl creates is confusion for end users. Multiple access points for data, misuse of Teams and channels, and a lack of knowledge on where to find the correct information all play a role in users' inability to access the correct data or stumbling upon outdated information. Unmanaged sprawl can result in internal and external miscommunications.

Data security risks come into play when these channels and Teams, and who has access to them, are also not properly managed. Access settings must be observed to prevent data leakage, and, on the administrator's side, the correct permissions must be enacted so that these issues do not occur in the first place.

If sprawl continues to be a problem, consider whether the number of Teams owners with administrative rights should be limited. If your organization needs firmer control on how Teams are created, named, and classified, or a strict rein on guest access, now is a perfect time to make those adjustments.

Additionally, be sure to refresh yourself on any compliance concerns and how your Microsoft Teams configuration and policies support requirements in the areas of retention, Data Loss Protection (DLP), eDiscovery, and legal hold for channels, chats, files and audit log search.

Planning a successful migration

First and foremost, a migration is the perfect time to clean house and eliminate outdated, unused and irrelevant data. To mitigate sprawl in the destination, only move what you absolutely must. You'll thank yourself later. Sprawl can boil down to a lack of policy, process, and administrative enforcement surrounding the content, so be proactive before you make your move.

Understand your timing. Large Teams migrations are complex, and user collaboration can significantly impact the amount of data to be migrated. Users cannot collaborate during migration, so larger migrations are best done on weekends to allow uninterrupted data transfer. 

As with any migration project, pre-planning is pivotal.  If your business is adopting Teams, a few best practices will help pave the way to success.

1. If you’re using a third-party migration tool, ensure that the source and destination match in configuration.
2. Create dedicated administrator accounts on both the source and destination, ensuring they can run unattended and are specifically for handling the migration.
3. Allow plenty of extra time to handle additional data if users store documents within Microsoft. Consider doing a test run on an average-sized Team to gauge the time required.
4. Teams migrations are complex and can cause throttling or other issues, so don’t hesitate to ask for pre-planning help and bring in outside support, if necessary.

In short, remember to prep the destination ahead of time, create administrator accounts dedicated to the migration, allow ample time for the migration, perform a test run, monitor your migration, and enlist any available support when needed.

Teams migrations are increasing in frequency along with the Teams adoption boom. With proper pre-migration planning, you can ensure your project is secure, mitigates instances of sprawl, and is ultimately a success.

Image credit: Natee Meepian/ Shutterstock

Antonio Vargas is solutions engineering, manager, for BitTitan. He is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Master in Messaging with vast experience in Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Microsoft Azure and PowerShell. In his spare time, he is a technical writer and co-authors technical books and curates his own blog, where he shares his experience and thoughts around Microsoft technologies.