Pre-Migration Planning: How IT Managers Can Ensure Successful Teams Migrations

By Antonio Vargas, BitTitan

Migrating data between instances of Microsoft Teams, a relatively young but highly popular workplace technology, can be a complex process for IT professionals. It’s incredibly daunting when the project entails migrating thousands of users within an organization. Some users may work remotely in different regions, and all rely heavily on Teams to collaborate.

Because Teams is relatively nascent, many IT managers don’t fully understand its ins and outs, which can ultimately impact the success of a migration. As more companies rely on remote workforces and user adoption of Teams continues to surge, IT professionals need to cultivate a deeper understanding of this communication and collaboration tool. Having a firm grasp of Teams allows IT professionals to become trusted advisors at their company.

Outlined below is essential information that IT professionals need to know before launching a Teams migration:

• First, develop a Teams pre-migration checklist. When creating a detailed pre-migration checklist, it’s crucial to consider all the different moving parts involved. IT pros should think about user experience, the potential impact on a company’s brand identity if the migration is happening due to an M&A, and more. While every migration project is unique, here are some key aspects to include in a checklist:

1. Audit your environment. An audit will help IT pros understand what should and shouldn’t move.
2. Look into how user access and permission are impacted. Teams has a high degree of variability. It is best to turn off custom permissions during the actual migration process.
3. Set user expectations. IT staff should be vocal and clear to employees about potential work disruptions and time delays that may occur during the transfer of data.
4. Plan a test migration. To gauge the time a full migration could take, select a team or department that is reflective of an average channel size and do a test run first.

• Mitigate problems by staying ahead of common Teams issues. Depending on the migration's scope, whether tenant-to-tenant or hybrid, the complexity lies in the different workloads involved. For the IT team, it's crucial to anticipate common problems during migrations and the necessary steps to address these. One of the most significant migrations issues is the disruption it causes to employees. During the pre-migration planning, IT staff should lay out the most optimal time to perform the migration as users cannot collaborate during this time. If executing a more extensive, multi-phased migration, it is best to do this over a long weekend or holiday break to allow uninterrupted data transfer.  

Another common issue to anticipate is sprawl, or the overflow of unused, outdated, or duplicated content and data within Teams. A migration brings the opportunity for IT pros to clean house and improve internal systems. It can allow the IT department to make the Teams environment more organized and easier to use for everyone. Assess what data must be kept and determine what data can be archived or removed. When using Teams, one helpful way to reduce sprawl is to establish moderators for different teams or channels, who can oversee data as it comes in and dictate what should be kept or deleted. Moderators will help set policies around creating new data and prevent sprawl from occurring.

• Know the differences in managing public and private teams and channels. Within Teams, “channels” refer to individual sections that contain a threaded conversation tab and file folders. Teams channels can be both public and private. When performing a migration, IT professionals need to understand that all public channels will need to be migrated while private channels do not. The data within private channels is often less relevant and valuable to the company post-migration, as employees generally share important data in public channels for record-keeping purposes. Eliminating the transfer of private channels will reduce project time.

The likelihood of success lies in the details. Effective and transparent migration planning is critical for a successful migration project. The pre-migration process sets the path on how the project will transpire. IT pros can ensure their company is on the right track by developing a well-crafted and detailed pre-migration plan and strategy.  

About The Author 

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.