Case study

Migrating to SharePoint Online

Overview

Migrate all file shares data to SharePoint Online. The Law Firm was running an on-premises Windows Server for storing their company wide Data. These file shares were mounted as a network drive on users’ computers. They were also using Office 365 for their emails & Office Apps.

The Issue

Storing files on Network Drives means every user will be able to access those files through the servers in the organization. 

They want to migrate:

  • Due to lesser functionalities in a Network Drive.
  • Owing to the current work-from-home situations, they wanted out-of-office access to their files.

Technical Challenges

Our team proposed two different approaches for migration of current on-premises file shares to SharePoint Online (Office 365).

  1. Use 3rd Party paid migration tools: Sharegate for data migration.
  2. Custom PowerShell scripts: To create custom site structure and streamline the deployment tasks

Solution

The Aim: A successful and seamless migration of on-premise file share to

SharePoint online along with easy to manage Microsoft 365 groups-based permission model in place.

The Process: A temporary Windows 10 Virtual Machine was provisioned under customer’s environment for installing Sharegate Migration tool. The tool is essential to migrate the data. The following steps were undertaken:

  1. Setup a SharePoint Migration Tool on a jump machine
  2. Define the source and destination path for data migration by creating tasks
  3. Create custom templates and site structure using powershell before migration
  4. Migration of all File Share data to SharePoint Online team’s sites

Once all the files were migrated successfully, a post-migration support was also provided for the next 2 weeks.

Product & Technologies

  • Sharegate Migration Tool
  • SharePoint Online
  • Azure Virtual Machine
  • Powershell