Microsoft’s offerings around data ingestion to Office 365 are going from strength to strength recently. With the much improved SharePoint Online Migration Tool and Migration Manager, migrating files into SharePoint Online has never been easier. The SharePoint Online Migration Tool which allows us to migrate SharePoint content into SharePoint Online provides a great user experience and when we look at cloud services, the acquisition of Mover last year is paying off, meaning that organizations no longer have to rely on third party services and additional licensing for these simple file migrations. There is still a use case for tools like ShareGate but it’s no longer an absolute must have for these types of migrations.

I will probably do an entire post on Mover alone as the functionality there is really impressive. Another addition which seems to have gone a little bit under the radar, is the ability to now specify Teams and OneDrive sites as the destination for the SharePoint Online Migration Manager. Migration Manager is designed to allow ingestion of data from on-premises file shares into the SharePoint Online platform. Previously this was limited to just SharePoint Online sites but with the added functionality, we now have more flexibility and meet more real world use cases, especially with the proliferation of Teams in most organizations.

Using Migration Manager

Using Migration Manager is really easy. To get started, navigate to Migration section of the SharePoint Online Admin Center and in the Migration Manager section, click on… “Get Started”.

If this is your first time using the Migration Manager, download the migration agent setup file and install it on a machine in your network.

Once the agent is installed, we can create a task to import our Data. Create a new task and choose one or multiple destinations. For this demo I’ll select a single destination but using a CSV or JSON file you can split imports across multiple destinations.

Enter the path to your File Share to import:

We now see that we can choose OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams! If we choose OneDrive, we can enter the OneDrive URL of the user and the folder we want to import into. We can even create a folder if it doesn’t exist already.

If we choose Teams, we can choose our Team, Channel and folder to import to:

Finally, we can add our settings and filters as normal to migrate.

The additional destinations and flexibility provided here makes legacy file share migrations a breeze. The enhancements to the ingestion tools have been incredible and we have come a long way from the old file ingestion service (which I still love by the way).

For more information on using Migration Manager, check out the Microsoft Documentation.