News

Microsoft Releases Migration Manager for SharePoint Server

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 28, 2020

Microsoft this week announced updates to the SharePoint Migration Tool, plus commercial release of Migration Manager.

The two tools are used by organizations to move from SharePoint Server hosted in an organization's datacenters to SharePoint Online, a Microsoft 365-hosted service offering. Microsoft also has another migration tool, called "Mover," but it's just used for cloud-to-cloud moves.

The public can ask Microsoft questions about its Microsoft 365 migration tools in an upcoming one-hour "Ask Microsoft Anything" session, which is scheduled for June 10 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

Migration Manager at General Availability
Migration Manager, a tool available in the SharePoint Admin Center, is now at the "general availability" commercial-release stage. IT pros can use Migration Manager to move file-share content from SharePoint Server when making a move to Microsoft 365 online services. This tool just moves files, though, and does not move SharePoint Server content, according to a Microsoft FAQ document. The tool also just supports English-language sites right now.

Microsoft added a few improvements to Migration Manager. Users, who need to be global SharePoint admins to use the tool, can now perform these tasks:

• Specify a document library and a folder for your migration destination
• Paste a destination URL (SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams); includes automatic scanning.
• Add an increased number of tasks to your migration
• Sort and search tasks

The Migration Manager tool was introduced as a preview at last year's Microsoft Ignite conference. It was explained back then that this tool was designed to handle large-scale file moves across multiple machines, which was described as challenging to accomplish using Microsoft's main tool, the SharePoint Migration Tool.

SharePoint Migration Tool Additions
Additionally, Microsoft described a few SharePoint Migration Tool enhancements.

The tool now has support for moving SharePoint Server 2016 content to Microsoft 365 at the preview stage. It supports pasting long URLs (instead of having to truncate them beforehand). Microsoft also made it easier to report issues with an "on-click reporting" function. Lastly, users of the SharePoint Migration Tool can migrate content to OneDrive storage using a user's email address. 

The SharePoint Migration Tool reached "general availability" commercial-release status a couple of years ago. It supports migrating SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2013 content, but it's at the preview stage for moving SharePoint Server 2016 content.

A preview of the SharePoint Migration Tool (presumably with support for SharePoint Server 2016) can be downloaded here. There's also a non-preview version that can be download at this page.