Management tooling vendor ShareGate has announced new features for supercharging migrations that involve the complexities of Microsoft 365 (M365).
In a webinar, ShareGate senior product manager Antoine Bousquet said latest and upcoming features from ShareGate included mailbox migration and Teams and SharePoint site provisioning.
“Migrations are complex, time sensitive projects. You want them to be fast,” Bousquet said. “And we’re expanding support for tenant-tenant migration, to help you move your mailboxes, the messages, the contacts, the calendar, the server side rules, shell mailboxes and more. “
Bousquet said other tools, including Microsoft’s own free migration tool, were not “as easy or powerful as ShareGate” for migration.
“Larger migrations, our licensing models allow you to break it down into multiple smaller migration on multiple machines, to make them faster,” he added.
“And then there’s a ‘preserve and transform’ pillar. We understand how critical your data is and we leave no details behind when copying permission, metadata, versions, or a bunch of other super important elements in your environment.”
Bousquet said ShareGate sees migration as an opportunity for users to optimise the way their company work, including internal productivity but also security. “It’s not just about the lift and shift.”
Also in 2024, ShareGate is offering enhanced SharePoint site provisioning, following Teams provisioning.
Users would get unlimited easy-to-use templates to create the sites, then leverage ShareGate’s M365 migration engine to copy it over the way you want it, for a “cleaner” result, building on various provisioning, archiving and governance announcements from last year, he suggested.
“Configure everything from the web interface, or you can do the way we do the Teams provisioning and leverage the blueprint system,” he said.
“And this year, we’re also excited to be extending our support for adoption by introducing a new thing, a turnkey M365 end-user training.”
According to ShareGate, preparing for company merger and acquisition (M&A) activities can prove troublesome if the meld of the digital workspaces involved is mishandled.
“Migrations are never easy. The volume of data can be a headache for IT, especially when large businesses enter the equation,” the vendor said, noting that planning in each case is crucial to success.
Content and collateral needs moving and reorganisation with sprawl also minimised to avoid unnecessary future resource use and cost, with M365 environments known for their particular challenges.
“When two companies merge, they bring different work cultures and values besides data. The new environment needs to be welcoming for both parties and should consider how each workspace previously operated,” said ShareGate in this blog post.
“And when there’s friction, productivity suffers.”
Incoming teams might be performing better in some respects, with aspects that could be incorporated into the acquirer’s practices and policy, for instance in the way that the merged digital workspace is organised and related content managed, the vendor said.
Read a step-by-step ShareGate migration guide on the vendor’s website.
( Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash )
.){kind=link}