Tool selection is a key step in the migration planning process. The tool influences the success of your tenant migration, including how easy, how fast, and how thorough the process will be.
Robert Buktenica and Joe Cirillo dive deeper into the topic of migration tool selection in this episode of Late Night Brew. They also discuss some pitfalls of migration that may not be obvious at the start, so you can plan for them ahead.
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TIMESTAMP
00:07 – Introduction
00:34 – The Brew
01:33 – Why is tool selection important in migrations?
05:00 – What are some pitfalls of migration that may not be obvious?
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert Buktenica: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk the brews first and we get around to what we’re supposed to do after.
Joining me once again for the next episode in this series of Tenant to Tenant is Joe. Welcome back, buddy.
Joe Cirillo: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Robert: All right. Now, of course, you are probably sick of the drill by this point.
Joe: Never.
The Brew
Robert: What brew are you having with me today?
Joe: Today, it’s actually a very simple root beer. Good old classic A&W root beer. It’s actually their diet version, but it actually tastes, I will say, of any diet soda I’ve ever had, it’s the closest to the real thing. So, it’s really good.
Robert: Yeah, I don’t drink pop very often—and there you go. That’s where I’m from, if you know how the US says—but when I do, that one’s actually quite a good one, so I agree with that.
I’ve got in honor of the recent holiday that passed for the US and the rest of HARP, the classic lager from… It’s a good lager. It’s a mainstay. I don’t know what else to say about other than good.
Why is tool selection important in migrations?
Robert: So on today, we are diving into migration tooling and why it’s important and all of that. So without further ado, Joe, why is the tool selection so important in migrations?
Joe: Yeah, when you’re doing a tenant-tenant migration, Microsoft has obviously a large number of services that need to be migrated from one tenant to another. And although Microsoft has been, I’ll say, slowly releasing certain features across platform, like a mailbox migration move or a one-drive migration move, they still don’t have an answer for a lot of the other types of migration of the services for like SharePoint, Teams, and so forth.
And so, of course, because of that, we have to rely on third-party tools to do these types of migrations. So, the selection of the tool becomes important because, number one, not every tool does everything, right? So you really have to take a look and make sure you understand fully what exactly you need to migrate.
So, if it’s a simple exchange or, a one-drive migration, then, yeah, probably 99% of the tools out there SharePoint can actually do those migrations. But if you get to something like a project online, there’s only less than a handful of tools that can migrate projects online.
So, it might even be that you have to run multiple tools in order to migrate all of the services that you need to migrate. It just gets very complex very quickly.
Robert: Yeah, and there’s always the fun of what if another tool comes out with the feature that you’ve been looking for and you went with another one, you know, and it’s that awareness.
Joe: Absolutely, like Power Platform is another one, too, that, you know, one of our partner companies that is actually capable of migrating the Power Platform, which is good.
So that’s again, another notch in their tool belt. So, it just makes it a little bit more simple. They do all of the core services like Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, but then they also do the Power Platform. So, that’s a big step up as well.
I know another solution they’re working on doing some more, like the Power Platform as well, as well as like Power BI. They’re always developing too. So that’s another thing you have to be able to look out, you know, what a tool might not be capable of doing today, absolutely could be capable of doing even within a month or two.
So, as you get closer to you, you know, when you really have to execute your migration, it’s definitely good to keep an eye on the market as far as the toolings are concerned.
Robert: Yeah, and you never know, from far too much experience, I think for both of us, what the actual hands-on tool is like versus what you were sold, right? Not to default, you know, or downplay any of that. However, definitely have had my expectations poorly managed.
Joe: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, not all tools are created equal. Absolutely. You know, some are very comprehensive, easy to use. Others, extremely complex, and very difficult to use, you know. Some require more manual settings, others have more automation. So again, yeah, just part of that selection criteria as well.
What are some pitfalls of migration that may not be obvious?
Robert: Yeah, and actually, that’s a good lead in with a, you know, what are we mentioned some already, of course, what are some other pitfalls of migration that, you know, might not be obvious on the outset?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, as far as the pitfalls, most of the tools will actually execute the migration for you. But where some of the tools might fail is more at the vendor level, right? For things like customer support, right? How good is the customer support? Can you pick up a phone and get a hold of somebody? Or do you have to do it all through mail?
Because we all know, right? When you’re in a cut-over weekend, you don’t want to have to rely on email, you know, having to open a ticket and waiting 24 hours and all this stuff when you’re in the middle of a—
Robert: I was going to say, the SLA has become really, really painful.
Joe: Yeah. And the other thing too, is a lot of tools offer additional training, right? So, they’ll actually sell you, hey, do you want to an x number of hours of gold-level support? So that they’ll help you set up the tool and help you navigate it and understand it. Others just rely on their KB articles and so forth.
So again, you know, as part of the due diligence, you got to think about not just will the tool execute migration from a data perspective, but also what kind of support am I going to get from the vendor when the time comes, you know, not just in setup, but also in execution as well.
Robert: Yeah, definitely. Those are very good points. And they’re great points to end our time on. So, Joe, once again, as always, buddy, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And we will chat on the next episode.
Joe: Great.
Robert: Until then, cheers.
Joe: Yeah, see you then.
And there you have it! Now that you know how important tool selection is in migration, it’s time to start researching the different tools available in the market to find the best one for your needs.
Need help in selecting a tool? Insentra is here to help. Reach out to us or check out our MapTo advisory services to get expert assistance in your tenant-to-tenant migration.
Feel free to download our Comprehensive Guide to Microsoft 365 Tenant Migrations ebook or watch our full Late Night Brew series to learn more about T2T migrations.
