Welcome to another episode of Late Night Brew: Tenant-to-Tenant Migration!
In the previous episodes, Robert Buktenica and Joe Cirillo have mentioned testing as a key step in the migration process. Now, it’s time to dive deeper into the importance of testing when performing a tenant migration.
How much of migration should be tested? And how close to production-level should you expect functional testing to be?
You know the drill—grab a drink and listen in to the discussion now!
TIMESTAMP
00:07 – Introduction
00:35 – The Brew
01:45 – How much of the migration process should be tested?
04:52 – How and where can testing impact the migration process or plan?
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert Buktenica: Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk the brews first, then we get around to what we’re supposed to at some point. Joining me once again for the next episode in this series is Joe Cirillo. Joe, welcome back buddy.
Joe Cirillo: Thank you once again. Glad to be here.
The Brew
Robert: Now, before we dive into testing during tenant-to-tenant migrations, you’re a seasoned vet, so what brew are you having with me today?
Joe: Today, I just actually brewed my own iced tea. So, you know, just a yeah, nothing too crazy. Just good old Lipton iced tea.
Robert: It’s warming up so I will soon myself have a stock of iced tea. I’ve actually got a Schöfferhofer. It’s a radler. It’s half beer, half grapefruit juice, which is actually quite delightful, and it’s not very high octane. So, it’s one of those that it’s definitely just a good sipping. It’s like you’re drinking grapefruit juice, which is both great and terrible.
Joe: Yeah. The first time I had a mixed beer and like lemonade was in Germany, actually, Munich. And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So it was actually pretty good.
How much of the migration process should be tested?
Robert: Yeah. It’s one of those lovely discoveries. Now, getting into the thick of it, just trying to think of a terrible pulp pun but just couldn’t. How much of the migration process should be tested?
Joe: Yeah, boy, that’s a nebulous question for sure. Because you know, of course with any type of migration, you always want to plan, plan, plan and then of course, test, test, test. I would just say that if you can do as much testing as possible, that’s always ideal. You know, so when you think about the workloads that are being migrated over and what you can actually test, given the fact that sometimes, in these types of migrations, you’re actually going to move the brand with you, right?
So you’re company.com and you’re going to bring company.com. But you can’t move that brand until the very end of the migration. So how do you test strategically with that domain? Typically, you cannot. So, you have to, just from a testing perspective, use either a faux domain or the Microsoft domain, for testing things like email, right? Sending, receiving, so on and so forth.
But you always want to test things within the framework of the migration tool. A lot of times the migration tooling will migrate permissions, for example, for Exchange or SharePoint teams, OneDrive. So, you want to make sure that those permissions are being carried over—
Robert: Properly, when it’s being shifted, yeah.
Joe: So you want to test— Yeah. So you definitely want to test all of the feature and functionality that the migration tool says it’s going to be capable of. You want to test and make sure that it’s actually operating correctly. And then look for any gaps.
And then a lot of times, customers might have some unique side cases of maybe integrations of certain applications and such that you also have to test as far as the migration process, just to make sure that it’s set up and configured properly on the destination tenant.
Robert: Yeah, there’s a lot. I remember some of the ones we’ve done of just making sure each workload has at least proven its ability to be migrated to some extent, and all of those important pieces. Although even some of the more difficult things—like Power Automate or Forms or some of those more difficult or incapable of a tool that can’t just lift and shift it for you—of making sure that’s happening. Or at least, it will wind up close to.
Joe: Yeah. And you know, testing, functional testing is not going to be exactly like production-level migration. So that’s why too, when we’re doing testing, we want to have the type of data as close to production as possible. Just so that, again from a tooling perspective, if it does have any issues, you can get ahead of that and then you know, make sure that you accommodate for that in the production actual cutover.
How and where can testing impact the migration process or plan?
Robert: And I mean that leads us, right, how can or how and where can testing actually impact the migration process or the plans even?
Joe: Yeah, well and like you said, it’s a great segue, right. So you know, it’s one thing just to create some test sites or mailboxes or whatnot, put a little clean data in there, and then do the migration. Everything looks good. And then when you get into the production side of the house, all of a sudden, things are failing, not quite.
So yeah, that’s certainly one of the most critical pieces is to make sure that you’re using either factual data or sometimes a lot of customers have either user accounts or sites that are no longer being used but still have legacy data. So maybe you can do some testing with those types of accounts or that type of data as well, to again, get what it’s really going to look like from a from a migration perspective.
So as close as possible. I know it’s never going to be perfect and you’re always going to encounter issues in production. It’s a migration. It’s just that, you know, it’s just the nature of those, you know, it’s just the nature of migration.
Robert: Yeah, I also like the champions, too, of who is—I always call it IT-friendly—who doesn’t mind helping out IT or is tech-savvy enough. “Hey, go log in and poke at it,” right. “What’s something that you usually handle breaking?” That one person in every department who’s the “IT guy” of that department, of giving them that early access to, say, “Poke at it in a way that you know it might break, and let us know if it works as much as you can”, right, within the limits to your point of functional testing.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely.
Robert: On that note of me making the final note instead of my guest, that is unfortunately all of our time. Joe, thank you once again for joining. If you have any questions, all of our contact is below. Please feel free to reach out. Until then Joe, the final episode is upcoming. So, cheers, Sir.
Joe: Alright, I’ll find something good to drink for that one.
Robert: Now you’re setting the standards high.
Joe: That’s right.
Robert: Take care.
Joe: Take care.
Testing can really impact the success of your migration process. It helps you foresee potential conflicts on the end user side, so you can come up with solutions when you execute the actual migration.
We hope this episode gave you clarity on the importance of testing in tenant-to-tenant migrations.
If you’d like to learn more about T2T migrations, feel free to watch our full Late Night Brew series or download our A Comprehensive Guide to Microsoft 365 Tenant Migrations eBook.
For expert guidance on executing a tenant migration, check out our MapTo advisory services or reach out to us today.
