SharePoint 2007 to Office 365 Migration with ShareGate

After looking at supported migration scenarios, Active Directory synchronization and planning your move from SharePoint to Office 365, you're finally ready to start your migration.

Since there are currently no tools available from Microsoft to migrate directly from SharePoint 2007 to Office 365, I will show you how to do it using Sharegate.

1.       Download and Open the Sharegate Migration Tool:

Of course, the first thing to do is to download Sharegate. Once installed, we’ll be able to choose Migration from the panel on the left of the tool’s home screen.

There, select the best-suited option based on what kinds of objects you want to migrate.

The first, Copy Structure, will help me bring bigger chunks over to the destination. You will be able to migrate entire Site Collections, individual Sites, Lists, Libraries, Groups and more.

The second one, Copy Content, provides granular options that can sometimes be more effective than moving everything at once.

In this example, we are migrating a basic SharePoint 2007 Intranet to a new SharePoint, on Office 365.

The thing is, a lot has changed since SharePoint 2007. The architecture of the platform is very different, but most importantly, there are Site Templates that no longer exist. We’ll take a note of that and see what we can do later on.

Because Sharegate isn't installed on a server and can run from your desktop, it doesn't have access to the same options in the Central Administration. You need a Site Collection to exist at the destination, so that Sharegate can hook on to it.

It can be blank, or one where content already exists. Either way, Sharegate will give you the options to merge with it if you need to.

If you have a lot of Site Collections, you can look at my post on creating an inventory with PowerShell of your SharePoint and create another PowerShell script that takes this inventory, to create new blank Site Collections with the same name.

2.       Migrate SharePoint Sites from 2007 to Office 365

The migration itself is pretty straightforward with Sharegate. Once you’ve planned your migration, you can start migrating your SharePoint 2007 Sites quickly and easily.

In this case, I am going to use the Copy Site Objects tool, because I plan on migrating larger objects as a whole to my Office 365, rather than taking the content from one List or Library to another.

Then, we need to enter the URLs for both the source and the destination. Sharegate asks me where I want to copy from, as well as which credentials I want to use to connect to each of these SharePoint URLs.

It’s important to connect with credentials that have the necessary rights to perform the actions you are planning to do.

For example, if I am planning to migrate just a Document Library, then I need to make sure I have at least access to it at the source and that I can create libraries at the destination.

Next, you’ll find yourself in front of Sharegate Desktop’s migration interface, which shows you the source and destination.

On the far left, we can see the Site Objects navigation, to change the type of objects we see in the squares that represent our environments.

Today, I don’t need a granular migration by object, so I’m going to select the Current Site in the Navigation on the left. This is because I want to take the site at the URL typed in the previous step, and migrate it to Office 365, along with all its subsites.

All I have to do is select the site on the left, drag it and drop it in the square on the right, which represents the Office 365 environment.

Before the migration starts, I’m prompted with the Copy Now screen where I can see the current settings or go into the advanced migration options.

For example, I might want the content, but only with the last 10 published versions. I might also want to merge, which will be the case in this example, because I want my old Site Collection become the new Site Collection in Office 365. Otherwise the default copy option would do so as a subsite.

When you're happy with the copy options, you're ready to start your migration.

3.       Report on SharePoint 2007 Migration

Reporting is a crucial piece of any given migration, because we want to make sure everything worked as it was supposed to. If it didn’t, reporting helps to know exactly what failed and why, so that it can be fixed.

Sharegate offers a lot of flexibility in terms of building reports, but if you want one quick and effective automatic report, you can view the report for the migration we just completed in the All Task panel.

From there, you will quickly see the results.

I can see from the report that I have a few errors that occurred during the 2007 to Office 365 migration, so I’ll double-click on it to find out more.

What I love about these error and warning messages is that they actually mean something. I can tell that the Translation Management Library is deprecated and thus was not enabled on my destination Office 365. There is also a URL to a Sharegate Documentation article that helps me solve this issue.

However, depending on your method of migrating, you could have chosen between Automatic Mode and Manual Mode. These are two approaches to the migration, one that is completely silent, but asks you before the migration starts what to do if various things happen.

The other, Manual Mode, stops and asks what to do as each warning or error occurs. With Interactive Mode, I could see while I was migrating my SharePoint 2007 Sites, that certain Site Templates no longer exist at the destination.