Introduction to Migration Manager

SharePoint Migration Manager enables you to migrate documents to Microsoft 365 (SharePoint or to OneDrive) from on-premises file shares, Google Workspace or Box . You access it by going to the SharePoint admin center and selecting the “Migration” option, in the left navigation:
SharePoint Migration Manager

If you want to migrate documents from SharePoint Server 2010, 2013 and 2016 or other cloud environments, you can use either “SharePoint Migration Tool” or “Mover”, both available from the Migration Manager page.

If you want to migrate documents from another site in SharePoint Online, you can also use the standard “Move to” function, available in the document library’s toolbar.

For more information see: Overview: Migrate your file shares to Microsoft 365 with Migration Manager.

Some facts about the tool

  1. With the ability to set up multiple computers as “agents”, Migration Manager lets you scale your migration project as much as you need. Your migration tasks will automatically be assigned to the next available agent.
  2. In the destination document library, the documents are migrated to a folder hierarchy that matches the folder hierarchy in the source location.
  3. Migrated documents maintain these metadata from the file server:
    • Date created: The time when the document was created on the file server. In SharePoint the value will be added to out-of-the-box column called “Created”.
    • Date modified: The time when the document was last modified on the file server. In SharePoint the value will be added to out-of-the-box column called “Modified”.
    • Owner: In SharePoint the value will be added to out-of-the-box columns called “Created by” & “Modified by”.
  4. Options when migrating documents are:
    1. To maintain the permissions that were set in the source location. It is also possible to use a mapping table for usernames.
    2. It is possible to only migrate documents that are newer than a specific date (can be applied on both creation date and last modified date).

Migration Manager has a graphical user interface, but it is also possible to use PowerShell to run migration jobs. For more information see: Migrate to SharePoint Online using PowerShell.