Introduction:
Altosio offers a great tool to migrate project management data from and to several vendors. It allows you to seamlessly switch from one software to the other, with a guarantee of no data loss. The migration software runs in the cloud, so you do not have to worry about installing anything. Everything is accessible from your web browser at https://app.altosio.com
The migration tool is reliable, secure and lightning fast.
What is migrated in Planner to Planner migration?
- Plans, with the Team or Office Unified Group to which they belong
- Permissions (members and owners)
- Logo
- Files with their metadata (created by, created at, modified by, modified at)
- Underlying Sharepoint site with all of its folders and files
- Buckets
- Tasks
- Task details including title, assignees, description, start date, due date, comments, attachments, progress, priority, checklist, and comments
- Group’s mailbox
What to consider?
Moving from a tenant to the other is seamless. There is no change of environment, so your users will not have to cope up with any changes. However, there are some API limitations that won’t allow us to have a perfect migration. These limitations are insignificant and will not impact the business or the Planner board. They are enumerated below:
- Comments metadata: The comment author will show as the migration account, and the timestamp will show as the time of the migration.
Altosio will append the real timestamp and the comment’s author to the comment in order to preserve the metadata. - Task Completed By: The completed by property will always show as Completed by the migration account, at the time of the migration. This information cannot be migrated due to the API limitation.
Security
The Altosio software runs in the Cloud and is hosted in Microsoft Azure data centers located in the Netherlands. Altosio is able to provide you with a static IP address from which the migration will run in order to secure your environments with Firewall access accordingly. Please reach out to support@altosio.com to get it. You can also visit our security statement here.
It is also worth noting that the Altosio tool does not store anything internally. It reads data in chunks and pushes them in real time in the target. No data is cached or stored in the hard drive of the servers running the migration. Altosio does however store the unique Ids of files and tasks that are migrated. This allows the customer to rerun the migration without duplicating data.
Requirements
To access Planner, in the source and in the target, Altosio needs:
- An admin consent to use the Altosio Azure Active Directory Application from your tenant. This requires a Global Admin account to grant the admin consent.
- Your tenant’s domain. This could be either your commercial domain “company.com” or your M365 vanity domain “tenant.onmicrosoft.com”.
- A migration account (email and password). This account does not need any admin privileges or roles. It simply needs a valid license that allows it to access Microsoft Teams. (an E3 license for example). We recommend that you create a dedicated user for your migration (migration@company.com for example) that can be deleted after the migration.
Licensing
Each board migration consumes a Standard Planner migration license. The license is automatically allocated to the board and will get burnt as soon as the Planner gets created in the target.
The license is Plan based and does not depend on the number of users, tasks or attachments there are in the Plan.
The migration supports delta passes, which means that you can restart the migration several times and it would still consume the same license that was originally assigned to it.
For any further inquiries related to licensing, please reach out to sales@altosio.com
Configuration
- Sign up and create your first project
First off, please create an account under https://app.altosio.com, validate it through the validation email and then login.
Once you login, you will land on a home page where you will have to create your project. Click on New Project, give it a meaningful name and then hit create.
Click on the project name to open it.
2. Create your connectors
The next step in the process is to create your connectors. Since this guide is about a Planner to Planner migration, we will create two Planner connectors, one for the source tenant, and the second for the destination. The process is the exact same for both connectors, except the Connector Type field where you have to specify if your connector is of type Source or Target.
Under the connectors page, click on New Connector, choose the type (Source or Target) and then Planner.
Provide the tenant name (your tenant name is the left part of your Sharepoint URL. If your Sharepoint URL looks like mycompany.sharepoint.com, then your tenant name is “mycompany”).
Provide the domain of your tenant.
Click on Grant Admin Consent. This will redirect you to a new page where you will have to login with your Global Administrator credentials and accept to install the Azure Active Directory Application on your tenant.
Please note that this application should be removed from your tenant after migration.
Please note that you can decline installing this application on your tenant. Instead, you can create your own Azure AD application, and provide the Application Id and Secret to Altosio. The tool will then use your own application credentials to connect to your M365 tenant.
Next on, you should provide an email and password of the migration account. This should be a licensed account with access to MS Teams application. This account does not have to have any admin privileges. (Standard user with no access to any admin portal).
Migration
- User mappings
Before running the migration, it is very important to visit the Mapping table section of your project. You need to add the source and target user mappings. You can use the UPNs.
The mapping table allows Altosio to correctly map the users in the target. It allows a correct migration of the files metadata and the list of assignees on each planner task.
With an empty mapping table, the migration would still run, but the list of assignees will not be migrated correctly.
Please refer to the screenshot below for an example of filled mapping table.
2. Understand the target fields
In a migration to M365 Planner, you can configure where you want to migrate.
Planner plans are always part of an M365 Group. In fact, creating a Plan from scratch creates an M365 Group by default. With Altosio, you can migrate to either an existing M365 group, or you can have Altosio create the Group for you. You can also choose to migrate into a Microsoft Teams by activating the Migrate to Teams option.
- Target Plan Name: This is the display name of the Planner in the target. The target plan name can be seen from tasks.office.com. This display name will also be the name of the tab that you would see in your Teams channel if you decide to migrate into Teams. You can see in the screenshot above in green.
- Target Email Nickname: This is the email address of the Group/Team you are migrating to. If you are migrating into an existing Group/Team, you have to identify its email address. You can find the email address from the Admin center -> Active Groups and Teams. The email nickname is the unique identifier of the Group/Team you are migrating.
- Target Group Name: This is the display name of the Group/Team. If you are migrating into an existing Group/Team, this field doesn’t matter since the group already exists. You cab see the group name in red in the screenshot above.
- Target Channel Name: This is only available if you are migrating into Microsoft Teams. This is the name of the Channel in which Altosio will create a tab with a link to the plan. If you leave this field empty, the plan tab will be created in the target General channel. If you provide a Channel name that already exists, Altosio will only create the Planner tab. If you provide a Channel name that does not exist in the target, Altosio will create the channel for you in this team. In this guide, we chose to leave the target channel field empty, so the plan got created by default in the General channel of the Team. The channel is identified in blue in the screenshot.
- Migrate into an existing M365 Group or Team
The email address of an M365 Group is its unique identifier. In order to migrate into an existing M365 Group or Teams, you need to provide the email address of the Group in the Target Nickname field.
Example: If your Group’s email address is Marketing@company.com, you need to input this email address into the Target field.
- Migrate into a new M365 Group or Team
You can choose to migrate into a new M365 Group / Teams. In this case, Altosio will be in charge of creating the Group/Team, adding the users as owner and members, and then creating the Planner inside this Group. For this, it is important to provide the target nickname (make sure the email that you wish to create the group with is not used elsewhere in a user’s email or distribution list), the display name of your group, the display name of the plan and eventually the name of the channel if you are migrating into Microsoft Teams.
Once everything is configured, please get back to your Planner list page, select the board or boards you want to migrate and then click start.
This action should prompt a selection of target connector. Select your target connector and click migrate.
The board will remain in a Queued state until it finds a spot on the platform. Once the migration starts, it will show in a “Working” status.
You can click on details to check the logs and the statistics.
If the migration succeeds, the status will turn into Success. Else, if there is an issue with the configuration, the migration will show an Error status. Please click on details to check the logs to see the reason behind the error. Eventually, please reach out to our support team at support@altosio.com to seek help if needed.
Post-migration
Once your boards are fully migrated, it is important to delete the migration account from your tenant (source and target) and remove the Altosio Azure Active Directory (AAD) application.
To remove the application, please follow the steps detailed below:
- Go to your Azure portal via this link https://portal.azure.com
- Under Azure Services, click on Azure Active Directory as show in the screenshot.
3. On the left-hand side menu, click on Enterprise applications.
4. Among the applications, look for the Altosio application and click on it to open it.
5. On the left hand-side menu, click on Properties, then delete and confirm the deletion.
Support
Support is done by email at support@altosio.com or over Teams calls.
Altosio support team will assist you throughout your migration project and will be pleased to help you run a successful migration.
