Table of Contents
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 an Planner to Asana migration scenario?
- M365 Group. This is translated to an Asana Team
- Microsoft Planner Plan. This is translated to an Asana Project
- Group / Plan members and owners
- Planner buckets
- Files
- Comments
- Tasks
- Tasks checklists. They will be translated to Asana subtasks
- Task details including title, assignees description, start date, due date, comments, attachments, completion and tags / labels
What to consider?
Asana and Microsoft Planner are quite similar in shape. Your end users will not find any issue coping up with the changes as both tools look quite the same, and have almost the same functionalities. However, there are some small limitations that you might need to be aware of:
- Planner allows multiple assignees on each task. Asana allows only one assignee. Altosio will assign the first assignee on the task and will mark the rest as Asana collaborators.
- Asana allows you to have subtasks. For Planner, subtasks are just checklist items of a task. The items will be migrated as subtasks in Asana.
- Asana APIs do not allow migrating any attachment that exceeds 100Mb in size. Any Planner attachment that exceeds this size will be ignored.
- Setting the Start Date on tasks in Asana requires a Premium Asana plan. If you are on Asana free plan, your tasks’ start dates from Planner will not be migrated.
- Picture attachments cannot be set as the background of your Asana tasks programmatically. The pictures/files are migrated correctly.
- Labels and tags are different in color and number between Asana and Planner. Altosio will migrate as many equivalent labels as possible.
- Comments will be posted in Asana under the name of the token holder. The metadata (real sender and real date-time of the comment) will be appended on top of the comment. This is an Asana 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/cards that are migrated. This allows the customer to rerun the migration without duplicating data.
Altosio’s migration tool does not edit the source environment in any way. It copies the data to the target without altering it. Altosio needs a read-only access to the source.
Requirements
1. Planner
To access Planner, 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.
2. Asana
To connect to Asana, all what you need is to provide a Token that allows us to read data from your Asana environment.
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 Asana project gets created in the target.
The license is board based and does not depend on the number of users, tasks or attachments there are in the board.
The migration supports delta passes, which means that you 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 Asana to MS Planner migration, we will create two connectors, the source being a Planner connector, and the target being an Asana connector.
a. Create your Planner connector:
Under the connectors page, click on New Connector, choose Source 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).
The creation of a source connectors automatically triggers a discovery job of your Planners in your M365 tenant. This job will pull the list of Plans you have and will fill the mapping table with the usernames of the users in M365. To be able to pull the list of Plans, the migration account needs to have access to all of the plans. Altosio will automatically add your migration account as Member of your M365 Groups in the source in order to query each group and see if they have any Planners residing inside of them.
b. Create your Asana connector:
Click on New connector, choose Target, then Asana. You should provide an Asana Token. Please check this article that explains how to generate it.
Pre-migration assessment
Before running the migration, Altosio provides you with a way to assess your migration. The Audit task allows you to identify on each board if you will hit the limitations that exist between the two environments. The limitations are listed above in this article.
For more information, please reach out to support@altosio.com
Migration
- User mappings
Before running the migration, it is very important to visit the Mapping table section of your project. In this section, you will find entries for your Planner users already prefilled. You need to add the equivalent email addresses of these users in Asana. If the email addresses are the same between the source and destination, you can leave the mapping table empty. Altosio will automatically map the users based on the source email addresses.
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.
2. Understand the target fields
In a migration to Asana you can configure where you want to migrate.
Asana projects live instead an Asana Team, which lives inside a Workspace/Organization. Altosio does not create Workspaces or Organizations. It can however create Asana Teams and Projects.
You can eiher migrate to a new Team/Project or merge the data into an existing one.
If you would like to migrate into an existing Team/Project, you need to provide the correct names of your Project and Team in the target fields.
- Target Plan Name: This is the display name of the Asana Project in the target. If you provide the name of an existing project in Asana, Altosio will migrate the data into it. If the Project does not exist, Altosio will create it and map the permissions to it.
- Target Email Nickname: This field is not used for Planner to Asana scenario. It can be left empty.
- Target Group Name: This is the name of the Asana Team. If you want to migrate to an existing Team, please provide the name of the team in this field. If no team is found with the value provided here, a new Team will be created.
- Target Channel Name: This field is also not used for this scenario. You can leave it empty.
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 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.
