Table of Contents
Introduction:
Altosio offers a great tool to migrate data stored in the cloud from and to several vendors. It allows you to seamlessly switch from a tenant to another, 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 tenant to tenant -Teams to Teams- migration scenario?
- M365 Group. The Group that hosts the Team is created in the target.
- Teams permissions (owners and members).
- Document libraries and files residing in the underlying Sharepoint Site.
- Files and folders metadata.
- Team channels, including standard and private channels.
- Microsoft Planner data, including buckets, tasks, title, description, start date, due date, labels, comments, assignees, references, attachments, checklists, and planner tab.
- Channel conversations. These will be migrated in an HTML file that will be added as a separate tab in the channel.
- Channel tabs, including Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, Website and Planner tabs. The files to which these tabs point should reside in the Team Sharepoint site.
- Microsoft 365 Group’s mailbox.
What to consider?
Like any other migration project, it is impossible to get the target to look exactly like the source. This is due to some API limitations that either don’t allow us to read the source, or prevent us to push the data in the destination. Some of the limitations are described in the list below:
- Chat conversations are not migrated, but due to the API throttling policies, it is not possible to rehydrate them in the chat window. Altosio migrates the chats in a shape of an HTML file that will be added to an HTML tab of the Teams channel. Mentions and emojis reactions are lost during this process.
- Comments on Planner tasks are migrated, but they will appear under the name of the migration account, and with the timestamp of the migration. Altosio appends the name of the real sender, as well as real date time (in UTC) of the comment to the top of the comment to preserve the data integrity.
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.
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
To access Microsoft Teams, 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. This account needs to bypass MFA, ADFS and custom Azure security defaults.
Licensing
Each Teams migration consumes a Standard Teams migration license. The license is automatically allocated and will get burnt as soon as the Team gets created in the target.
The license is Team based and does not depend on the number of users, channels or files.
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. Licenses are not refundable upon purchase.
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 tenant to tenant migration targeting Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups, we will create two Teams connectors, one for the source and another one for the destination.
a. Create your Teams source connector:
Under the connectors page, click on New Connector, choose Source and then Teams.
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. This can be either your commercial domain (mygreatcompany.com) or your Microsoft technical domain (mycompany.onmicrosoft.com).
Click on Grant Admin Consent. This will redirect you to a new page where you will have to log in 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 Teams and Groups in your M365 tenant. This job will pull the list of the teams and groups you have and will fill the mapping table with the usernames of the users in M365. You can navigate to Groups and Teams page to see the progress of this discovery job.
b. Create your Teams target connector
Identically to the source, you have to create your target teams connector.
Pre-migration assessment
Before running the migration, Altosio provides you with a way to assess your migration. The assessment task allows you to identify which teams will take longer to mirgate based on the amount of data in has in the source.
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 source users already prefilled. You need to add the equivalent email addresses of these target users. 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 permissions as well as the items metadata.
With an empty mapping table, the migration would still run, but the permissions and metadata will not be migrated correctly.
2. Understand the target fields
In a Teams to Teams migration, you can configure where you want to migrate. If the target Team exists in the destination, Altosio will migrate the data into the existing Group/Team. If the team does not exist, Altosio will create a brand new based on the Target Email Nickname you provide. This value is by default the same value of the source, but you are free to edit it.
On the left-side menu, click on Groups and Teams to visualize the list of your Teams. Clicking on Details on one entry will prompt a window like the one below.
If you would like to migrate into an existing Team, you need to provide the correct Mail Nickname of your target group.
Below is an explanation of the target fields.
- Target Group Name: This is the display name of the team in the target. It is the same name of the team in the source by default. Altosio will use this field as the display name of the team that it will create in the target (only if the team does not exist).
- Target Email Nickname: This is the nickname (the left part before the @ sign of an email address) that is going to be used to create the Team, or to bind to an existing one. You need to make sure that this field does not exceed 260 characters, as well that it does not contain any special characters that are not allowed in an email address. The email address should also not be used by another object like a user, shared mailbox or a distribution list.
Once everything is configured, please get back to your Groups and Teams list page, select the items 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 Team 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 logs tab to monitor the progress of your migration.
If the migration succeeds, the status will turn into Success. Otherwise, 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.
