SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams files, and legacy file shares planned, migrated, and validated.
SharePoint migrations fail for two predictable reasons: permissions don't migrate cleanly, and nobody validates the content after it lands. File share permissions mapped to Active Directory groups don't automatically translate to SharePoint Online permissions. SharePoint 2010 features enabled in old site collections have no equivalent in SharePoint Online. Documents with special characters in file names cause silent failures in the SharePoint Migration Tool that the summary report buries in a CSV nobody reads.
The migrations done here include a content inventory, a permission mapping audit before migration starts, a post-migration validation pass comparing source and destination file counts, and user acceptance testing before the source is decommissioned. Source data is not deleted until migration success is confirmed.
Known Folder Move silently redirects users' Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive without requiring manual file moves. When deployed via Intune or Group Policy with the right configuration, users don't notice the change until they realize their files are accessible on a second device. When deployed without preparation — typically by pushing the policy before Entra Connect sync is complete or before OneDrive is provisioned — users get sync errors and call the helpdesk.
The deployment sequence here tests Known Folder Move on a pilot group of 10–20 users, confirms OneDrive provisioning and sync completion, then stages the rollout to the full organization with a defined rollback policy in place.
Tool selection depends on the source environment and data volume. The SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) is the baseline for straightforward SharePoint-to-SharePoint Online migrations. Sharegate provides better visibility into permissions migration and is preferred for complex environments. Movebot handles cross-platform migrations including Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox to SharePoint Online. For large file share migrations, the Azure Blob Storage staging approach via SPMT handles volumes where direct upload is impractical.
SharePoint 2010 and 2013 customizations — classic web parts, SharePoint Designer workflows, InfoPath forms — do not migrate to SharePoint Online. These are assessed during the pre-migration inventory. Options include rebuilding in modern equivalents (Power Automate for workflows, Power Apps for forms), leaving on-premises if actively used, or decommissioning if usage data shows they aren't. This conversation happens before the migration starts, not after.
File share permissions based on Active Directory security groups are mapped to equivalent SharePoint Online permissions during the pre-migration phase. Explicit user permissions (ACLs applied directly to individual accounts instead of groups) are flagged for review because they don't have a clean migration path. In most cases, these are consolidated into groups before migration. Broken inheritance and deeply nested permission structures are the most common complications.