IT Pros Deliver a More Streamlined Migration of Microsoft Teams
In the modern workplace, the ability for employees to collaborate and engage with each other on projects in real time is becoming essential. The increased adoption of tools like video conferencing, chat apps and unified communications solutions that facilitate real-time collaboration are making messaging within the workplace easier and more cohesive. This changing landscape of workplace communication is reflected in the rapid adoption of collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams. A cloud-based team collaboration software that is part of the Office 365 suite of features, Microsoft Teams provides employees access to messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing and is gaining traction as a key component of the Office 365 suite. Teams has been adopted by more than 500,000 organizations, including 91 percent of Fortune 100 companies, and is anticipated to continue to grow. Many companies are excited about the emergence of Workplace tools like Microsoft Teams because it facilitates cohesive employee engagement and can help improve efficiency. However, IT staff can find the migration of Teams a complex and daunting process.
Tenant-to-tenant (T2T) migration
As tenant-to-tenant (T2T) migration scenarios continue to arise, Teams is becoming a critically important workload to migrate alongside other user and business data such as mail, documents and personal archives. Teams is expanding as a central collaboration hub in Microsoft Office 365, and when a larger IT transformation project takes place, it’s critical that information inside Teams is preserved for users. This is resulting in IT professionals understanding the growing significance of how to correctly perform migrations of Teams, and that this skill will only increase in demand within organizations. However, since Teams is a new workplace-messaging software, there has been no previous success model that IT professionals could follow or replicate to complete a successful migration. Migrating instances of Teams could often be perceived as a headache by IT professionals.
Fortunately, the deployment and migration process of Teams has now become easier and more secure for the IT community. On July 9th, BitTitan, a leader in managed services automation, announced the introduction of new capabilities to its cloud office migration solution, MigrationWiz, which will support the migration of the Microsoft Teams platform. MigrationWiz is an industry-leading SaaS solution for mailbox, document and public folder migrations and has helped transition 15 million users to the cloud. Now with the introduction of these new capabilities, IT professionals using MigrationWiz can migrate a Teams Instance and also the individual components including Teams, Channels, Conversations, Permissions and Files within that instance. In addition, IT professionals can conduct a pre-migration assessment of Teams software to analyze the number of Teams, amount of data and number of users that will need to be migrated. This type of assessment will help IT professionals better gauge and analyze aspects of the migration before execution, like timelines and number of licenses required, and help to better forecast overall project costs. With these added capabilities to MigrationWiz, IT professionals are now able to address new workload demand more efficiently and smoothly.
Streamlined Migration Process
IT professionals know that the migration process is more difficult and tedious than one might think. Migration of software can be time-consuming and highly technical. Best practices of a successful migration process can include planning in advance, focusing on one workload at a time to ensure all data is transitioned seamlessly, and making sure to decommission legacy systems and clean up infrastructure at the end of the migration. MigrationWiz’s new Teams capabilities ensure that IT professionals can easily check the boxes on these best practices during the migration process.
New Signature, a cloud-first, full-service Microsoft partner that delivers full lifecycle solutions, can relate to the challenges and issues that many face during the migration process. With the continued proliferation of Teams, many of New Signature’s customers expected to migrate their Teams content as easily as other Office 365 services. As an early adopter of BitTitan’s products, New Signature was able to take advantage of MigrationWiz’s Teams capabilities to create a more complete and seamless migration experience for their customers. “We were eager to leverage MigrationWiz for Teams projects and incorporate them into our existing tenant-to-tenant migration toolkit to ensure our customers have a much more comprehensive transition to their new tenant,” said Jim Banach, practice group lead at New Signature.
The evolving landscape of workplace communications and the growing popularity of tools like Microsoft Teams reflect that IT professionals need to be equipped with the skills and tools to ensure software migrations are as seamless and secure as possible. Next time an IT professional is faced with a migration of Microsoft Teams, remember to leverage MigrationWiz for an easy, fast and secure transition that will deliver an end-to-end Office 365 migration experience.
Mark Kirstein is the Vice President, Products at BitTitan, leading product development and product management teams for the company’s SaaS solutions. Mark has over two decades of experience overseeing product strategy, development, and go-to-market initiatives. Prior to BitTitan, Mark served as the Senior Director of Product Management for the Mobile Enterprise Software division of Motorola Solutions.
By Mark Kirstein
