I am working for a client who needs to migrate their existing tenant say https://existingtenant.sharepoint.com to a new tenant say https://newtenant.sharepoint.com
Migration is not a problem partly because I am using a very easy to use tool
ShareGate and partly because my client has a very standard out of the box kind of SharePoint implementation.
One of the very important tasks is to migrate all the One Drive for Business data of over 200 existing users. I didnt know that it could get so tricky. I was under the impression that it will be as simple as migrating other site collections using the tool.
Before we proceed
There are a few things that you need to know about OneDrive for Business for SharePoint Online
1. Its My Site which enables user to store and share documents just like any other document storage and sharing tool out there for example DropBox but of course with much more features and flexibility that comes with SharePoint.
2. Its a users site collection and only users have access to their my.sharepoint.com site.
3. Even tenant administrators dont have access to users' OneDrive. Users are sole site administrators of their OneDrive
4. OneDrive is not like your emails which is available as soon as a new user gets created. It needs to be first provisioned before it can be used.
5. You cannot migrate OneDrive from a "existingtenant" to a "newtenant" unless you have administrative rights on each of OneDrive on users on both the tenants.
As you can see I have following problems to solve
1. Pre-provision all the users (200+) on the new tenant.
2. Get administrative rights on all the users on both the tenants.
3. Migrate all the users' OneDrive
ShareGate helped me fair bit by letting me become administrator of all the users on both the tenants with just a few click. But this does not solve my problem because the original problem of provisioning the sites and bulk migration was still outstanding.
1. Pre-provision all the users
After a bit of googling I got hold of a very useful script by Microsoft which helped me provision all my users. Details and all the required explanation
here. Keep following in mind
1. webUrl should be your -admin.sharepoint.com
2. Your user should have Global Administrator rights
3. Run Windows PowerShell as Administrator.
4. Microsoft.SharePoint.Client, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.UserProfiles can be found
here.
5. I didnt setup SharePoint Online Management Shell.
Once I got all the users provisioned I had to find a way to verify if the script ran successfully and I found a useful
link which helped me verify that all my OneDrive for Business are provisioned. I also randomly accessed a few users' OneDrive to verify the case.
2. Get administrative rights
I got my first problem solved. My next step was to be able give my Administrator full access to each users' OneDrive. I am assuming that you dont have access to ShareGate and you have to do it yourself.
Following is what I see when I log in as one of the users and access OneDrive.
Click on Site Settings> Site collection administrators under Users and Permissions and you will see that current logged in user is the only administrator of her OneDrive (which we have already talked about)
To give yourself administrative rights on each of the OneDrive sites you need to perform the following actions
1. Get SharePoint Online Management Shell. There are a lot of things that you need to take care of as suggested by Microsoft. Get yourself accustomed before trying any of this all. Download SharePoint Management Shell from
here.
2. Run Shell as administrator and connect to your tenant using the command
Connect-SPOService
Make sure you put it -admin.sharepoint.com part when prompted for Url.
3. Put in your admin user and password and asked.
4. Create a new .ps1 file using the following script
5. Run the script using SharePoint Online Management Shell by first pointing to the destination folder where you have stored this file.
I have named my script file AccessRights.ps1
As you know that I had 4 users I see four times the message that my administrator is added to each users site.
Your administrator is now a Site Collection Administrator on all the users on your newtenant.sharepoint.com. Make sure you repeat this process on existingtenant.sharepoint.com
3. Migrate all the users' OneDrive
I am planning to use ShareGate to migrate user's OneDrive. If I get a script to do it for me I will post it here.
Happy migrating.
