Prepare your environment

To be able to use the PnP Provisioning framework you need two key components. First of all you need to have Windows Management Framework v4.0 installed in order to generate the Cmdlet help. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40855 . Secondly you need to download the setup files and install the Powershell cmdlets. The latest release of the framework and instructions can be found here.

Once this is done you are ready to use the PnP Provisioning framework. To move our configuration to a different tenant/site we’ll create a template of our site and use it to configure the site on the new location.

Export the configuration to a template

Start your Powershell environment to access the newly installed cmdlets. The export process starts with connecting to the source environment where you configured your solution. Use the Connect-PnPOnline cmdlet and specify the url of your site.

You will be asked to enter your credentials.

Use Get-PnPProvisioningTemplate to create a XML that contains the description of your site.

In the -out parameter you can fill in the complete path of the XML-file. If no path is used, the file is created in the current directory of the Management Shell (c:\pnpDemo).

Now we have created an XML file that contains the configuration of your site. You will recognize the following nodes in the XML:

Sitefields

<pnp:SiteFields>
<Field … \>
<\pnp:SiteFields>

ContentTypes

<pnp:ContentTypes>
<pnp:ContentType>
<pnp:FieldRefs>
<pnp:FieldRef … \>
<\pnp:FieldRefs>
<\pnp:ContentType>
<\pnp:ContentTypes>

Lists

<pnp:Lists>
<pnp:ListInstance>
<pnp:ContentTypeBindings>
<\pnp:ContentTypeBindings>
<pnp:Views>
<\pnp:Views>
<pnp:FieldRefs>
<\pnp:FieldRefs>
<pnp:Security>
<\pnp:Security>
<\pnp:ListInstance>
<\pnp:Lists>

Security (site)

<pnp:Security>
<\pnp:Security>

Navigation

<pnp:Navigation>
<\pnp:Navigation>

Apply Template

After creating a new site we can apply our template to it. So first connect to the destination site

And apply the template

Our Approach

• You can also use other commands to customize a site, but we prefer the XML. This allows you to make changes and reapply it again. When it’s a new object it will be created otherwise it will be updated.
• We prefer to use several XML’s that just contains one type of object: Site Fields, Site content types, lists, …
• First try out your templates in a site on your development environment before doing it in production
• In some cases we also use other Pnp Commands. Look here for an overview.

Hopefully the above will help you!

As an IT project manager, I searched for an easy and generic approach to detect the reasons (whether financial, operational, cultural, …), as well to define the goals and the measurements needed to monitor the business case!

Although not a new concept, I believe that the “gains and pains”-concept – often used for defining value proposition – may be used as “a framework” that helps the writer of a business case to describe the reasons together with its goals for starting up a project

Putting theory into practice, I give an example from one of my customers, that  briefly describes how a “pain” was translated into a solution and how the goals were defined for that specific solution

First we discussed which pains my customer had. Soon it became very clear that involvement of people was a major pain, this due to historical reasons and the culture spread. From a technology perspective, we tried to help the customer in finding a solution to help the customer’s employees improving their involvement within their professional environment. The assumption was that employees could easily use any external social collaboration platform to spread their ideas about the company publicly.  Therefor a private social collaboration platform was introduced, allowing ALL employees to facilitate horizontal and bottom-up communication.

As a result, employees got more and more involved into the company processes, as they were able to express their thoughts about almost any process in the company,. The platform allowed upper management to capture their employees’ thoughts and comments as an input for improving processes and circumstances. Measuring involvement became easy: the more people who shared their ideas on the private social collaboration platform, the better processes were adapted and the better these processes were perceived by the employees.

This is what happened mathematically. By defining a pain, the company got a gain at the same price of one pain!

• Pain:  Lack of involvement
• Goal:  Improve involvement of employees and indirectly improve processes
• Gain:  Improved processes
• How:   A private social collaboration tool and capturing the ideas of employees about internal processes
• KPI and Measurements:  Counting the number of input and measuring the effect of adapted processes onto the employees via a simple tool called “Survey”!

Of course, we all agree that most business cases consist of multiple pains and gains, having each their own goals and measurement tools.

Hopefully this simple example may help other people in defining a business case.

The tool can be used by all O365 users, you do not need to be a global administrator to run the tool. Instead you only need read access to the source data and write access on the destination.

The tool is able to migrate smaller as well as large data batches and execute them in bulk.

Below you can find some more info on the Preview version of the new SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft.

The preview version can be downloaded on the following location.

Requirements

Before you begin, check the requirements prescribed by Microsoft.

Following table gives a short overview what happens with the permissions you had allocated to your source data

Using the SharePoint Migration Tool

When opening the SharePoint Migration tool, you will see the following screen.

When you first launch the SharePoint Migration tool, you will be prompted for your Office 365 username and password. The Office 365 credentials you provide will be where the files will be migrated.

After you successfully signed in the tool is asking you where you source data is located:

Before starting the tool, note down where your data is located and where you want to migrate those files.

As you can see above you will need to select the source location and enter the URL for the SharePoint Online site or OneDrive for Business site. Keep in mind you can only select data out of SharePoint 2013 sites or from a local file share or network path.

• SharePoint on-premises:
  If you select the SharePoint on-premises option, you will be asked to enter the name of the SharePoint Server site where your files are located and prompted for your credentials for that site. You will indicate what document library you wish to migrate.

• File Share:
  If you select the File share option, you will be asked to enter the location of the file share, the URL of the SharePoint Online site and document library where they will be moved.

For this demo purpose we will select the File Share option, procedure for the SharePoint option will be identical.

In the next popup screen select the folder or documents (Source) you want to migrate.

When clicking next, you will be able to fill in the destination URL. When filled in the requested detail just click on “Add”

In the next screen you will see the configuration you’ve made for source and destination. Within this screen you have the possibility to add more tasks or to export the tasks to CSV, which can be used later in a bulk migration process.

After you click Migrate, the progress of your migration jobs will be displayed. As they complete, you can view either detailed or summary reports of an individual job or view a single summary report that includes all migration jobs submitted during this session.

Migration report can be downloaded as well to check if the migration is executed correctly.

All folders, subfolders & files were migrated correctly into the SharePoint Online site.

Summary

First impression, The SharePoint Migration Tool lets you migrate your files from SharePoint on-premises document libraries or your on-premises file shares and easily move them to either SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.

The SharePoint Migration tool is an excellent tool for simple 1-to-1 data migrations. However, when there are more complex data migration requirements, 3th party tooling such as provided by AvePoint or ShareGate is still the best answer to successfully migrate content.

The following list illustrates the more complex needs:

• Migration of custom permissions
• Migration of 3th party workflows
• Migration of user alerts
• Mapping of site templates, permission levels, users & groups
• Migrating Managed Metadata
• Export from SharePoint to Csv
• Bulk Metadata edit
• Migrating Farm Architecture or Content DB’s
• Migrate sites to different templates or levels
• Version cleanup

Furthermore the new SharePoint Migration Tool currently only supports SharePoint 2013 on-premises & fileshares as a content source.

Ruben Plehiers

Business Innovation Consultant @ Spikes