SharePoint Migration Tool

SharePoint has become a platform for secure collaboration in many organizations all around the globe, especially after the introduction of SharePoint Online. SharePoint can handle tremendous data sizes, that is not the problem. The problem occurs when you need to migrate SharePoint.

To solve this issue Microsoft has released SharePoint Migration Tool. The application is designed to migrate content from SharePoint Server 2013 or on-premises file shares easily to either SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.

 The problem here is that the tool focuses on content migration, and that is very limited. To answer this, Microsoft released another component called “SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool” or SMAT for short. The tool is a simple command line executable that scans the contents of a SharePoint farm to help identify the impact of migration.

The “SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool" tool is available in two modes:

·         Assessment and Identity Mapping. The assessment mode runs scans against the SharePoint farm and associated content looking for issues that have been known to cause problems for customers migrating into SharePoint Online.

·         The Identity Mapping mode allows you to generate a report of all the user and group identities that have access to your SharePoint environment and attempts to map those identities to Azure AD user and group identities.

There is no user interface for this tool, and it is run completely using command line syntax. The application utilizes two configuration files:

·          “SkipSitesList.csv” which allows the application to skip sites, excluding them from the report.

·          “ScanDef.json” is also available in the same directory, allowing you to disable or enable individual scans within the assessment tool.

SMAT.exe is used at the command prompt. Navigate into the extracted application directory and type: SMAT.exe

The current engine will launch the scanning tool, and the engine starts a separate window listing the items found within the current site.

After the application completes scanning, base report details are available within the “Log” directory. This directory contains a log of the following:

·         Actions

·         Errors

·          Summary report

·         Site assessment report

·         and all the “CSV” files now populated with data from the SharePoint farm.

The “CSV‘ files such as “CustomizedPages-detail.csv” are available to be opened and viewed. These files contain the raw data entries retrieved through the scanning process.

After completing a scan, the report is generated displaying information about potential issues that need remediation before migrating to SharePoint Online. For example, my scan revealed two customized pages, and the report simply rendered the following values and link:

 

Clicking the link takes you to the documentation for that specific item within the SMAT section of “docs.microsoft.com.” The information provided only offers a view of the data but not of the customization found.

Though this is useful information for identifying locations of customizations or other assets and features that need checking, it is just information of where items exist and no deep inspection of what has changed.

The SMAT tool works perfectly, at least to give you a log of potential issues that need addressing, for an organization looking to migrate to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.  However, it does not give you a more in-depth inspection into code items; list where web parts; scripts or even other components are within the site. It is assumed that when using the SMAT tool  that other processes are in place to manage those elements.