New Endpoint: Shared Drive (Source)

Over the past two years, we have seen an uptick in the number of migrations between cloud office suites. Gartner also made this observation as part of their updated market guide in February 2021.

Shared Drive is the equivalent system to SharePoint Online for Google Workspace users, providing a central repository for files and folders, enabling users to work collaboratively and remotely.

With new enhancements to MigrationWiz, customers can now migrate data out of Shared Drive and into SharePoint Online. Support for Shared Drive as a destination and between separate Shared Drive accounts is scheduled for later this year.

New Component: Teams Private Chat

Private Chats – messages between two or more individuals in Microsoft Teams – is a critical component of a cross-tenant Teams project. Because these messages are stored within Exchange, these chats are migrated as part of a standard mailbox project.

Early this year, we added this checkbox to our mailbox project flow. Both standard mailbox and User Migration Bundle licenses support the migration of Private Chats. You can learn more about this feature release here.

Due to API limitations from Microsoft, Private Chats are currently migrated to a specific Outlook folder on the destination. We are working around this limitation and expect to be able to hydrate those chats directly into destination Teams instance later this year.

New Offering: Microsoft 365 Migration Assessments with Voleer

Thanks to another product in the BitTitan portfolio, Voleer, migration customers can run assessments prior to a migration to help scope and plan for the move to another tenant.

These assessments range from all-up tenant analysis to individual workloads such as Teams or SharePoint. Assessments can be run several times or across different customers and are free to use as part of the 30-day trial with Voleer.

Learn more about different assessment types here.

What’s Up Next?

We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but know we’re working on some pretty sweet things for migration customers this year.

Expanded Coexistence for Tenant Migrations

The first part of this work addresses scenarios where there is a change in the domain name as part of the migration project. We have already improved error reporting and messaging to help project owners troubleshoot issues proactively. In Q2, we will be expanding features around mail user objects, target objects, and converting mail user objects to mailboxes to offer a better management experience throughout the project.

Phase two of this work is tackling same domain coexistence, a highly requested feature from our tenant to tenant user base. We will have more to share on this feature set in the second half of the year.

Support for Additional Teams Components

Arriving in the first month of Q2 will be versions and metadata for files stored within Teams – expanding the work we did to improve our SharePoint Online migration experience in 2020. User Team settings and a secondary authentication method through Delegate Permission will be releasing shortly as well.

Building on that is support for the Planner application, a popular productivity integration for Teams.

In addition to Private Chat hydration directly into Teams, we’re also scoping additional migration scenarios into the Teams application, understanding that not everyone is starting from scratch when it comes to workstream collaboration applications.

Teams continues to be the priority focus of our product teams this year in the context of tenant to tenant scenarios.

What would help you be successful in 2021?

One of our four core values at BitTitan is a customer-first mentality. We love our customers, from MSPs large and small to internal IT teams doing it themselves. Drop us a line if there is a feature or improvement you’d like to see from our team that would make your life easier. Who knows, maybe you’ll see it on the next product roadmap!