Over the last two decades, our company employed multiple SharePoint versions for document management and storage, hosting our intranet, and supporting collaboration on projects. Starting with SharePoint Server 2003 up to the current 2019 version, our on-prem architecture grew and has been extended by SharePoint Online since 2015. Additionally, on-prem file systems were used to store and share files within the company. This left us in a challenging situation where content spanning multiple data types was not only stored in different locations but on the top subject to various access methodologies and security architectures.

To consolidate this historically grown mixture of on-prem and cloud data into a cloud-first target structure, we were required to find migration tool(s) which fulfilled our needs. Besides the migration of content, properties of the data and the existing source technologies (e.g., the term store) have to be included and processed. Consequently, example criteria for tool selection included but were not limited to, proper handling of 

• the version history of files,
• the term store,
• access rights,
• site templates including migration of classical to modern,
• whole sites, document libraries, lists, and files.
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On the target side, to plan for the migration of content from both SharePoint Server and on-prem file systems to the cloud, we focused on both SharePoint Online and the solution of the Azure file.

In the next part, we will look at the migration tool selection process and how we designed the target structure for SharePoint Online and Azure files.