Microsoft has made Migrating to SharePoint Online a little bit easier by releasing the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT). At the time of blogging the current release was version 0.2.75.1, the leading zero is a good clue that it’s definitely still in development and may be missing some of the things you really need. Having said that, it does solve some common migration issues and it does it for free!

Here’s a short list of things the SPMT will do for you:

·       Allows you to copy a folder on your file server to a library in SharePoint

·       If the source folder contains sub-folders it copies them too

·       Retains created and modified dates

·       Retains names of the creator and last modified

·       Does incremental copies

·       Allows setup of multiple source and destinations in a single job

·       Source can be a file server (or local disk) or SharePoint on-premises

There are a few short comings to be aware of in the release above:

·       You cannot copy photos on your source server to an image library in SharePoint Online

·       You cannot name a migration job which makes finding the job to rerun later can be hard

·       You cannot schedule a migration job

·       If you close out, you need to run the tool and log in to Office 365 again

I’m sure many of these things will be sorted out soon. Even with these limitations the SPMT is still a very useful tool and will help with some of the basic problems with dragging and dropping files to SharePoint.

Download the SharePoint Migration Tool here:

http://spmtreleasescus.blob.core.windows.net/install/default.htm