Microsoft Teams is an excellent platform for collaborating and bringing all your team together to work on projects. It is one of the best productive workspaces out there. If due to some new restructuring at the organization sometimes you have to move Teams channel to another Teams then worry not.
In this article, we are going to provide you with a solution for it. Before that let us see some user’s query.
“I know that without the use of a PowerShell you cant move a Teams channel at the moment. But apparently, there are a few Graph API calls that could handle the migration process, has anyone created a custom solution for it? I have seen 3rd party tools that claim they can be the migration in Teams. I am assuming they use Microsoft endpoints to achieve this.”
Reasons to Move Teams Channel to Another Teams?
There are a number of reasons that a user could want to migrate their channel from one team account to another. A few common ones are as listed below.
- Mergers and Acquisitions: When 2 companies go through a merger then it is required to have all of the company data in one teams account. That is say company A merges with company B, then both companies would want their data in one place together. Either migrate B to A or migrate A to B.
- Divestiture: When a brand or business branches into sub-divisions it is important to change the teams channel of that branch to a new teams account. In a case like this, we have to move teams channel to another teams.
- Re-Branding: When a company or a business decides things aren’t working out and wants to do a fresh start they re-brand themselves. To cut off all ties with their previous brand identity even in internal space indie their offices they would want to move teams channel to another teams.
- Internal restructuring: If a company is restructuring its internal workings then there might be a case where it has to move its data between channels.
Also read: Chatbot Application Development
Why is Moving Teams Channel to Another Teams So Difficult?
We all have heard that migrating teams is a difficult task to execute. But have you ever thought about why? It is so hard to carry out this process because Teams stores various types of its data in various storage locations. This becomes a hassle when we have to move teams channel to another teams. Let us look at some of the storage locations that teams use.
- SharePoint Team Site: All files and folders associated with the teams library is stored here including all the files and folders associated with it. Files like external emails sent to Teams, data of the wiki page, document library of the shared channel, etc.
- Exchange Teams Mailbox: Group chats, channel chats, Teams emails, and contacts are stored inside the Exchange Teams mailbox.
- Individual Exchange Mailbox: Calendar events, voicemails, and personal chat history is stored here.
How to Move Teams Channel to Another Teams?
Generally speaking, there are 2 types of ways that you can use to do this process. Using manual methods and using a professional method. From the above section, we have seen how vastly the data used in Teams is spread out. If we try manually migrate the data too on top of the already shattered data then there are high chances of data loss. Therefore let us use a Professional Microsoft Teams Migration Tool to migrate teams channel to another tenant.
Steps to Move Teams Channel to Another Teams Account Using Professional Tool
- From the link above download install and open the tool.
- In the selection tab pick Office 365 as source and destination.
- From the category of data to migrate select Teams and Groups and click on next.
Note that all channels will be created as a public channel in the destination as default. You would need to change it to a private channel after the migration process is over.
- Next enter the source and destination credentials validate and verify the permissions and click on next.
- In the resource tab, there are 3 methods to get the details of the user. Choose the option that best suits your needs.
- Fetch user
- Import user
- Download Template
- After the users are imported into the tool you have to map the source users and destination users.
- Go to the next section of the resource tab to get the Teams data. Here again, there are 3 options fetch, import, and download template. Choose the one that you prefer and click on the next option.
- Once imported map the source Teams with the destination Teams. To do this click on the “Create Team button” and provide a destination name.
- Validate permissions and click on the start migration button to start the migration process.
- If any of the items were skipped or failed then you can re-run migration to move those items too. This feature can also be used to move any new items that have arrived.
- After making sure all the data is migrated select the “mark Teams Complete” option once this option is selected you can’t re-run the migration anymore.
Also read: How to Perform Office 365 hybrid migration step by step
Conclusion
In this article, we have taken a look at how we can move Teams channel data. As we have discussed above with all of the limitations of the manual method we recommend using the above-mentioned tool to migrate teams channel to another tenant.