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Copy teams and Cloud copy - Limitations

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The ShareGate migration tool and Cloud copy rely on available Microsoft 365 APIs to migrate your Teams, and there are a few limitations to consider.

Index

General limitations

  • Teams with Org-wide privacy will have Public privacy at the destination.
  • Only the Standard Team template is currently supported. The migration tool and Cloud copy will create all your destination teams using the Standard template.
    Note: If you copy a team with a non-Standard template, the additional properties of that template will not be included at the destination.
  • Teams for personal use (not part of a Microsoft 365 tenant) are not supported.
  • Chat messages can only be copied with PowerShell.
  • The Teams picture is not supported.
  • The Teams setting Allow members to upload custom apps is not preserved at the destination. It will have the default value On at the destination.
  • The Teams setting Who can add tags is not preserved at the destination. It will have the default value Owners only at the destination.
  • Your custom tags from Manage tags are not supported.
  • Pending requests for private teams are not migrated.
  • Deleted channels are not migrated.
  • Outgoing and Incoming webhooks are not migrated.
  • Custom apps are not supported. Only Teams app store applications can be migrated.
  • Migrations to and from Multi-Geo Satellite sites (Central Site supported).
    • The ShareGate migration tool cannot migrate Teams into the additional regions created by the Multi-Geo service.
    • The migrated Team will go to the default tenant domain.
  • Services connected to your Exchange server---such as the Calendar in Teams or Shared mailboxes---cannot be migrated as they are not attached to SharePoint.
  • Copy/pasted images at the source will not be viewable in the destination. If an image was added as an attachment at the source, it will be migrated as a reference link in the destination and still be viewable. 
  • Single sign-on browser authentication cannot be used.
  • Custom SharePoint admin center URLs (i.e., vanity URLs) aren't supported. For more info, see The Central Administration for site could not be found.

Organizations with Microsoft national cloud

Due to several limitations in terms of the Microsoft APIs used by ShareGate to function as intended, the following Microsoft national cloud deployments are not currently supported for Copy teams and Cloud copy:

  • Microsoft 365 US Government - GCC
  • Microsoft 365 US Government - GCC High and DoD
  • Microsoft 365 China, operated by 21Vianet
  • Microsoft 365 Germany

Channels

The migration tool and Cloud copy can copy standard and private channels, their conversations, files, folders, and certain tabs and apps. The migration tool cannot migrate the following:

Settings

The ShareGate migration tool cannot access most of your channels' settings. Your users will have to reconfigure their channels manually after the migration.

Tabs

The tabs in a channel give team members access to conversations, files, and tools. The following 4 sections highlight support and limitations when copying channels using the ShareGate migration tool and Cloud copy. For general information on tabs, see the Microsoft article Use built-in and custom tabs in Microsoft Teams.

Posts tab

This section is about the conversations you will find in the Posts tab of your team channels. It is not about the messages you will find in the Chat section of Teams.

  • The 50 most recent conversations will be copied to the Posts tab.
    • All other conversations are stored in an HTML archive page that you will find in a new Message history tab in the destination.
      Tip: You can copy up to 500 messages with the
      -PostedMessagesMigrationStartDate parameter in PowerShell.
      Note: A conversation consists of the original channel message and its replies. Multiple replies to a conversation are merged (concatenated) into a single reply. The author and timestamp of each reply are preserved inline.
  • The ShareGate migration tool and Cloud copy cannot determine the time zone at the source. The timestamps of the conversations in the destination will be the same timestamps the user running the migration can see at the source.
  • The Meet Now post is not migrated.
  • Reactions (emojis at the top of your messages) are not migrated.
  • Reference-type attachments added in a conversation via drag and drop or the upload button are replaced by a direct link to the documents in SharePoint.
  • Conversations with a tab reference attachment are not shown in the tab at the destination.
  • The Allow post setting of Announcement is not supported. The setting is set to the default at the destination, which allows users to reply to the announcement.
  • Link previews are not copied.
  • User mentions (i.e. @teams, @channel) are replaced by text highlighted based on your formatting. The mentions will no longer display information about the user when you hover them with your mouse.
  • Code snippets' titles and languages are not preserved at the destination.
  • Each migrated conversation will contain a disclaimer at the top of the conversation thread that shows the following information:
    <Account used to perform the migration> <Date, Time of migration>
    The conversation below has been retrieved from <sourceTenantName>
    Tip: To ensure that this disclaimer is uniform, professional, and understood by your colleagues, run your Teams migrations with a service account.

Unsupported tabs

These tabs are not supported.

  • Flow (they are created at the destination, but they need to be reconfigured)
  • Wiki tabs

Tabs that are only supported when they are migrated within the same tenant

These tabs are only supported when migrated within the same tenant. They will have the same content since they point to the same entity in your Microsoft 365 environment.

  • Yammer
  • PowerBI
  • Stream
  • Forms
  • Whiteboard

These tabs are not supported when you migrate them to another tenant. They will be created, but they will require to be configured.

Limitations with supported tabs

  • Most tabs created from third-party apps will work once copied. Users will need to reconnect to the platform. In some cases, they might not work as expected and will require some adjustments in the destination.
  • Folders from cloud storage in a Files tab cannot be migrated.
  • The ShareGate migration tool and Cloud copy module cannot preserve the order of your tabs.
  • With Copy channels into an existing team, the notebook in the default OneNote tab will need to be linked. For more information, see The OneNote notebook referred by this tab was not found at the destination.

Channels

Hidden channels

When copying channels into an existing team, the copied channels may become hidden at the destination. This is because of a limitation of the Microsoft 365 API used by the app. For information on how to show a team's hidden channels, see the Microsoft article Show and hide channels.

Shared channels

Channels shared between multiple teams are not supported by the migration tool and Cloud copy at the moment.

Members and owners

Missing members and owners

Some members and owners from the source may not appear in the destination team's user interface.

These missing users are generally resolved automatically when Microsoft updates the members and owners lists every 24 business hours.

Missing users will be automatically added to the members or owners lists when they sign in to Teams. This update can take a few minutes.

Copy team channel migration

When doing a copy team channel migration, members and owners will only be migrated if the channel being copied is private. For public channels, you will have to manually add any missing members and owners after your migration. For more complete details, see Walkthrough - Copy team channels.

During migration

  • It is not possible to migrate without members or owners.
  • Members and owners cannot be added or removed during a migration.

Planner

For more information on limitations specific to copying Planner, see Copy teams - Planner.

Incremental copy

For more information on limitations specific to incremental copy, see Copy teams - Incremental.

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