Give each kind of file the right home, clean up before you move, move in stages that suit your size, and have people reach their files through the OneDrive app. Don’t copy the old drive across as one big folder tree.
Where things go
- OneDrive: each person’s own files, the old home drive. Private by default; people can share from it.
- Team sites: a team’s shared files. Create the team in Teams and you get the site, plus a mailbox, calendar and Planner. Each standard channel is a folder in the Documents library.
- Communication sites: what the whole organisation reads, such as policies, forms and news. A few people write, everyone reads.
- Separate sites for work shared with outsiders, so guests only see the site they were invited to.
Teams should broadly match the security groups on your shares. If finance’s share is open to the finance group, that’s the finance team.
Keep teams private. A public team’s site gives “Everyone except external users” edit rights, and Copilot will surface its files to anyone who asks. Company-wide reading goes on a communication site.
Shared Dropbox folders go to SharePoint, not one person’s OneDrive.
Projects and customers. Lots of small projects with the same people: one Projects team, a channel per project. Big, long-running work with outside stakeholders, dedicated staff or tight security: its own team. Often that’s a customer, with a channel or folder per project.
Don’t copy the mess
Ask people to tidy up. A lot of storage is a 1996 training video nobody will open again. I’ve seen storage drop by over 70% just by asking, especially where nobody had asked before.
Turn folders into metadata. Folder paths usually encode the client, the year and the document type. Make those columns and let views do the sorting. Think iTunes: you stopped filing MP3s in folders and sorted by artist and year.
Small organisations can skip home pages and web parts. Point the site navigation straight at the libraries, and add pages, approvals and policies when you need them.
How people reach their files
The OneDrive sync app with Files On-Demand: everything shows in File Explorer and downloads when opened.
- Add shortcut to My files, not Sync. Microsoft recommends it; it follows the person to every device. Hide the Sync button with
Set-SPOTenant -HideSyncButtonOnTeamSite $true. - Known Folder Move puts Desktop, Documents and Pictures in OneDrive. If you redirect those to the file server now, copy them across with Migration Manager first.
- Under 300,000 synced items per person, shortcuts included, or sync slows down.
- No mapped drives. They use WebDAV, which is slower and less reliable. So is “View in File Explorer”.
- Don’t sync to the old server and share it out, except for large files. It works, but people lose live collaboration and version history.
Budget for the internet connection: every file now crosses it, so don’t cheap out on it (the sums).
Moving the files
Use Migration Manager in the SharePoint admin center. Agents on machines that can read the shares split the work. It also moves Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and Egnyte.
- Scan first for blocked file types, illegal characters and paths over 400 characters.
- Check permissions. The most restrictive of share and NTFS permissions wins, advanced NTFS permissions are dropped, and deny entries don’t migrate, so content behind a deny can open up (guide). Fix it on the server first.
- Pilot, then run incremental passes while people keep working.
- One live copy. A small organisation can cut over in one go, as Microsoft suggests. A larger one can move a team at a time and make each team’s old folders read-only as it goes.
- Don’t rename or move migrated files until the last pass. Incremental passes match by path, so a renamed file gets overwritten.
Get some help
An experienced person heads off a lot of duplication and lost metadata. With 500+ licences, FastTrack will do migration work as part of your subscription. If a partner’s quote looks steep, ask for it itemised: some of it may be a third-party tool licence you can swap for Microsoft’s, and you can offer to do some of the work. Going department by department, your IT people learn as they go.
Tell people the date, the new location and why, before anything changes.