Microsoft SharePoint has been the best collaborative and content management solution for literally decades. When Microsoft released SharePoint Server 2013, it had several breakthrough features still in use today, such as connection with OneDrive for Business, the launch of Community Forums, and microblogging features.

Like other perpetual license software providers, Microsoft will cease long-term support for Microsoft SharePoint customers in April 2023. While upgrading to the most recent SharePoint Server 2019 is conceivable, there is no direct path to migration from SharePoint 2013. SharePoint migration is the process of migrating all of the content from the current file server or SharePoint to a new and existing environment.  In this article, let us look at the advantages of migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online.

Why Migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online?

Migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online provides you with many advantages, which are listed below:

•   SharePoint Online has no “End of Support,” typically at most ten years in the case of Microsoft SharePoint Servers with everlasting subscriptions.
•   Site proliferation can be better managed, saving engineering time and money while boosting security and technical adaptability.
•   It is constantly updated, so the user would not have to wait for new features or security updates.
•   Microsoft manages it, so administrators rely less on it for infrastructure and updates.
•   It consolidates sites and content into a single Office 365 tenancy, reducing the number of different farms.
•   Avoid the licenses and expense of maintaining on-premises servers and software.
•   Server, site, and disaster recovery are built-in and inherent to the Microsoft cloud.

What Is the Procedure for Migrating from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online?

The migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint Online goes through the two-step procedure: planning of migration and execution of migration. The two-step procedure is described in brief as below:

Planning of migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint Online

The migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online begins with an audit of the current sites and portals. Their number and nature would determine the migration strategy, which may range from simply shifting sites and portals to starting fresh in the cloud. We refer to this as mapping.

After identifying the sites to be moved from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online, the second step is to evaluate governance before migrating the sites. It includes determining how much authority different stakeholders have over the transfer and accessibility, matching on-premises provided based on the cloud, and developing policies for utilizing Microsoft SharePoint in the cloud. Following the establishment of the governance plan, enterprises must determine where they must migrate all the workloads to the cloud.

Executing Migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint online

The execution of migration from SharePoint 2013 Server to SharePoint online should go through a process as described below:

•   Rather than moving outdated SharePoint 2013 sites, build new sites with the correct template, corresponding to how they would be used in SharePoint Online.
•   Permissions are reviewed, simplified, or flattened where possible and configured in the destination.
•   The on-premises SharePoint 2013 taxonomy and metadata structures are consolidated where possible and replicated in SharePoint Online.
•   Root site information is consolidated and updated with SharePoint Online content.
•   Where sensible, site collections are grouped into Hub(s) for common theme and navigation.

Key Features of SharePoint Migration Tool

• The SharePoint Migration Tool allows you to effortlessly transfer data from Microsoft SharePoint on-premises documents library or your on-premises file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.
• The utility will run automatically and will not affect the production environment.
• The tool will take about two days to scan your area. The utility will report progress in the terminal window throughout this time. When the scan is finished, you can find the result files under the Logs directory.
• Provide a valuable report for existing and finished migrations and task reports to assist in identifying and resolving any issues that may have arisen during the transfer process.
• It has a very user-friendly interface.
• It enables batch transfer from the Share folder, SharePoint on-premises, and CSV files.
• It supports small-scale migrations as well as large-scale migrations.

Post Migration and Pre-Launch Activities

Complex processes, workflows, integrations, and workloads, such as dashboards and ETL for Business Intelligence, must be re-linked just after content is migrated. Review the necessary endpoints, prerequisites, and permissions before utilizing SPMT. You must join Microsoft 365 as a Global or SharePoint admin to migrate at the organizational level. You must be the site administrator for that site collection to transition to the traditional project level. Both SharePoint and file share migrations do not support proxy connections. HTTP connections would fail if Web Browser proxy is configured since SPMT by default does not use system proxy credentials.

You might see problems like “SharePoint login failed” or “can’t load document library,” for instance. You can, however, change the SPMT app’s configuration file so that it uses the system proxy settings. The source SharePoint 2013 and target SharePoint Online environments must be cross-referenced to determine whether the migration was successful.  Scripts may need to be built for specific operations, such as establishing and creating new sites from a request in a Microsoft SharePoint list.

Furthermore, Officials must watch changes in office 365 and SharePoint regularly to determine the impact on the SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online migration, mainly if it is a lengthy process. Microsoft has also created a simple command-line tool called “SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT)” that will analyse the content of your Microsoft SharePoint to assist identify any issues with data that you plan to migrate to SharePoint Online.

Conclusion

You are strongly advised to move the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 to SharePoint Online before the support period expires. Many people who are still using SharePoint 2010 can use the same way to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online.

Most organizations must examine a wide range of factors related to the wider Office 365/ Microsoft 365 ecosystem while moving from SharePoint 2013, because, while technically viable, SharePoint 2013 would not generally be transferred to SharePoint Online on its own.

SharePoint Migrator Tool is a professional migrator tool that can move an unlimited amount of domains, site collections, versions, workflow, metadata, list/libraries, and other items between two SharePoint accounts.

We had a use case where one of our clients had two different SharePoint sites. One SharePoint site was where team members create and modify content.

Another SharePoint site was used by the CEO where team members manually update the finalized content from their site since the CEO wants to only see finalized content.

This allowed for final published content aggregation for review by the CEO in one location.

This way the CEO did not need to go across multiple sites, allowing for a single location for making business decisions easily.

It is quite a tedious process to manually replicate and update content on the CEO’s site in real time. Our client was looking for a way to automate the whole process.

One option is to create a Power Automate workflow on a document library of the source site which will sync the data to the destination-defined document library.

This will work perfectly fine for one source document library. However, challenges will appear when we want to implement the same solution for more than one source document library.

It is not scalable or recommended to create a Power Automate workflow every time we create a new document library on multiple sites, so this approach would not easily be scalable.

There is no out-of-the-box or straightforward way to achieve the requirement of replication across a growing number of source document libraries.

We, therefore, implemented a reliable solution using SharePoint lists and Power Automate which can sync data from multiple document libraries and their folders across multiple sites to the destination folders (CEO Consolidated content).

By using this approach we are able to manage the replication of thousands of folders/files across multiple sources and destinations.

SharePoint Lists structure

1. Create one central Mapping List. In this list, we are managing the source location of different sites and the destination location of the CEO Site.
2. Add Source path and destination path in the central mapping list as per the below example
3. Added an InternalID column in the destination library in which we will store the ID of the source’s folder/file. This InternalID will be used to check whether a folder/file exists or not at the destination location. This will be the key column between the source and the destination.

Power Automate Solution Structure

We need to create a Power Automate solution and will need to create three different Power Automate flows inside the solution as shown below. The Content Replication Parent Flow will run first and inside that flow, we will run two child flows for content replication and for cleaning up files

• Content Replication Parent Flow (Parent Flow])
• Content Replication (Child Flow)
• Clean-up Files (Child Flow)

Power Automate Schedule

From an operational perspective, we schedule the Content Replication Parent Flow daily at midnight.

It will further call the Content Replication and Clean up Flows and will pass the current mapping ID in it.

Content Replication Parent Flow

This Flow extracts the active mappings from the Central Mapping List and loops through each active mapping.

This Flow passes the current mapping details to the Child Flows (Content Replication and Clean Up Flow) as seen in the image below.

Content Replication

1. This Flow will Copy Content from the source to the destination based on the current mapping. It will receive the mapping details from the Parent flow.
2. Loop through all folders/files of the source path mentioned in the mapping and fetches the folder/files modified after the date-time mentioned in the “LastFlowRunTime” column of the central mapping list. After getting all the folder/files it will check folder/file already exists on the equivalent destination path same as the source path using the Internal ID column which we created in the destination library
3. If it exists, then we overwrite it.
4. If it does not exist, then the Flow will create the folder/file

Clean-up Files

1. This Flow will remove files from the destination which were deleted from the source
2. Loop through all folders/files in the destination path mentioned in the mapping and will fetch the folder/files. After getting all the folder/files it will check whether the folder/file already exists in the equivalent source path using the Internal ID column.
3. If the folder/file is not found in the source path, it means that the folder/file was deleted from the source, so we delete it from the destination.
4. This way, it will delete all the files from the destination which were originally deleted from the source.

After implementing the solution, we found that when we move a folder/file to another folder then it does not modify the modified date of the moved subfolder or file.

So content movement between folders and libraries can cause an issue, where the updates don’t get reflected in the destination.

In practice, we found that the moved folder does not get captured in the next cycle of the Power Automate Flow, as we are only synchronizing the folders/file which was modified after the previous Power Automate Flow run, based on the timestamp which we store in “LastFlowRunTime” columns of the central mapping list, and therefore will not get synced to the destination equivalent location.

We had further optimized the solution to overcome this move folder/file issue and made the changes in the solution as shown below.

SharePoint Lists structure

• Create Moved Mapping List (For Moved Folder/File: a complete replica of central mapping list)

Content Replication

1. This Flow will Copy Content from the source to the destination based on the current mapping. It will receive the mapping details from the Parent Flow.
2. Loop through all folders/files of the source path mentioned in the mapping and will fetch the folder/files modified after the value of “LastFlowRunTime”. After getting all the folder/files it will check whether the folder/file already exists on the equivalent destination path the same as the source path using the Internal ID column which we created in the destination library
3. If it exists, then the Flow will overwrite it.
4. f it does not exist, then a further check of the folder/file to see whether it exists anywhere in the destination library. If it exists somewhere in the destination library, then it seems the file has moved to another folder in the source location. If so, it will create an entry for the parent folder of the folder/file in a Moved Mapping List. If it does not exist in the library at all, then the Flow will create it as a new folder/file

Power Automate Solution Structure After adding Move functionality

• Content Replication Parent Flow (Parent Flow)
• Content Replication (Child Flow)
• Clean-up Files (Child Flow)
• Replicate Moved Content (Flow for moved folder/file attached on Moved Mapping SharePoint List on Item create the event)

 Replicate Moved Content

1. This Flow is a complete replica of the Content Replication flow. But it only triggers for the specific moved folder file which we created in the Moved Mapping list while executing the Content Replication Flow.
2. Power Automate will trigger when any new item will be created in the Moved Mapping list and move the folder/file to the destination path mentioned earlier.

In Conclusion, Mirroring the SharePoint document library contents to multiple sites is an important task that needs to be done with care, and having a reliable SharePoint development company with expertise in Microsoft Sharepoint services is crucial for efficient and smooth mirroring.

Summary

While creating a PowerApps app, we needed to add a button that would be visible only for a particular set of users who were present in a specific group in SharePoint. This was accomplished with the help of Flow.  

We would check with the help of Flow that the user that is trying to access the App, is present in the group or not. If yes, the button is available and if not, the button won’t be. 

The approach goes like, 

Step-1

Create a SharePoint Security Group and add the users who would have the access to the button in PowerApps App.

And enable the access to view the members of the Group to Everyone, so that when the user tries to login, not all users would be in the group.  

Step-2

Creating the Flow 

• Create the Flow, with the trigger PowerApps of PowerApps connector. 

• Add an action, Initialize variable of Variables connector. Set the name as isAdministrator to store a Boolean value.

• Add another Initialize variable of Variables connector. Set the name as UserGroupInfo to store a Boolean value. 

• Add an action, Send an HTTP request to SharePoint of SharePoint connector.  

Site Address – Select the site address where the security group is created 

Method – GET 

Uri – api/web/sitegroups/getByName(‘SharePoint Group’)/Users?$filter=Email eq ‘’ 

Replace the SharePoint Group with the name of the group created in Step-1. Here I had created the group ‘Line Manager’.  

Put the cursor pointer in between the single quotes and select the option from PowerApps, SendanHTTPrequesttoSharePoint_Uri from dynamic content window.

• Add an action, Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable UserGroupInfo in Name and value as Body from Send an HTTP request to SharePoint from dynamic content. 

• Add an action, Condition of Control Connector. Set the conditional value as variable UserGroupInfo and select the condition is not equal to and in value  to be compared as ‘[]’. 

     Inside the if yes and if no options, 

 For the option if yes, add an action Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable  isAdministrator and set the value as true, 

         For option if no, add an action Set Variable of Variable connector. Select the variable isAdministrator and set the value as false. 

• Add an action, Respond to PowerApps of PowerApps connector. Select the text option for the output. Set the variable as isAdminUser and the value as isAdministrator from the Dynamic content. 

The final look of the flow would be like this: 

Step-3

Implementing the Flow with PowerApps App 

After the Flow is ready, lets configure the same with the App to test it. 

On the first screen that would be visible when you run the App, on its OnVisible Property, set the variables as below: 

First, we take the variable isAdmin and set it as false.  

Secondly, we would check with the flow to set the variable UserGroupInfo as the flow’s outcome.   

On the button’s visible property, set it as If(isAdmin, true). SO that if the user is in the SharePoint Group the button would be visible else it would not. 

So when a user is inside the SharePoint Group, the screen would display the button: 

And when the user is not, we display: 

In conclusion, leveraging PowerApps in conjunction with SharePoint groups provides a dynamic solution for implementing role-based access control within your applications.

By utilizing the capabilities of Flow, we have demonstrated how to seamlessly manage user permissions, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access specific features or functionalities.

With Microsoft PowerApps solutions, organizations can not only enhance security measures but also streamline workflows and improve overall efficiency.

Whether it’s creating custom apps tailored to unique business requirements or integrating with existing systems for seamless collaboration, PowerApps empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of their digital ecosystems.

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can effectively implement role-based security measures in your PowerApps applications, providing a tailored and secure user experience for your organization.

Incorporating Microsoft PowerApps solutions into your development toolkit opens a world of possibilities, enabling you to drive innovation, maximize productivity, and achieve your business objectives with confidence.

Please post your question, if you will find while implementing this process. Thank you.