Migrate SharePoint From One Tenant to Another: Transfer Sites, Documents, Lists & Permissions

What Actually Moves During a SharePoint Tenant Migration

Before starting the method, helpful to understand and separate the components you are responsible for: 

• Sites / Site Collections: The containers of everything else, including team sites, communication sites, and any subsites underneath.
• Document Libraries: Files, folders, and their version history plus attached columns.
• Lists: List items, custom columns, views, and any workflows tied to them.
• Permissions: Unique permission levels, SharePoint groups, and sharing links that control who can see what.

This category includes Office 365 tenant to tenant migration involving Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, and Teams data. SharePoint tends to be the most complex aspect in such migrations, as permissions are not stored as simple values in databases. They are closely linked to objects in the Active Directory of a particular domain and, therefore, must also be migrated along with the directory.

The Native Route: Microsoft’s Cross-Tenant SharePoint Migration

Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) only allows migration from on-premises SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online. The tool does not support migration between tenants. Microsoft offers Cross-Tenant SharePoint Migration as a preview feature. This service may evolve over time and should be considered as such.

The process runs through PowerShell and follows a defined sequence:

1. Connect to both the source and target tenant.
2. Establish and verify trust between the two tenants.
3. Pre-create the users and Microsoft 365 groups that will own content in the target tenant.
4. Build an identity mapping file linking source accounts to their target counterparts.
5. Run the Start-SPOCrossTenantSiteContentMove cmdlet with the source site URL, target site URL, and target host URL.
6. Complete the post-migration verification steps.

The mapping file in step four assists to transfer right. Without it, SharePoint isn’t ready to recognize that “Alice in Tenant A” and “Alice in Tenant B” are the same customers and are entitled to equal access.

Where the Native Method Runs Into Trouble

Many IT teams need to move SharePoint sites from one tenant to another as part of a larger restructuring, and the native process works for that. A few practical limitations show up quickly once the project grows past a handful of sites, though:

• Preview status: Availability and support are governed by Microsoft’s private preview terms, which means limited assistance in case of issues arising during the production cutover.
• Manual identity mapping: Every user and group has to exist in the target tenant beforehand, and the mapping file is built and maintained by hand.
• Command-line only: There’s no dashboard for tracking dozens or hundreds of site migrations in progress, just individual PowerShell sessions.
• SharePoint-only scope: It moves site content, not the Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, or Teams data most organizations are migrating in the same project.

None of this makes the native approach unusable for a small, well-scoped move. It just means the manual effort scales alongside the number of sites, users, and groups involved, which becomes a real constraint once a migration spans a whole organization.

DRS Softech Tenant to Tenant Migration Tool

For IT teams that want to migrate SharePoint from one tenant to another (along with mailbox content, OneDrive accounts, and Teams data) – but don’t want to use multiple manual methods to complete that task – the DRS Softech Tenant to Tenant Migration Tool puts those manual efforts into a single product based on the Microsoft Graph API.

A few specifics that matter for SharePoint:

• Flexible site mapping. Works as one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many. Good for combining a few source tenants into one target, or spreading one source tenant across a few targets.
• Source-to-target user mapping. The same mapping that lines up mailboxes also lines up the people behind SharePoint content, so permissions and file ownership carry over on their own instead of needing manual fixes.
• Skip Previously Migrated. Checks what’s already been moved and transfers only what’s left. Useful when a large site takes more than one migration run to finish.
• Built-in deduplication. Scans files by content, not just by file name, to catch duplicates. You can clear these out during the move instead of after.
• Real-time monitoring and reports. A live dashboard shows progress as it happens, and reports list what moved, what was skipped, and what failed.

Not all projects require all four workloads — if the goal is to migrate a SharePoint site from one tenant to another without touching Exchange, OneDrive, or Teams, this same tool works for that much narrower task, and the mapping and filtering options described above apply just as well to a smaller set of workloads.

Teams channel files are technically stored as SharePoint document libraries behind the scenes, not inside Teams itself. Organizations handling both migrations together may want to look at how the same tool approaches Teams attachments between accounts once the underlying SharePoint content has already moved.

Native vs. DRS Softech: A Quick Comparison

What You Need	Native Cross-Tenant Migration	DRS Softech Tool
Migrates SharePoint sites cross-tenant	Yes (private preview)	Yes
Permission and user mapping	Manual mapping file	Built-in mapping
Combines SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Teams	No	Yes
Progress dashboard and reports	No	Yes
Incremental re-run without duplicates	No	Yes

SharePoint Migration Tools Comparison: Features & Pricing

Feature	DRS Softech	BitTitan	Cloudiway	ShareGate
Bulk Migration	✔	✔	✔	✔
Incremental Migration	✔	✔	✔	✔
Migration Report	✔	✔	✔	✔
Maintain Folder Hierarchy	✔	✔	✔	✔
Deduplication	✔	✖	✖	✖
Pricing	$20 per user	$57 per user	$29 per user	$5,995 per year

Best Practices Before You Transfer SharePoint Data From One Tenant to Another

A few steps up front save time later:

• Inventory every site, document library, and list on the migration list, and flag which ones use unique, broken-inheritance permissions.
• Confirm Global Administrator access in both the source and target tenant. Microsoft requires this for any cross-tenant operation.
• Build the user and group mapping list before starting, not while the migration is already running.
• Run a pilot migration on one lower-priority site before you migrate SharePoint Site to Another Tenant for business-critical content.
• Schedule the larger transfer outside peak working hours to cut down on users editing content mid-move.

Conclusion

Moving SharePoint sites, libraries, lists, and permissions between tenants is rarely a one-step process. The permissions piece is primarily dependent upon the mapping of users and groups between the two tenants before the content is moved. Teams that need to migrate SharePoint from one tenant to another alongside mailboxes, OneDrive, and Teams data in one pass typically find that the DRS Softech Tenant to Tenant Migration Tool cuts down the manual mapping and tracking work by a wide margin, all from a single dashboard.

Frequently Asked Questions