Do you plan to document your migration project after it is completed?

Rarely are there good engineers in the migrations that go wrong. They lack good documentation. The documentation gap is evident in ad-hoc decisions taken under pressure during the migration window, inconsistent support provided to clients, and a lack of audit trail when asked about what was moved and when.

The migration runbook must be the first artifact to exist before any tools are configured. Not a list of tasks. A decision document: what to do when item-level errors rates exceed a threshold, what are the rollback triggers, and who can make decisions independently or which ones need escalation. The runbook is a document that allows the 5-person Hyper-Care Support team to deal with 500+ clients without having to route every issue to the lead engineer.

The second step is to assess the pre-migration environment. Documenting source and target tenant health before migration begins means Entra ID objects counts, mail flow dependency, legacy authentication configurations and any hybrid sync state which will cause problems if not resolved before the MigrationWiz first batch runs.

The third is the batch execution log. The audit trail for post-migration support is created by tracking which accounts were migrated in each pass. This information, along with item counts and errors summaries, can be found on the MigrationWiz item level report. The batch execution log will tell you if an item failed or migrated when a user complains about missing emails six months after the cutover.

The fourth is a coexistence and mail-flow map. Documenting the email flow between source and recipient during the transition period, including MX records, mail routing connectors, transport rules and SPF/DKIM configuration is crucial for troubleshooting mail flow issues that arise in the first 48-hours after cutover. The map will tell you where to look.

The fifth package is the knowledge transfer package. The documentation that you give to the steady-state team will determine whether they can maintain what you have built without having the migration engineer at their fingertips. If the documentation doesn’t exist, then you are the documentation. This is not a sustainable model.

What documentation is available for your migration project that was not created by the tool?

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