Have you ever explained that identity migration is a different workstream than mailbox migration to a business stakeholder and watched them look confused at the time?

Everyone talks about migrating SharePoint content and mailboxes. Fewer engineers openly discuss what happens when you migrate your identity layer. The Entra ID object migrate in a large divestiture was a separate category of work than the data migration that ran alongside it.

The tool difference is important. Quest Migration Manager works at the identity level. BitTitan MigrationWiz works at the content level. Engineers who confuse them in project planning can create sequencing issues that are revealed at cutover.

Migrating Entra ID objects in excess of 500 is not a simple exercise. Each object has attribute mapping decisions which determine whether downstream systems will recognize the migrated objects or break authentication. Before migration, user accounts, group memberships and service principals must be evaluated. The trust relationships between these objects and their registrations and user accounts will also need to be validated at the destination.

The sequencing problem was significant. Identity objects needed to be moved in coordination with both the server migration program as well as the file server migration, so that permissions would remain valid throughout the cutover period. A move of an identity object before the dependent server workload in the destination is accessible creates a failure of authentication. When an identity object moves after the dependent content workload has been cut over, there is a permissions gap that occurs between the time content becomes accessible and when the identity can authenticate.

A particular challenge that arose during the program was the conflict between source and destination tenants in relation to application registration attributes. Parallel app registrations of the same application were found in both directories, with overlapping redirect URIs. To resolve this before cutover, it was necessary to identify every affected registration, coordinate with the application owners and validate authentication flows in destination tenant before source registrations were deactivated.

Identity migration isn’t the first step before migration begins. It is a parallel process that determines if everything else you migrate will actually work when users try it.

What is the order of your identity migration sequence in relation to your content migration timeline

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