New Teams Private Chat Migration Features

We’re thrilled to announce a suite of powerful new enhancements to MigrationWiz, designed to make your Teams Private Chat migrations more efficient and easier to use. The developments consist of full chat history, more security protocols, regional controls, streamlining large-scale migrations, easier troubleshooting and simplified multi-pass migrations. These new features reflect our commitment to delivering the tools you need for a faster, smarter, and more reliable migration experience.

Let’s take a look at real-world use cases for the new Teams Private Chat features in MigrationWiz. You’ll find detailed instructions for using these features in the BitTitan Help Center:

Full Chat History as HTML Content Tab – MigrationWiz Teams Private Chat introduces full chat history migration as an HTML content tab, ensuring that conversations remain accessible in a structured format. Users chat threads are stored as an HTML file. MigrationWiz automatically generates an HTML file at the time of migration. These files are securely stored in the destination service account’s OneDrive and shared with the respective user. The migration supports various chat elements, including meeting chats, 1:1 chats, group chats, chat titles, rich content formatting, replies/threads, emojis, GIFs, stickers and long text messages. These improvements provide a seamless and comprehensive way to preserve Microsoft Teams Private Chat history while maintaining accessibility in the destination environment.

Protect migrating data – You can now create an IP-based lockdown that restricts access to a defined set of whitelisted IP addresses during your Teams Private Chat migration. All data – including usernames, passwords, and documents – is also fully encrypted in transit and at rest.

Regional controls – MigrationWiz users with regional data residency requirements can meet regulatory obligations without technical intervention or extensive setup. Regional controls automatically direct Teams Private Chat data to the appropriate data center based on your preferences.

Streamline large-scale migrations – Spend less time setting up your migration projects by using an Advanced Option to filter Source users based on their security group. This is easy to do during the Autodiscovery phase of your migration and gives you more control over which users are included in large migrations.

Cloning Projects and troubleshooting – By duplicating your settings, you can save valuable time when setting up multiple MigrationWiz projects. We have also integrated new troubleshooting features and methods for our support team. They will have greater ability to pinpoint and resolve issues to quickly get you up and running.

Multi-pass migrations without complications – When migrating large volumes of Teams Private Chats, it makes sense to plan a multi-pass migration. While MigrationWiz was not designed as a syncing tool, you can perform multi-pass migrations without duplicating previously migrated data. The tool checks for new messages since the last migration and includes them in the new migration pass so that only new messages are captured in already migrated chats.

Understanding the difference between Migrating Teams and Teams Private Chat

While the casual observer might assume that Teams Private Chats fall under the umbrella of a Teams migration, that is not actually the case. The Teams application is an interface for different Microsoft products such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Teams Chat is no exception. And just like SharePoint and OneDrive the functionality of Teams Private Chat lives in a different location. While the names are similar, they require two different licenses and migration methods. MigrationWiz Teams Private Chat migration is currently in Preview and does not require a purchase to use currently. Teams migrations require the Collaborative license.

Until about a year ago, MigrationWiz was able to migrate chat messages through Exchange Web Services (EWS). Microsoft ended that practice and now currently, anyone that wants to migrate Teams chats can only do so using Microsoft’s APIs. As such, Microsoft has limitations on what and how to migrate items. Some of the limitations for Teams chats are:

• Only users that have licenses for Microsoft Teams and OneDrive for Business can have their chats migrated.
• Every chat including 1:1 chats need a service account to export and import. Because of this 1:1 chats are created as group chats after which a pass can be run to remove the service account from the rehydrated group chats, returning them to 1:1 chats.
• Chats that were initiated by external users, as they are not part of the migrating tenant are not readable by the API.
• It is recommended to run Teams Private Chat last in your tenant migration.

Use MigrationWiz for fast, secure, and worry-free Teams Private Chat migrations – or any other kind of migration to, from, and between cloud environments. Contact us if you have questions about these new features or if you need help with an upcoming migration.