Microsoft administrative permissions

You will need certain Microsoft administrative permissions to perform actions using ShareGate Desktop. These permissions are required for the app to interact with your Microsoft environment and ensure that your connection is secure.

For example, for a Teams migration, you need Teams admin permissions to migrate the team and SharePoint admin permissions to migrate the associated SharePoint site. 

In this article, you will find details about each administrative permission required for your tasks.

Tip: For a quick reference of all these permissions, see Permissions reference tables - Migrations and Permissions reference tables - Explorer and reports. For more information on Microsoft 365 roles, see the Microsoft article, About admin roles.

Index

• Global admin and SharePoint admin (Microsoft 365)
• Site collection admin (Microsoft 365 and SharePoint on-premises)
  • Auto-assign as site collection administrator
• Teams admin (Microsoft 365)
• Farm admin (SharePoint on-premises)
• Term store admin
• Full control
• Manage user alerts permissions
• Read-only lock

Global admin and SharePoint admin (Microsoft 365)

Required to:

• Connect to your Microsoft 365 SharePoint admin center.
• Access all your site collections.
• Access all your OneDrives.
• Add/remove site collection admins.
• Perform migrations of multiple site collections (requires a connection to your admin center).
• Perform migrations of permissions.

Site collection admin (Microsoft 365 and SharePoint on-premises)

Site collection admin permissions are also required when running most operations in ShareGate Desktop, even if you have global admin or SharePoint admin permissions.

Without site collection admin permissions, many interactions with the SharePoint APIs will fail, causing unpredictable issues.

It is recommended to have site collection admin permissions at both the source and destination environments in order to:

• Perform most procedures in Explorer and Migration.
• Run a structure migration (lists, libraries, sites, etc.).
• Perform OneDrive for Business and My Site migrations.

It is recommended to have site collection admin permission at the destination environment in order to:

• Perform an Import from file share.
• Perform an Import from Google Drive.

Auto-assign as site collection administrator

If you are using a global admin or SharePoint admin account, you can enable Auto-assign as a site collection administrator when required in your ShareGate Desktop security settings. This setting will automatically add you as a site collection admin when running most procedures on your SharePoint sites or when performing operations such as reporting or Explorer on your OneDrives.

Teams admin (Microsoft 365)

In addition to SharePoint admin permissions, Teams admin is required to:

• Migrate teams.

If you have global admin permissions, Teams admin is not required for teams migrations.

Farm admin (SharePoint on-premises)

Required to:

• Connect to your SharePoint central admin and access your web apps in Explorer and Migration.
• Access all your site collections.
• Access all your MySites.
• Access all your OneDrives for Business.
• Add/remove site collection admins.
• Perform migrations of multiple site collections (requires a connection to your central administration).

Term store admin

Required in the source and destination to:

• Migrate managed metadata applied to your list items and documents.
• Migrate Terms, term groups, and term sets.

Full control

Can replace site collection admin in the source and destination to:

• Migrate content with Copy content only, Import from file share, Import from Google Drive, and the Import-BoxDocument PowerShell command.

Note: Though you can perform these actions with Full control permissions, you need to use site collection admin permissions if you want to use Insane mode.

Manage user alerts permissions

Required in the source and destination to:

• Copy user alerts in Migration (note that you also need to have the server extension installed in the source and destination).

Read-only lock

While not a permission itself, Read-only lock must be removed from SharePoint Central administration. You may require higher-level administrative credentials to remove the lock status. Read-only lock must be removed from your site collection(s) to:

• Perform any migration action in ShareGate Desktop.

Some SharePoint services do not respond correctly when your site collection has a read-only lock and the requests will not be processed as intended. This can cause many unexpected issues. For more information, see Read-only lock.