This section covers a few points about validating that your migration was successfully completed, and how ShareGate can help you with the governance of the new environment.

The migration report lists everything in your migration's scope, including errors for items that did not migrate and warnings for items that were migrated but potentially changed during the migration.

The migration report is a reliable tool to validate your migrated content.

Once your migration report has been reviewed, we suggest that you navigate through your new environment and do a few verifications to make sure everything is in place.

Though the report is reliable, this extra step can help you assess details in the destination. We recommend checking for unsupported look and feel elements, broken links in your pages, and other details that you might otherwise not notice through the report alone.

It is good practice to ask users to validate that their content has been properly migrated and to communicate with them if anything is missing or incorrect.

If possible, keep the source for a few months after your migration in case anything was missed during the migration.

If you compare your source and destination by looking at the number of items or their size, you might find some discrepancies even though everything was migrated.

If you migrate between different versions of SharePoint, the size of your files can change depending on how versioning is handled or metadata is written within your files in the destination.

If you migrate documents from a file share, files with the attribute "System" or "Hidden" are not visible to ShareGate Migrate. These files will not appear in the migration report but will be part of the total count in your file system properties.

When your migration project is finished, you should consider establishing a decent governance plan to make sure your new destination remains secure and free of unnecessary clutter.

External sharing policies, permissions, creation of Microsoft 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams are all things you should consider.

With ShareGate Migrate, you can schedule reports like the permissions matrix report to review your permissions. You can find unused sites to delete or archive.

For information about how ShareGate Protect can help you with automated governance for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups, see the ShareGate Protect docs.