Technical prerequisites for partners

What we’ll put in place together — and keep in good shape — throughout our partnership

As a SMART Migration partner, you resell the SMART Migration license and you run the customer projects yourself, in your own context. The customer relationship, the planning and the day-to-day delivery are all yours, under your own brand — that’s exactly how the partnership is meant to work, and we’re happy to sit in the background and back you up.

We help out in two ways. Outside of any customer project we provide partner training, so you can get to know the product properly in an environment of your own. And for your first two customer projects we’re there to quietly assist and help — supporting you behind the scenes rather than running the project for the customer on your behalf. After that you’ll be delivering on your own, and we’re always super happy to assist whenever you need us. We’d just ask that you check internally first — see whether someone on your own team can answer before reaching out to us. To make that easy, we suggest appointing a main contact within your organisation who leads for the others and is the point of contact with us.

The one thing we’d really like before you take on a customer project is for you to feel genuinely comfortable with SMART Migration — and that comfort comes from time spent in your own sandbox. So please think of the points below not as one-off hoops to jump through, but as a shared baseline we look after together for the life of the partnership. To be clear, this baseline isn’t optional — it’s a required part of being a partner — and it’s worth keeping current for every project, not just the first.

Your partner sandbox

(Step-By-Step guide to setup your free Windows Sandbox – We will help you if you like.)

The sandbox is your own space to learn the full installation and configuration procedure, rehearse it until it feels routine, and prove it works for you — until you feel genuinely confident in the tasks you’re about to carry out at a customer. It’s well worth keeping around rather than standing it up once and tearing it down: having it available and current means you can happily rehearse against each new project and each new SMART Migration release as the partnership grows.

A couple of things make the sandbox work really well:

Ideally it’s a multi-machine setup — two machines or more — where each machine can be rolled back on its own to a clean, blank state that’s fully up to date with Windows updates.

Each machine runs a 64-bit Windows 11 Pro or Windows Server 2022 (or newer). For Nextcloud destinations, Windows Server 2022 or newer is the supported server baseline.

Why the clean roll-back helps. The whole idea is to get the initial installation and configuration under your fingers from scratch, so you can reproduce it confidently at a customer. Rolling a machine back to a blank, fully-patched state lets you walk through the procedure as often as you like, until setting up SMART Migration on a fresh machine is second nature.

Why two machines rather than one. Mostly so a running customer project never has to get in the way of your ongoing training on new versions or your work for the next customer — with two machines, one can be busy with a live project while the other stays free. As a nice bonus, two machines also let you model a setup closer to a real customer’s.

*These can absolutely be virtual machines — a free VMware Workstation setup on a single capable host does the job nicely. Snapshots give you the clean per-machine roll-back, and you can spin up more VMs whenever you’d like to model a bigger customer scenario. No need for a pricey hosted VPS or Azure VM.

!Partner license — as our partner you get your own unrestricted SMART Migration license. Install it on as many machines as you like, physical or virtual, with no machine count to keep track of. It’s whitelisted to your own domains, so it runs right across your sandbox while staying tied to you.

Per-machine system requirements

Since the sandbox is for testing and training, the minimum requirements from System requirements are all you need here — the recommended specification is really meant for live customer workloads, so there’s no need to over-build.

The minimum specification is:

• 64-bit Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022 and newer (no macOS support).
• Dual-core processor.
• 16 GB RAM.
• Display resolution of at least 1920×1080.
• Hard disk with 30 GB free space in the Windows Public folder and 50 GB free space in the Windows Temp folder.
• A performance index (Account tab) of at least 1.0.

*One small thing worth a glance: because CPU and clock speed are virtualised these days, the performance index on the Account tab is the most reliable measure of real-world performance. Just check it reaches at least 1.0 on each machine and you’re set for training.

As the VMs share a single host, it helps to size the host’s RAM, cores and disk so each VM can comfortably reach 16 GB RAM and the free-space figures above.

A dedicated Microsoft 365 tenant with some realistic demo content

It’s a big help to have a dedicated Microsoft 365 tenant just for training and demos, kept separate from any production or customer tenant. The more it resembles real customer data, the more useful your practice will be — an empty tenant won’t show you very much.

Ideally the tenant has:

• A handful of SharePoint sites and Teams, each with documents that carry version history and metadata (custom columns and content types), rather than just plain files.
• A file share with some demo documents too, so you can try file-share sources alongside SharePoint and Teams.
• Files across a good range of sizes, from under 10 KB to over 1 GB, so you get a feel for both small-file throughput and large-file handling.
• A few SharePoint Online files with lots of versions — 100 or more. You can build that version history with SMART Migration itself, so it’s easy to set up.

A test Nextcloud server (when you’re migrating to Nextcloud)

If your projects involve migrating into Nextcloud — rather than SharePoint only — you’ll also want a test Nextcloud server to migrate into, and you’ll want full administrator access to it. Admin rights matter because SMART Migration connects to Nextcloud as an administrator to set up Team Folders, users and groups, and the admin connection it uses to move content and metadata across. Having your own admin-level test server means you can rehearse the whole Nextcloud side just as freely as the SharePoint side. The server should be running Nextcloud v33.x (Nextcloud Hub Winter 26) or newer.

*Carrying SharePoint metadata across? As soon as you migrate anything beyond basic tags, the Nextcloud server also needs the MetaVox app installed. Nextcloud on its own doesn’t provide structured metadata other than Tags, so MetaVox is what lets SharePoint columns and metadata land properly on the Nextcloud side. In practice, if you’re migrating M365 content with metadata, you’ll most likely need MetaVox.

You’ll find the specifics in Nextcloud Requirements.

Microsoft 365 App registration

SMART Migration signs in to SharePoint and Microsoft 365 through a Microsoft 365 (Entra ID) App registration — an application identity with a certificate and the right API permissions and admin consent, rather than an interactive user login. It’s well worth getting comfortable creating and configuring one, since you’ll set up an App registration in each customer tenant, and it’s the perfect thing to practise in your own sandbox tenant first.

The guide Create M365 App Registration walks through the whole thing — including installing the certificate on the machine. Running through it a few times in the sandbox makes it painless when you do it for a customer.

Content Governance and its Microsoft Teams team

Content Governance is an application built in SMART Migration — not the product itself, but a wizard-driven application created with SMART Migration’s own components and run inside it. It uses a Microsoft Teams team (and its backing SharePoint lists) as its workspace, so it does need a Teams team to run. Having a Teams team ready — in the sandbox or at a customer — is all it takes to get going.

It’s a great idea to set up and use Content Governance in your sandbox tenant during training, so the Teams-based workspace, the lists and views, and the way jobs are managed all feel familiar by the time you’re at a customer.

How the training runs

The training program is typically three online sessions of about two hours each — 3 × 2 hours. That’s enough to walk through SMART Migration properly while leaving plenty of room for your own questions along the way.

All training sessions run over Microsoft Teams as video meetings. During a session the MigrateDMS consultant can take remote control of your machine through Teams, so we can demonstrate steps directly on your own setup, sort out any snags on the spot, and hand control back to you to try things yourself. That means your sandbox machine needs to be reachable from the machine you join Teams on — easiest of all is to join Teams from the sandbox machine (or host) itself.

For everyone taking part there’s one prerequisite we really rely on: a working understanding of both environments — the Microsoft 365 / SharePoint side and the Nextcloud side — and, just as importantly, all the required access configured ahead of time on both sides. With the App registration and tenant access on the M365 side, and admin access on the Nextcloud side, already in place before we begin, the sessions can stay focused on SMART Migration itself rather than on chasing permissions.

A quick checklist of what’s needed to have in place before the training starts:

• Two or more machines, each able to roll back on its own to a clean, fully-patched state (Windows 11 Pro / Windows Server 2022 or newer).
• Each machine meeting at least the minimum system requirements, with a performance index of 1.0 or higher as measured on the Account tab in SMART Migration..
• VMware Workstation (free) — or something equivalent — with snapshots set up for clean per-machine roll-back.
• A dedicated Microsoft 365 tenant, separate from any production or customer tenant.
• For BI: That tenant populated with SharePoint sites and Teams whose documents carry version history and metadata, plus a file share with demo documents.
• For BI: Demo files across a wide size range, from under 10 KB to over 1 GB, including SharePoint Online files with 100+ versions (easily generated with SMART Migration).
• If you’ll be migrating to Nextcloud: a test Nextcloud server (v33.x / Nextcloud Hub Winter 26 or newer) with full administrator access — plus the MetaVox app installed if you’re carrying metadata beyond basic tags.
• A Microsoft 365 App registration set up in your sandbox tenant.
• A Microsoft Teams team ready for Content Governance.
• Microsoft Teams available for the training sessions — they run as Teams video meetings, and the MigrateDMS consultant takes remote control of your sandbox machine through Teams (so the machine you train on must be reachable from where you join Teams).
• SMART Migration downloaded and installed (Download here) and your partner license key applied.

*Notice that since you are going to be using a partner license, it is important that you get your SharePoint domain registered at MigrateDMS. The domain is, for example, MyDomain.sharepoint.com, where you must register MyDomain Contact your account manager at MigrateDMS to get that done.