Field Notes
Notes from building Liscaragh Software's products and delivering Microsoft 365 migration projects. Practical guidance, technical observations and the occasional war story from real migrations.
Why more concurrency doesn't mean a proportionally faster migration
Doubling how many files a migration uploads at once feels like it should roughly double the speed. Past a point it doesn't, because the ceiling stops being yours to raise.
Read →Dragging an email into a folder isn't filing it
Moving an email into an Outlook folder feels like dealing with it. It doesn't change where it lives, still inside one mailbox, invisible to everyone else, until someone else needs it and cannot find it.
Read →What "done" actually means for a migration
A completed copy isn't the same thing as a completed migration, even though the two are often treated as if they are. What proves a migration is actually finished, and the checklist worth running before sign-off.
Read →One mailbox, multiple Outlooks
"Outlook" rarely describes a single application. The various Outlook clients share a name and a mailbox, but they are built differently, and a feature that works in one can behave differently, or not exist, in another.
Read →Why "just copy the files across" undersells a migration
A migration isn't simply about moving files. It's about making sure people can carry on working afterwards, permissions, links between documents, folder structure and metadata included.
Read →Running the same migration playbook for every client
The difference between a profitable migration practice and an expensive one usually isn't technical ability. It's whether every project follows the same proven process.
Read →When the client record lives in one Outlook inbox
A mailbox usually becomes the complete record of a client relationship by accident, not design. What happens when its owner is suddenly unavailable, and why filing properly rarely happens until the friction is removed.
Read →The data Liscaragh Save never touches
An Outlook add-in that saves email and attachments into SharePoint needs permission to read your mail and write your files. What it holds onto afterwards is a different question, and here's exactly what our backend can and can't see.
Read →The credentials a migration tool never needs to hold
Many migration tools want your source and destination credentials in their own cloud before they'll move a file. Liscaragh Migrate was built the other way round, and here's exactly what that means for each credential.
Read →The drag-and-drop gap New Outlook left in SharePoint and OneDrive
Classic Outlook made it easy to save emails and attachments into SharePoint or OneDrive. New Outlook doesn't. What that gap costs in practice, and how Liscaragh Save fixes it.
Read →What a bad SharePoint migration actually costs
Most comparisons stop at the licence price. The real cost sits in broken permissions, sharing links that quietly stop working, and the rework nobody budgeted for.
Read →Migrating a file server without hiring a consultant
What a consultant actually does during a file-server migration, the three decisions that genuinely need a person, and a practical plan for doing the rest yourselves.
Read →What really survives a migration into Microsoft 365
Content, folder structure and dates arrive intact. Permissions and version history need a deliberate decision instead of an automatic one, and that is by design, not a shortfall.
Read →Turning your folder structure into searchable SharePoint metadata
Provenance, folder-level extraction, filename pattern extraction, category by type and retention flags, how a migration can also be a tidy-up, and why every part of it is opt-in.
Read →A letter grade before you move a single file
What Check readiness actually measures before a migration starts: the A to D grade, what earns each letter, and the gigabytes of duplicate files most migrations carry without anyone noticing.
Read →Running a large migration without anyone in the office noticing
A migration of any real size takes hours, sometimes days, and the office is usually still open while it runs. Overnight scheduling, bandwidth caps and a Sync that only ever adds up are what make that safe to leave unattended.
Read →OneDrive or SharePoint? Decide Before You Migrate
Every migration into Microsoft 365 involves a decision that is easy to overlook: does this content belong in a person's OneDrive, or in a shared SharePoint site? Get it wrong and you are correcting it later.
Read →The file and folder names SharePoint won't accept
A file that is perfectly valid on a Windows share can be flatly rejected by SharePoint. The invalid characters, reserved names and 400 character path limit that quietly break migrations.
Read →Your internet speed is not your migration speed
You can be on a gigabit line and still watch a migration crawl. The limit is rarely your connection, it is the API at each end, and no amount of bandwidth changes that.
Read →Have a question or a topic you'd like us to cover? Get in touch.