Migration of on-premises SharePoint 2016 to SharePoint Online
As to further enhance University wide collaboration and improve office productivity, ITS is excited to announce that existing content of HKU on-premises SharePoint platform will be migrated to Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online(SPO) to provide numerous benefits to HKU departments, including cost savings, improved collaboration, scalability, accessibility, enhanced security, automatic updates, seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and built-in disaster recovery.
The accessing website URL and migration schedule for existing on-premises departmental SharePoint 2016 sites and DDAS sites to SharePoint Online are as follows:
| URL after migrated to SharePoint Online | Migration Period |
Departmental SharePoint Sites | https://hkuhk.sharepoint.com/sites/<dept> | June to December 2025 |
DDAS Sites / ISDM Sites | https://hkuhk.sharepoint.com/sites/isdm-<dept> | October 2025 to June 2026 |
for which <dept> is the departmental abbreviation.
Departmental site collection administrators will receive email notification for the details of the exact switchover date. The original SharePoint 2016 site will be set to read-only mode and accessible for only three months after the migration. Message will be shown on the homepage of the site indicating that the site has been migrated and URL link to the new SharePoint Online site will be added to the left navigation panel.
Important Notes:
- The site collection administrators are required to inform ALL their departmental SharePoint site users to check-in all the checked-out documents before the switchover date in order to migrate the documents successfully.
- All SharePoint site users should be aware that network drive mapping to SharePoint Online site is no longer supported. It is suggested to access the files via web browser or use OneDrive client to sync the files locally when needed.
- For those departments who are using SharePoint 2016 workflows, they are required to develop the workflows again for SharePoint Online as the existing old workflows cannot be migrated. The SharePoint sites with workflows will be pre-migrated in advance for departmental developers to create and test the new workflows before the actual switchover to SharePoint Online.
If you are interested in knowing the difference between on-premises SharePoint 2016 platform and SharePoint Online platform, please refer to this webpage for further information.
if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact ithelp@hku.hk and provide the SharePoint Site or DDAS Site information. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding of this important transition.