SPMT Scan and Assessment: What It Catches and How to Use It
SPMT Scan and Assessment: What It Catches, Risk Codes, and How to Use the Results
An SPMT scan helps you understand what you have, but choosing the right mix of assessment, migration, and governance tools turns that insight into a solid migration plan. Read the full SharePoint migration tools guide to see how everything fits together.
Why Assessment Is the Real First Step
Before selecting a migration tool or planning migration waves, you need situational awareness. Assessment answers the foundational questions: what exists, how much of it is active, what will cause migration issues, and what should not move at all. Skipping assessment is how organizations end up migrating years of ROT, inheriting broken permissions, and discovering blockers mid-wave.
SMAT End of Support and What to Do Instead
The SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) is Microsoft's older assessment tool for SharePoint Server migrations. It scans a SharePoint farm and reports migration-impacting issues, including large lists, custom permissions, checked-out files, workflows, managed metadata, InfoPath, publishing pages, sandbox solutions, unsupported templates, and other legacy features.
SMAT reaches the end of support on October 1, 2026. Microsoft recommends transitioning to SPMT's built-in scan capability as the replacement. For new projects in 2026, lead with SPMT scan instead of SMAT.
SMAT may still be useful when a project already has SMAT-based assessment outputs or remediation templates, when comparing against earlier SMAT reports, or when the migration team already understands reports from a legacy SharePoint Server farm. In those cases, treat SMAT as a supplementary context rather than the primary assessment path.
What SPMT Scan Produces and How to Interpret It
SPMT 4.0 and later includes an integrated SharePoint Server assessment. It scans source sites before migration, shows a dashboard with content inventory and potential migration risks, and provides downloadable reports. The scan identifies what can migrate, what will require remediation, and what may block migration entirely.
The output helps teams categorize sites and workloads into: content that is low-risk and ready to migrate; content that needs remediation or redesign before migration (legacy components, unsupported features, complex customizations); and content that should be archived, retired, or excluded from the migration scope.
Use the scan results to build remediation queues, assign owners to each remediation task, and track progress before the first migration wave begins.
Admin Workflow: Turning Scan Results into Remediation Queues
Run the SPMT scan early in the project, well before migration execution begins. Export the results and categorize findings by severity and effort. High-severity items (features that will not migrate at all) become immediate remediation tasks. Medium-severity items (features that will migrate with limitations) become planning inputs for the migration approach. Low-severity items (cosmetic or minor issues) can be addressed after migration.
Assign an owner to each remediation category. Track progress in a shared tracker so that the migration team can see when the source environment is ready for each wave. Rerun the scan after remediation to verify that major issues have been resolved.
When Scan Is Not Enough
The SPMT scan focuses on risks associated with SharePoint Server migration. It does not provide tenant-wide visibility into the destination environment, Copilot readiness, oversharing, or governance gaps in SharePoint Online. For those dimensions, Tenant Dashboard for Microsoft 365 provides a complementary view.
SPMT scan is also not designed for complex customization assessment, business-led disposition decisions, or post-migration reorganization planning. If the source environment has deep customizations, legacy publishing, or complex workflows, the scan results may indicate that a commercial migration tool (such as ShareGate or Quest Content Matrix) is required.
Need help interpreting your assessment results?
Book an assessment review call with Envision IT.