Why the Sharepoint root site swap button is not visible

So the option you can swap your (old Classic Teamsite) site with a new site is available for some time now. See the Microsoft documentation: Modernize your root site.

So i did a test in my test tenant and this wend fine. The current old site will be renamed and gets another url and the new communication site takes it place. Great!

When you select the root site the button becomes visible where you can perform this action with.

So okay. I tried this over the weekend to do this in the our live production site. But the button “Replace site” did not become vissibe. We tried several things but nothing worked.

And yes i know there is a Powershell cmdlet that can do this site replace operation. But somehow it feels better if we could do this with a button. I am using Powershell daily and i don’t have a logical answer why this feels this way but i do. And i thought the button needs to work!

So i created a support call with Microsoft and after some time e-mailing back and forth. They asked:

  • site is not a communication site?
  • site is connected to a group?
  • site is not Modernized and some other backend issue?

I could confirm that this was not the case. After some waiting i got an answer that the support engineer got from higher up in the Support chain:

this Admin Center feature is applicable to Customers with fewer than ~10,000 licenses

And this is true. We have 10K + licenses in the live site then in the test tenant. (about 500 licenses). I still don’t understand the logic about this difference but that was the answer we got.

In some holliday week or so when things are quit we will do the Site replace thing with Powershell with the Invoke-SPOSiteSwap cmdlet.

I will update this post when we have this behind us.

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