Planning to migrate to SharePoint? A successful migration does not just require you to have understanding of SharePoint platform. It’s much more beyond that.
Migration to SharePoint is a strategic decision that every growing business should consider. It simplifies collaboration, communication, and content management to streamline business operations. You must define a well-structured strategy, including careful planning, testing, and execution, to minimize disruptions and maximize productivity.
If you want to migrate or upgrade your business with SharePoint, make sure to refer this guide till the end. It provides some proven tactics to help you make your SharePoint migration a success.
How to boost your SharePoint migration success?
Migrations strategy starts even before actually planning for the roadmap to migrate to SharePoint. Here are some practices to follow:
Pre-migration planning
Before migrating, you need to be aware of the goals and objectives you plan on achieving with the migration. Identify whether you want:
- improved collaboration,
- better content management,
- lower operations costs,
- better security, or
- simply need to access the advanced AI features
If you’re performing a SharePoint to SharePoint migration, see what sites, subsites, libraries, lists, workflows, and other customization you need to move.
Perform thorough data audit
Take inventory of all the data stored in the source environment. Write down the number of sites in the source SharePoint, files, and folders available. This will provide a clear idea of the complexity involved in the process.
Categorize data into folders and label them based on their usefulness and priority to keep your destination clutter-free and organized.
Data cleanup to remove outdated content
Check for the redundant, obsolete, and outdated data and separate it out from the necessary business data. Run a thorough data cleanup and remove the data that you won’t need in the destination environment. You can also keep a backup of this data within your local storage or an external hard drive.
It will not just sort out the data but will save additional storage space that the irrelevant data would otherwise occupy.
Prepare your destination in advance
It is important to prepare the destination SharePoint environment beforehand. Consider the following factors:
- Determine the storage you’ll need to store the data. Manage the storage to withstand the future users and their data requirements.
- Plan the structure of the new site to deliver effective content management and user experience.
- Map all the user accounts along with their permissions to execute safe SharePoint to SharePoint migration.
Communication is the key
Always be ready to handle the unexpected challenges, if you skip communicating about the change to your shareholders and end users. Keeping users in the loop helps to remove hassles post migration and allows users to adapt to the new platform easily. Provide them with proper training and learning materials to allow smooth understanding of the upgraded SharePoint platform.
Choose your migration approach
A successful SharePoint migration is mainly affected by the approach you follow. Based on the amount of data, architecture complexity, your business aspects, you can pick the approach to migrate the process. The two primary approaches available for SharePoint migration includes Big Bang and Phased migration.
- With Big Bang migration, you can move the entire content to a SharePoint site in one go. This can be complicated if there is a large environment. It is somewhat difficult to test the destination environment.
- In Phased migration approach, the entire data from the source is migrated in different phases. It provides better control over the process and simplifies testing and validation.
Another way to migrate to SharePoint is with the Lift and Shift migration. However, it doesn’t guarantee preservation of the site and data structure.
Select the migration tool
Finding the right SharePoint migration tool is essential to conduct an error-free migration process. A free utility by Microsoft that you can try is SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT). It allows easy migration of data from on-premises environment to SharePoint Online and Office 365. However, it doesn’t support migration tenant to tenant migration.
Use professional tools to migrate the data as such software tends to overcome all the shortcomings of the free utility. Third-party tools not just migrate sites and other data but also handle the metadata and permissions smoothly.
Test the migration batch
Before actual migration, it’s a wise decision to test a batch of data. It provides a clear pre-migration analysis of the process with detailed insights. Use this data to run an error-free migration.
Post migration improvement
Remember that there’s a lot that goes on after migrating the data. Monitor the destination environment, test it for load handling, and verify that all the permissions are migrated correctly. This will provide you understanding if there’s a scope of improvement.
Conclusion
Following a pre-defined strategy might cause the migration process to be a failure. To boost your SharePoint migration success, you need to define a customized strategy. With the techniques mentioned above, you can plan an easygoing migration with optimized performance and productivity. Moreover, use a professional tool like Kernel Migration for SharePoint to execute a migration with zero downtime and errors.
