Planning for SharePoint Migrations

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Planning for an enterprise SharePoint Migration can be challenging, painful, frustrating, and time consuming. 

Define SharePoint Migration Goals

The first step in SharePoint Migration planning, or in any technology migration, is to define the goals and objectives.  Simply put, this is defining:

  • Why are we migrating?
  • What must we have Day 1 on the new platform?
  • What do we hope to get out of the new platform?
  • What are the hopes/goals six months after launch?  A year?  3 years?

These are small questions that can have some big answers.  Having defined goals and objectives before deep diving into planning activity will help inform your analysis and decisions.  Each stage of the planning process should be viewed through the lens of these goals and objectives.  If the “why” of the migration is part of a company-wide cloud initiative, then you know at the outset that the option to leave behind legacy or complex customizations is probably off the table.  If the Day 1 objective is a seamless cutover from the user perspective, then you can expect to put more effort into planning and communication around cutover events, and quality assurance efforts to ensure a positive user experience.

Inventory of SharePoint Content

The goal of taking inventory of SharePoint Content is to understand the total volume of content and sites, which will allow you to start understanding the scale of a migration effort.  A helpful way to begin the inventory is to list out all the site collections, sites, and subsites present in your current SharePoint environment.  From this list, you’ll continue to layer on useful information, such as who are the business owners of content areas, and who performs day-to-day administration of the site collections and sites.  You should also gather information on if the sites are still in use, or when it was last modified.  With this inventory, you’ll start to develop an idea of how big your “move” is, and identified the people to talk with when questions arise around where or how their “stuff” should be migrated.

Data clean-up

For SharePoint content, the goal is to look at each site and determine if it should be Removed, Archived, or Migrated (RAM).  By using the RAM mentality, this will allow you to plough head first into the pile of SharePoint content and make it more manageable, so you are only migrating content that is in use and necessary.  To help determine this, you’ll want to look at site activity metrics, such as when content was last modified or when new site objects were last built out.  The site usage metrics will also help to inform your RAM decisions.  Once you’ve collected that usage information, present your recommendations to the business owners of sites/content, and get their buy in on the decisions.  If you were unable to identify a business owner during your inventory, this is a pretty good signal that a site is no longer needed!

Choose the right migrations tools

There are few tools available in the market to complete the SharePoint migrations. Here are some of them:

  • ShareGate
  • Metalogix
  • AvePoint
  • DockIT
  • MetaVis

If you are currently in the process of migrating content to SharePoint, then please contact Prometix for any assistance – enquires@prometix.com.au

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