Tips for Your SharePoint Migration Plan
The Initial Planning Phase
| Do | Don’t | ||
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Garner executive support for your SharePoint migration project |  |
Just take a lift and shift approach with your content – assess your information architecture and consider ways to improve it |
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Select and design an Office 365 collaboration space | |
Take a one-size-fits-all approach to your SharePoint migration plan |
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Migrate teams one by one in a staggered approach | |
Assume that everything should be migrated |
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Eliminate trivial, redundant and obsolete (ROT) information during the migration, clean up and organise content | |
Underestimate the time and effort it takes to plan and execute a migration |
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Design site and information architecture in advance with input from users | |
Tackle a migration project without extensive pre-planning and in-depth knowledge of the system you’re migrating to and from |
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Consider hiring a content migration specialist | |
Assume all metadata will be easily mapped. Consider how you’ll handle elements like versioning, renditions and annotations for example |
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Forget to incorporate change management and SharePoint training into your planning | ||
After careful project planning, you’ll be ready begin the next stage of your SharePoint migration plan, which is the execution phase.
Executing Your SharePoint Migration Plan
| Do | Don’t | ||
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Understand metadata to be migrated and how it will fit into SharePoint | |
Underestimate the amount of space needed |
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Select and become proficient with a migration tool, such as Xillio | |
Underestimate the time needed to execute your SharePoint migration plan |
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Conduct a pre-check or test migration before undertaking the full migration | |
Forget to have a plan B and back your files up in case the migration fails |
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Set the migration window and follow through | |
Forget to test and validate the data to reconcile migration counts |
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Add a collaboration space into the SharePoint navigation | |
Forget to report on the impact and results of the migration |
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Make the source read-only or delete | |
Wait until after the migration to start teaching your team how to use SharePoint |
Post Migration Tips
| Do | Don’t | ||
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Incorporate information governance processes | |
Forget to delete the source files after X months |
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Understand change management and training will be required | |
Be afraid to replace custom solutions if they aren’t fulfilling their need |
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Implement security, protection and retention controls | |
Underestimate the need for proactive change management and user training |
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Consistently check in on your team in the following few weeks to ensure they have the support and training they require | |
Forget to provide organisation wide migration analytics to the executive team |
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Automate business processes and workflows | ||
Data migration projects are anything but easy, and take a considerable amount of time to plan and execute. If you feel your organisation may be in over its head and could benefit from external expertise or you’d like a quote on outsourcing the migration, please get in touch with our team of migration experts. Find out more about our content migration services here.
Thien is a technical consultant with an instrumental role in leading content and data migration projects, utilising our migration tool Xillio. Thien has expertise with SQL Servers, database and system administration.
