Over recent years, more organisations are making the move to cloud repositories such as SharePoint Online, to enjoy the flexibility and security such repositories offer to an organisation. However the journey from your legacy repository to SharePoint can be challenging, time consuming and costly. To what degree depends on the system you’re migrating from, the amount of information, and the actions you’ll take to improve the quality of your content/files/information along the way. We’ve developed some quick tips to consider as part of your SharePoint migration plan.

Tips for Your SharePoint Migration Plan

The Initial Planning Phase

Do		Don’t
	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
	Select and design an Office 365 collaboration space		Take a one-size-fits-all approach to your SharePoint migration plan
	Migrate teams one by one in a staggered approach		Assume that everything should be migrated
	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
	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
	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
			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
	Understand metadata to be migrated and how it will fit into SharePoint		Underestimate the amount of space needed
	Select and become proficient with a migration tool, such as Xillio		Underestimate the time needed to execute your SharePoint migration plan
	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
	Set the migration window and follow through		Forget to test and validate the data to reconcile migration counts
	Add a collaboration space into the SharePoint navigation		Forget to report on the impact and results of the migration
	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
	Incorporate information governance processes		Forget to delete the source files after X months
	Understand change management and training will be required		Be afraid to replace custom solutions if they aren’t fulfilling their need
	Implement security, protection and retention controls		Underestimate the need for proactive change management and user training
	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
	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.