Microsoft has continued to offer its various tools to help the organizations shift to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 cloud services. All these migration tools are designed to be used for migrations that range from a small set of files to large scale enterprise migration. The tools help to bring your information to the cloud and also take advantage of the latest intelligence, collaboration, and security solutions with Office 365.
So, if you have decided to proceed with SharePoint migration, then just using a SharePoint migration tool won’t help as it is highly important to follow a proper process to make the migration smoother. The new features of SharePoint may be very interesting to you and may help you increase your returns on investment. Whatever be the reason that led you to this, proper planning is essential to get started.
SharePoint migration is always a popular topic for administrators and business owners. From transitioning to the cloud to proper adoption and engagement issues, there are many things that need to be considered. Though getting caught up in the latest user experiences is common, there are some issues faced during the transition to the cloud or to the multiple environment solutions that can only be solved through detailed migration planning. Proper planning can dramatically help to improve the speed and reduce any risks that are associated with the migration process.
Whether you have planned to move your outdated SharePoint 2010 environment to the SharePoint 2019 on-premises environment, or develop a phased strategy for moving various files on to Office 365, it is by considering certain business analysis and project management fundamentals that you can easily avoid some of the most common migration pitfalls.
Identify All Your Customization Needs:
If you are already aware of SharePoint migration processes and have performed it earlier, then you have to go through the pain of finding the error logs to check where the migrations failed so that you can make some customizations to suit the process.
Since migration failures usually happen at the most inconvenient time and cause the maximum loss to you and your management team, it is crucial to identify all the customizations that are needed within your system and decide if they can be replaced by any out of the box capabilities or not, whether the site has to be re-built or any third party plugins added to meet the future growth needs.
Don’t Rush the Process:
Verify that all the right people are involved in the SharePoint migration process and you also follow the right scope for your migration. Even a minor mistake in your planning cycle can leave huge gaps down the road, which can be highly expensive to overcome. In SharePoint, the data model and taxonomy flaws may not show up instantly, but it is definitely critical and more expensive to correct the problems later.
Don’t Treat All Your End Users and Sites the Same:
Always remember that only three out of your four teams may use SharePoint out of the box features and the fourth team may need some custom workflows, integrations, extensive dashboard to the CRM system. Treating all your sites the same would break the customized site, thereby, leaving the team that actually uses SharePoint. So, try and understand the individual team’s needs and their requirements and based on their needs plan the SharePoint migration.
Follow a Testing Schedule:
Migration processes are iterative and this is because different site teams and site collections have different priorities and requirements. You should conduct a thorough test to understand what has been moved from a technical standpoint and also from an end-user standpoint. Robust migration planning there allows for more verifications, proper navigation, look and feel and also check that the content is all properly working as planned
Have a Rollback Plan:
A good project manager is someone who has a rollback plan in case of any risks during the SharePoint migration process. This will help you to recover easily from the problems that are caused by rushing into the process and not identifying the customizations in the environment and treating all the sites in the same manner. But in case of any failures, a rollback plan will help you to recover without severe pain. So, plan accordingly and have your backups ready before you start with the migration process.
Microsoft SharePoint – DepositPhotos
