With subscription-based pricing that now brings it within the grasp of small businesses, SharePoint Online is forging new territory by breaking down communications barriers, avoiding duplication of effort, and eliminating precious time wasted looking for information. It’s no wonder that SharePoint collaboration tools are one of the most popular platforms for digital collaboration, business process automation, and file sharing.
Perform a content audit
Although it might seem obvious, many companies neglect to clean up outdated content before performing a SharePoint migration. They do this in an effort to reduce the overall scope of the migration. Corporations need to clarify what they want to keep ― and what should be headed to the archives - before embarking on the migration initiative if they hope for a frictionless content migration.
The audit should include technical dependencies as well as content assets. It should encompass site collections and settings, sub-sites, content type and site columns, workflows, libraries (including the size and type of content as well as when content was last updated), pages and web parts, and custom solutions (web parts, event handlers, custom coding, etc.).
Stick to Pareto’s 80-20 rule
The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule, which maintains that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted the 80/20 connection while at the University of Lausanne in 1896. Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
In terms of general business sales management, it means that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. How it applies to a SharePoint migration strategy is that 80% of the staff will use no more than 20% of the content on the intranet. Identifying this core 20% will quickly separate the must-haves from items that require more thought, which will further streamline migration.
Create a migration strategy
The challenge of implementing a successful online collaboration tool migration methodology is aligning people, processes, and systems. For people, it’s all about communications and collaboration. For processes, there becomes a greater emphasis on interactions. From the systems perspective, it’s the science of using advanced technological tools optimized to a company’s particular circumstance.
There are three ways to migrate content: manual, automated, or a mixture of both. Manual migration is the simplest approach, but it is a tedious process. An automated migration process won’t require any resource-intensive manual input, but it will require technical understanding and specific knowledge on a case-by-case basis. Most SharePoint solution migrations will actually be a mixture of both, and the true skill is choosing – and applying – the right balance.
Don’t compromise on security
A primary consideration for any migration is maintaining security policies. Additional diligence must be employed when utilizing a manual approach, and appropriate data validation will need to be performed on migrated data. No two custom SharePoint solution migrations are the same: every business has unique structure, permissions, workflows, configurations, and metadata.
While in-place upgrades will preserve pre-existing security settings and options, companies need to take additional steps to ensure corporate security and permissions are preserved, especially if they have deployed a migration tool. As with design considerations, upgrades and migrations are another opportunity for current security parameters re-evaluation.
Develop a post-migration strategy
IT departments understand that the real work begins post migration. A migration is not complete until specific tasks like checking links, cleaning up page layouts, checking user rights, and ensuring security. But even with thorough training and hands-on experience, employees will have questions about unanticipated situations that arise. A robust IT department that can provide individualized support to users will be in the best position to provide this.
The power of SharePoint’s pioneering of a collaborative work culture can only be realized when the tools and features are accepted and implemented uniformly throughout the company. This digital transformation requires a cultural shift in the working style of the organization that will not be possible until employees are convinced that SharePoint is better than legacy systems.
In preparation for a migration to SharePoint 2016, be aware of hardware requirements (for those creating a fresh SharePoint 2016 instance and farm), what version of SharePoint is currently running (if SharePoint 2010, then migrate to SharePoint 2013 first, and check legal and audit implications in case you are going to take advantage of the new cloud features).
Available in January 2018, Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool helps organizations move local SharePoint content in their datacenters, such as file shares or document libraries, to SharePoint Online or OneDrive Office 365 services hosted by Microsoft. Support ranges from the smallest of migrations to large-scale migrations with support for bulk scenarios.
