Having plans for migrating to SharePoint 2019? Have you decided about the method of migration to be used while making the move to SharePoint 2019? You should first get to understand factors that require consideration before moving to SharePoint 2019. We have discussed these below, which give you some idea on how to initiate your SP2019 migration.

About SharePoint 2019

It is usually understood that many companies, mostly SMEs, using SharePoint on-premises will eventually migrate to cloud. But it is a fact that so many organizations are still using on-premises SharePoint environments. By releasing SharePoint 2019, it is evident that Microsoft is still dedicated to businesses that are running on-premises, many of them in hybrid mode. The main objective of SharePoint 2019 is to enhance the SharePoint experience for on-premises & hybrid users, thereby reducing the time spent on searching for content and tweaking configuring settings resulting in more time for other productive tasks.

SharePoint 2019 comes with an innovative, contemporary design optimized in such a way to work on all screens, whether it is a tablet, phone, laptop or desktop. A new assessment tool is incorporated which will work on SharePoint 2010 and above. It will examine the SharePoint farm before commencing the migration and provide useful features such as site usage analysis and identity mapping.

SharePoint 2019 Features

Before leaping into the critical factors with respect to migration, you must first know the important features available in SharePoint 2019 that help you in knowing what to expect and how to prepare.

SharePoint Home

Modern team and communication sites

Lists and libraries

User-friendly pages, web parts and authoring

Suite Navigation and App Launcher

Simplified sharing experience

Direct links to SharePoint documentation

SMTP authentication for sending emails

Workflow Manager 2019

Integration with PowerApps and Flow

New Hybrid Status Bar

Holistic Search

Team News

OneDrive Sync Client

Improved hybrid support and scenarios

New developer options

SharePoint 2019 Migration Checklist & Best Practices

 Prepare your SharePoint 2019 source and destination

You need to get a clear understanding about what’s going on in your current SharePoint farm right now for cleanup and efficient migration. Before commencing your migration plan, review the source and destination platform (SharePoint 2019). This will ensure if cleanup is required in source and whether relevant configuration is available in destination, based on your requirement and current source SharePoint environment.

 Track down and identify contents not needed for migration

Analyze all the contents in your source SharePoint platform and cull out the ones that are no longer needed. This may be abandoned site collections, webs, or web applications, third party software that didn’t work the way you wanted. If you skip analyzing your contents, you will complicate your migration and end up migrating junk, even if your migration is 100% successful.

 Plan the migration time and space requirements

Always have surplus amount of space in target SharePoint which is more than the actual space you need for migration. You may require large database to migrate source site and list contents, customizations, Web Parts, Workflows, etc. This will result in effective migration and helps in managing modifications after performing the migration to SharePoint 2019.

 Perform mock migration, review the results and repeat it till satisfied

It is advisable to run pre-migration tests and find out the bottlenecks that may arise during migration. This will help you in knowing where migration can stop, how the end look and feel will be, resultant metadata and permissions, limitations that need to be resolved, etc. After a few test migrations, SharePoint admins can get clear idea to make the migration successful.

 Accommodating customization in new SharePoint 2019

Before starting the migration, it is vital to properly identify and map user-defined customization in source and target SharePoint platforms for comprehensive migration. Find out all the Master and Home pages, Web Parts, Workflows, Themes, Site, List and Document Templates, Custom Content Types, Metadata columns, etc. You have to ensure whatever customizations you have done in current SharePoint platform is recreated as such in SharePoint 2019 or tweak accordingly to work with the enriched capabilities in SharePoint 2019.

 Creating content batches for migration

While planning for SharePoint 2019 migration, classify the Site Collections, Sites and Lists based on purpose, Content Types, Metadata, Permissions, etc., into batches. This will help you to setup migration tasks to migrate associated lists, make it less error prone and avoid many points of failures. It facilitates streamlining the migration process for peak/off peak hours.

SharePoint 2019 Migration tool

Vyapin’s SharePoint 2019 migration tool provides automated features to accomplish all of the above tasks without having to spend time on manual planning efforts. It reduces your total cost of migration by providing you with Discovery, Inventory, Pre-migration planning, Migration and Post-migration analysis for your SharePoint 2019 migration.

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