Is SharePoint Migration just a small technical job or is it a process that entails the inputs of several different stake holders of an organization?

Migration provides yet another opportunity to fully realize and further improve a company’s collaboration, productivity and content management processes. A thorough and detailed SharePoint migration planning not only improves the time and effort involved in the actual migration but also gives the opportunity to validate if all related business goals could be accomplished prior to establishing the SharePoint environment.

During migration it is very important to find out all customizations in your source environment and decide if they can be swapped by out-of-the-box (OOTB) capabilities or have to upgraded to the new SharePoint version or need to be re-built to cope with the evolving of technology.

Most organizations will sign up with consulting companies to analyze their content infrastructure, assess their migration approach and migration action plan, and then perform the actual migration.

Migration Planning

The team that is going to perform the migration should have a complete overview of the current inventory of the source environment so that the team knows the structure, size and the quality of the content that needs to be migrated into their destination SharePoint environment.

Important points to consider before a SharePoint migration:

• Do you have complete visibility of all the content in your source platforms?
• Are the organizational objectives in Content and Collaboration likely to be met? This is one of the most important aspect that most companies pay less attention to.
• Is a consultant required or in-house IT people are enough?
• Are you migrating only what needs to be moved to Destination SharePoint?
• Does the migration remove content bloat?
• Is the migration approach optimized for time and effort?
• Can test runs of migration be done and important results validated before the actual migration?
• Has the destination SharePoint environment been set up keeping in mind the critical factors of Governance, Security and Accessibility?
• Do you have a fairly close estimate on the total costs of the migration? This is possible only if you have a sound migration plan.
• A cut off and switch over plan will be very useful. Is there a temporary rollback plan if migration does not go well as planned?

Employing the right consultants may be costly but their proficiency will be helpful for the organization in SharePoint architecture planning and hassle free migration.

On the other hand, third-party SharePoint migration tools are becoming more sophisticated and coming up with newer capabilities that may pay off if a company decides to perform the migration with in-house staff without the assistance of consultants.

If you want to perform a large migration with complexities in SharePoint metadata and content, then you may need some third-party tools like Vyapin’s Dockit Migrator for SharePoint and Office 365.