Microsoft SharePoint is known for being one of the best collaboration softwares. The software is pegged as the most secure, reliable, scalable ,and efficient program in the business world.
Microsoft wants SharePoint to give users a ‘modern experience’ that’s ultra user-friendly – and the most recent version, SharePoint 2019, does not fail to deliver.
The benefits of SharePoint are endless, but migrating to SharePoint can be tricky. To help users, we put together a SharePoint Migration Plan Template to make the move easy.
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Before moving forward, it’s important to identify the business issues that can be solved by a SharePoint migration, and how moving to a SharePoint environment can improve your business overall.
Common reasons for a SharePoint migration include:
Whatever the reason, your SharePoint migration plan needs to be aligned with your business goals.
When considering SharePoint migration, it’s important to think about your overall business direction, and how your business is currently operating. With this in mind, consider the changes in workflow automation, project management plans, project management platforms, and organizational structure changes that may affect information flow.
There are some critical questions to answer in your SharePoint migration project plan:
Be proactive by asking your team members these questions so you can get a full picture of your business environment.
This will also help you identify custom solutions that you may need.
You can save time and money by hiring a specialist or a migration manager to oversee the migration process, as expert hands are needed on deck for a smooth and successful move.
SharePoint migration processes need teams for:
Apart from getting a specialist on board, find internal tech experts that can assist in every step.
Before implementation, you will need to have a communication strategy in your SharePoint Migration plan document. Every member of your migration team needs to understand their role in the process and be well versed with the pre-migration and post-migration plan.
In order to increase efficiency, there should be clear deadlines for each department.
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In preparation for migration, it’s crucial to evaluate the inventory in your existing environment. This analysis will make it easier to plan the migration and create definitive timelines for completion.
Your SharePoint migration project plan template should give you a broader perspective regarding your current environment, and should include:
After assessing your inventory, you should have a better idea of what you don’t need in your environment as well.
Similar to performing a “spring cleaning”, take a look at the things that you don’t need in your inventory and remove them. This could include:
To ensure that the process is both easy and efficient, you can export your SharePoint information using a tool called PowerShell.
In addition, you can also export any list to an excel spreadsheet to provide a big picture view of what you’re looking to accomplish.
After looking at your inventory, you may discover that some areas are highly disorganized. To make the migration as smooth as possible, it can be helpful to clean up your environment.
At this time, you might need to restructure your content types, web parts, templates, and SharePoint farm topology. This could include:
At the end of the day, the end user experience is most crucial, and preparing the destination environment will create a positive experience for all teams.
When prepping your new home, look at:
One of the challenges with every deployment process is the fear of change – change management in migration strategies helps streamline the process. Having a centralized change management team, or change leaders in all your teams, can ready your employees for the upcoming adjustments in their existing data environment. These may include:
It can be helpful to migrate in phases as you build content maps – this ensures that every team understands the transformation of content as it moves from your old system to the new.
The process of migrating one workload at a time is not only more manageable – it ultimately reduces the overwhelming enormity of the whole process.
The changeover process in a SharePoint migration plan example entails:
After migration, testing is essential to make sure everything is running correctly.
In order to accomplish this, a testing plan is often required, and specialists can be extremely helpful. The goal is to ensure that all features, including customizations and third-party apps, are working as expected. A testing plan will also:
In summary
A SharePoint migration process is extremely complex and time consuming – if there is any uncertainty at any point in the process, it’s best to consult or outsource your migration.
Our experts provide dedicated cloud migration services and they can help to achieve a successful SharePoint migration to solve your current environmental constraints, including performance, security, and compliance. To learn more, contact Buchanan today.