When migrating enterprise content to SharePoint 2013 Online, you want to avoid merely relocating your current digital junk drawer into the cloud. If your content management system is overflowing with poorly organized or outdated content, users have trouble finding anything and tend to mistrust the information’s validity.
Once your company has decided to move to SharePoint 2013 Online, follow these five tips to leave old problems behind and ensure a smooth transition. The first two tips offer general migration advice, while the last three dive into nitty-gritty tactics.
- Assess your current content and functionality: Before any SharePoint migration, take inventory of your content and assess the overall file size of your content database. This is also a good opportunity to audit your content, cleaning up any data duplication and making sure the content you move to SharePoint Online is top quality and meets all of your compliance and retention policies. This step makes the migration easier, while also giving you a chance to check in on your content and decide what you want to keep and what you should get rid of.
- Take inventory of any SharePoint customizations and third-party applications: Each one of these add-ons to your existing system has the potential to complicate your migration to SharePoint Online, so it’s important to list them at the outset and then begin troubleshooting them individually. Note any site pages that display information that does not belong in SharePoint and how these pages are composed.
- Create custom user profile properties prior to your migration: Many SharePoint users don’t know about this tactic, but it makes a migration much easier. The lines between SharePoint, Exchange and Office 365 are blurring as Microsoft integrates these tools. People search and people discovery are Office 365 attributes that are starting to bridge the gaps between content in SharePoint and your identity in Exchange for email, in Lync and in presence awareness.
User identities registered with Office 365 provide rich context by including details on an employee’s interests, expertise, special skills and project experience. But many of these attributes are not available out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2013. - Avoid custom content types in lists and libraries: Content types are powerful and robust elements within the SharePoint environment, enhancing all of the platform’s information management features. While creating custom content types is fairly common and easy for business users to do, you want to avoid creating them at the list and library levels at all costs.To be clear, custom content types aren’t the problem — it’s where users create them. In fact, it’s often a good idea to create a custom content type base that allows you to add global metadata and propagate any changes down to the custom content types in your site collections. But these custom content types shouldn’t be created at the list and library levels. For easier management, create them at the site collection level, or leverage the content type hub to federate your content types to your site collections.
- Integrate OneDrive for Business with your information management policy: Essentially, OneDrive for Business gives the user a Dropbox-like interface for accessing a SharePoint document library. This allows users to work offline and independently, accessing content via mobile devices, and sync changes and updates via OneDrive. This integration helps users transition away from file-shares and into a cloud-shared experience for document management, while staying within the organization’s security policies.
In your SharePoint Online migration, it’s important to take steps to minimize obstacles and avoid relocating old problems from your current content management system to the cloud. When migrating to SharePoint 2013 Online, following these five tips helps with the transition and makes sure your organization gets the most from these new technology investments.
Learn more about planning your SharePoint Online migration by contacting Portal Solutions.
