Most organizations accumulate large amounts of content and never take the time to clear out the dead wood.
Over time, duplicate data and corrupted files have a negative impact on your system performance. Moving your SharePoint and other content to the cloud with Office 365 is a good opportunity to clean up your data, which offers technical and functional benefits.
From a functional perspective, cleaning up your content ensures that you’re migrating relevant, up-to-date content. The migration process allows you to see how much content you have and what’s duplicated. This means you’re able to leave the old content behind and only bring content that’s going to be relevant moving forward.
From a technical standpoint, cleaning up data optimizes the speed, accuracy and smoothness of your Office 365 migration. Migrating a company’s data takes a while, especially when you consider all of the email, documents and historical content most organizations have stored in their on-premises systems. The more content you have, the more time it takes to migrate from your on-premises system to the cloud. Cleaning up that data makes the migration smoother and faster.
For a smooth technical migration, make sure your current system doesn’t contain corrupted data or documents. It’s also important to understand the technical constraints on what you’re able to migrate. For instance, Office 365 has restrictions on the size of email attachments, so make sure to clean those up early on. When you’re dealing with lots of historical content, you may want to assess particularly large documents and items with long or improper file names
To make your migration easier, take advantage of the variety of tools and applications now available. These tend to fall within three categories: assessment, migration and monitoring tools. Assessment tools evaluate your current computing environment in terms of email, documents and SharePoint content. Using these tools gives you valuable insight into current activities, the amount of content you’re storing (and its complexity) and what resources are available.
Next, you have the migration tools. Microsoft provides some migration capabilities, such as directly transferring your on-premises Exchange content to Office 365, but no automated tools for migrating Microsoft files or SharePoint content. Third-party migration tools would be a good choice for your on-premises file-based and SharePoint content, and some provide a greater degree of granularity for migrating email.
Last are the monitoring tools. Every cloud platform experiences issues or downtime on occasion. When moving to Office 365, monitoring tools ensure your internal support teams and end users are aware of the platform’s uptime and availability. These monitoring tools also help your support teams understand how people are using the new Office 365 suite, both during the migration and after. For instance, it might be helpful to know how much use you’re getting from SharePoint or Yammer, how much email people have been sending or how much spam is getting through.
If your content includes a fair amount of duplicate data and outdated files, the Office 365 migration process allows you to clean it up as you go. By making use of the various tools and applications available, you’re laying the groundwork for effective content management as you move your business information to the cloud.
Want to learn more about how to improve efficiency when moving your content to the cloud? Download our new white paper, “7 Office 365 Migration Best Practices”
