How To Migrate Between SharePoint 2013 And Office 365

Migrating from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 has many benefits, including an extensive range of productivity features, as well as the ease of administration in Office 365. There are also cost benefits associated with using Office 365’s cloud-hosted infrastructure rather than having to host the features on-premises.

First, identify the reasons why you are moving to Office 365 and what you hope to achieve from the transition. This may seem like an overly-simplistic step, but defining your goals clearly during the first stages of migration, before you touch any sort of technology, will help focus the rest of your planning. Goals you may want to define could be improving the information architecture, make content easier to find, or adopt a new electronic records retention policy.

After you’ve defined your organization’s “why,” you will need to audit the infrastructure you already have in place. Find out the total size of your content database, as this figure affects how long the migration process will be.

Next, identify the various components of your content. For example, are you mostly using SharePoint to store image files, CAD files or another type of file? Some are more difficult and take much longer to transfer than others, so it’s important to know what you are working with. Also, note any customizations that you have applied to your SharePoint system, as you’ll need to set these up again on Office 365.

Finally, a common misconception is that a migration will often fix what isn’t working. While that would be convenient, it’s, unfortunately, untrue. Migrating any broken elements in your current solution to Office 365 won’t make them start working again; instead, you’ll need to fix them before or after the migration. So take the time to identify any parts of your existing SharePoint system that are broken when performing your audit.

Once you know what you are working with, it’s time to sit down and design your new Office 365 solution. In addition to considering your technical infrastructure, you will also need to consider user experience.

Moving to a new environment always changes the user interface in some way, so why not take the opportunity to address the pain points in the current system? You may be able to create a solution that allows your users to interact with the technology much more efficiently. Hold a meeting with your core users to gather their views on the changes that are needed in the user interface.

With your design in-hand, set up your new Office 365 solution. But don’t launch it. First you will need to map all your site content in its new environment. (That way you know where all your content will be stored.)

Before pushing your new Office 365 environment live, you need to decide how you will move content over from the old system. The best way to migrate content from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 is to use a third-party content migration tool. Trying to drag and drop all the content yourself can result in losing a lot of information and will take a very long time.

Once you’ve built out your Office 365 solution, and you have your content migration strategy scoped out, test your migration plan by running it on a small subset of your content so you can find out your content transfer rate. This rate determines how long the total migration will take, which allows you to plan your timeline accurately.

Now it’s time to pull the trigger and migrate your content. But don’t forget take down the old system, or, at least, make it read-only. Decommissioning your previous platform ensures employees will only be able to work the new environment – an important step toward successful user adoption.

Dedicating the time and resources necessary to carefully plan your SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 migration will be critical to your success. By following the steps above, you’ll not only be able to proactively handle challenges or issues that might derail your project otherwise, but you’ll also create an Office 365 environment that better addresses the pain points of your organization and provides a better user experience.