Moving your content from on-premises storage to the cloud offers many benefits, but some organizations worry about the risks and difficulties of a SharePoint migration. Fortunately, many of the common issues organizations run into during cloud migrations are avoidable with better planning.
Keeping your migration under control means setting an accurate timeline, developing a detailed inventory of the amount and type of information you have to transfer, and using automated tools to sort out what you do and don’t want to move to your cloud-based SharePoint Online platform.
Here are five tips for a successful SharePoint migration:
- Clean up your content: Before beginning your SharePoint migration, determine what information to move to the cloud and what you should leave behind. Weeding out any redundant, outdated or trivial content before the migration should make the process easier, while also controlling costs and mitigating risks. For example, cleaning up old, outdated information could help with compliance and records management issues before they become a liability to your organization.Cleaning up your content also improves the user experience in your new cloud-based system. Reducing the amount of noise that users have to browse and search through helps your users quickly find accurate content and the most recent versions of documents.
- Automate cleanup processes: Deciding whether to delete, migrate or archive each piece of content is time-consuming, so look for ways to automate and streamline the process by using simple rules based on date, author and location. For example, if your records retention and compliance policies indicate you shouldn’t migrate any content older than seven years, that selection process is easy to automate. When the situation is more complex, you may need to coordinate different business units and stakeholders to review their existing content before deleting or archiving it.
- Take inventory: To minimize errors and unwelcome surprises during your SharePoint migration, take inventory of the content you plan to move and acknowledge the intricacies of the source before you test or migrate to a new destination. The best way to go about this is to truly investigate your content and acknowledge the different object types involved. This inventory may be very granular, including number of versions, quantity of metadata and associated lookup columns within SharePoint or another site collection.
- Test your migration before you commit: When moving from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online, it’s important to address the different object types and their migration paths. Each object type is going to have a different migration path with its own challenges. In a test migration, you collect a smaller set of files from the source and move it to the destination, and then make sure all the attributes that you want come over with the files. It also gives you a chance to address any errors and complications, and test the transfer speed. Testing by object type helps you acknowledge the types of content and objects that have to move and any complexities you may run into with each of them.
- Set a generous timeframe: Cloud migrations tend to take longer than migrating between two SharePoint on-premises systems. While cloud migration tools may claim to transfer a gigabyte per hour, your actual speed depends on a number of factors and network complexities. Moving data between completely separate data centers may result in low transfer rates, around 100 MB or 250 MB per hour. When you’re dealing with terabytes of data, such a slow rate could put you behind schedule.
That’s why it’s important to look for ways to speed up the process. For example, if you’re using Office 365, you could migrate to an Azure server that’s in the same data center as your SharePoint Online and Office 365 tenant. That way, you’re migrating within the same data center.
In the end, to get the best results from your SharePoint migration, it’s important to set appropriate expectations and timeframes. For example, content cleanup may take considerable time depending on your information, cleanup goals and strategy. But considering the potential benefits of streamlining the migration and improving system performance, there’s no sense in cutting corners.
Learn more about how cloud-based enterprise content management could help your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
