We’re back for another round of war stories, strategy, and guidance with SharePoint Migrations! At the upcoming SPTechCon Boston conference, Adam Levithan, Product Manager at Metalogix, and I will be presenting a half-day tutorial on the ins and outs of SharePoint migrations.
Even in a half-day tutorial, there’s simply not enough time to cover all of the details, but we like to cover the key obstacles that we’ve uncovered during our experiences facilitating migrations for many companies in the last three years. What’s different about the session this time is that a lot has changed, improved, and evolved in the technology space. This time around we have the additional benefit of picking the brains of the Content Matrix teams (Metalogix and formerly Metavis).
Here are a few reasons to join us at SPTechCon, and some insight into why we believe migrations typically fail:
1. Failure to Fully Scope the Effort
If the underlying reason for migrating is not defined, we’ve seen migrations fail from the point of approval. It’s important to build realistic goals, which is based off of knowing how people actually use SharePoint and how your organization would like it to be used in the new environment.
2. Failure to Budget for All Activities
From experience, we’ve seen that it’s better to understand what method of migration you’re going to use to migrate FIRST, before finalizing your effort. Also, it’s now not just SharePoint content that is being migrated, and it’s even more important to build a roadmap that takes into consideration all the different workloads that Office 365 provides.
3. No Buy-In from Stakeholders
Remember #1, yup if you don’t have goals then your stakeholders and end-users won’t understand the value that is being provided by the migration and will only look at it as a technical change, not a productivity boost. When organizations don’t commit to governance before a migration starts, we’ve seen the battle to catch-up be an insurmountable climb.
4. Content is Not Cleaned or Enhanced
Migrations are a great opportunity to take a look at how your organization collaborates and to optimize your new environment to the observed specific patterns. This is also very important when moving to Office 365, because you have several different ways that you could re-architect your information based on new and upcoming tools that are available in the cloud.
What Adam and I enjoy most about this type of session is the ability to learn about each attendee (albeit, sometimes they have to talk really quickly, but we usually start introductions before the official starting time). By asking these types of questions: What are you migrating from/to? Where are you in the process? What are your biggest concerns? We are able to customize the conversation to individuals in the audience. Oh, and if you do decide to join, be ready to share because your stories are just as powerful.
If you have a Migration story to share: join the conversation in comments below.
Want to learn more about how to cut costs and improve efficiency by moving to a cloud-based productivity suite? Download our white paper, “7 Office 365 Migration Best Practices”
