Best Practice for SharePoint migrations

Proper planning and preparation is critical to ensure a successful migration to SharePoint 2010, but through due diligence prior to a migration and by following key guidelines, your SharePoint migration project should be a success.

Prepare for your SharePoint migration

Every migration poses it own unique challenges, but there are many consistent issues organisations are likely to face:

• Resource challenges - Many organisations have cut back on their IT staff and budget and find it hard to allocate resources to perform the prior and ongoing due diligence work required for a successful migration.
• Budget challenges - Often the complexity of migrations is underestimated by senior management, who see migration as simply moving files from one place to another, leading to insufficient funds being allocated.
• Clear vision and scope - Creating a clear, concise and actionable vision and scope takes time, and the vision should be well-defined and communicated to ensure each participant clearly understands the primary goals.
• Insufficient information about current data - without a detailed audit and inventory of all existing data sources and their uses, it makes it very difficult to work out what data to rationalise, consolidate and move.

Prepare your data

This is an essential prerequisite prior to any SharePoint migration but a project phase that is often skimmed over or ignored, leading to serious problems during the migration process. Key data aspects that should be determined are:

• The number, sizes and types of files to be migrated
• Clear understanding of folder structure and metadata requirements
• The uncovering of forbidden characters in file names and other potential migration issues
• Review of data stored in previous SharePoint versions to determine if older versions need to be migrated and whether there are list and library customisations that need to be migrated e.g. site columns or workflows.

Define the migration team

An effective SharePoint migration team should involve people from across your organisation, not just IT resources:

• Create a ‘steering committee’ that will oversee the whole migration effort from a high level
• Include individuals doing the work, their managers, escalation points and SharePoint ‘champions’
• Involve SharePoint subject-matter experts and end-user trainers throughout the migration process
• Include representatives from non-IT departments who benefit from or who are sponsoring the migration such as sales and marketing, customer services, HR or business units.

Explore existing data sources
Once the migration team has a set of reports on the data that needs to be migrated, business users can give their input on what needs to be migrated, permissions changes, folder structures, metadata file assignments etc. Failing to take the time to understand your existing data can lead to a number of issues as follows:

• The SharePoint 2010 farm design may not be optimised for user needs
• Opportunities for archiving or retiring unneeded data are lost and data is migrated unnecessarily
• Data that is essential to migrate is missed or only part migrated
• Missed opportunities for take advantage of useful SharePoint features such as lists, libraries, metadata, content types and workflows or unexpected difficulties could arise during migration testing

Define the migration vision, timeline and budget
An important step of the preparation process is to define specific goals for the migration. It is often easiest to start with a vision statement, which could be a handful of sentences that describe the high-level goals for the project. This statement is the foundation for the more detailed and specific project goals and could include, for example:

• Migrate content from current intranet and SharePoint 2007 portal to SharePoint 2010 quickly and efficiently.
• Allocate resources to review the existing data and plan for retiring old and duplicate data.
• Use SharePoint 2010 tools to enhance collaboration and user productivity in the new environment.

With a clear migration vision, plan, migration team and data review, most SharePoint migration issues can be resolved successfully, ensuring a successful SharePoint 2010 implementation that meets all of your user’s needs.

To find out more about Ballard Chalmers services and how we can help your organisation please email us or call Andrew Chalmers on 01342 410223.

Sign up to receive our regular email newsletter

Return to News