With Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft provides a modern platform that allows organizations to build their own tailored Digital Workplace. The applications and the rich set of features that Microsoft 365 provides can be leveraged together to build an environment customized to organizations’ needs and requirements, their corporate entities, and their staff.
As many new and exciting features are not available with older versions of SharePoint, many organizations migrate from their old environment to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online. Those who want or need to host SharePoint within their own hosted environment can migrate to SharePoint 2019.
Regardless of the designated target environment, migrating an existing environment is never an easy endeavor and requires a lot of planning and preparation. Based on our staff’s long-time experience with SharePoint migrations for various organizations, we know that thorough and comprehensive planning is a crucial step to success. This Whitepaper provides guidance and best practices regarding migrations from previous versions of SharePoint to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 as well.
This whitepaper is over 50+ pages long and looks extensively at migrating to SharePoint Online and 2019. The following are the topics discussed in the whitepaper.
Read more about each section topic below or dive into the entire whitepaper by clicking on the image.
Everyone upgrades eventually (or they move away from the platform), so we think it’s always good to talk about why businesses are accelerating their upgrades or where (in terms of workload) they are considering an ‘early’ upgrade/migration for SharePoint.
So why do people upgrade or migrate? It’s worth noting that there are internal and external pressures on IT to upgrade their technology. In this section of the whitepaper, we look at the internal and external factors as well as creating a better user experience, improving business process support and collaboration support, reducing hardware maintenance costs, and improving security.
Once the planning is done and plans have been verified multiple times, your organization will proceed with migration activities and migration execution. Migrating content from one environment to another environment isn’t as easy as migrating files from one folder to another folder.
When planning to migrate data in a professional environment, we need to think about how to best migrate data with the least disruption to the business. The section of the whitepaper provides an overview of the most common migration considerations.
The upgrade supported process is often not used to avoid paying for additional hardware configuration and setup to hop from older versions of SharePoint Server to newer ones (as each supports an upgrade from the last).
For example, a simple diagram depicting the typical flow of most SharePoint Online migrations follows.
In this section of the whitepaper, we detail all of the different phases seen in the illustration above.
Several factors can impact the perceived success of the content migration effort by the project team and external stakeholders.
We go into detail on the listed risks in our SharePoint Migration Whitepaper.
Successful migrations leverage the best practices listed in this white paper – before, during, and after – the migration process. As with any migration, you need to do proper planning and analysis of the legacy system and how it will map to SharePoint. You need to prepare the target environment for the new content and usage. You need to ensure the migration results in as little user disruption as possible. Finally, you need to ensure that the new SharePoint architecture ensures a better experience today and in the future.
It isn’t always easy, and that’s why we tried our best to share some guidance that might help you. Download our Whitepaper to take advantages of our combined experience!
Need a little extra help? Whether your organization is looking for quick or incremental migration project to Online or the latest version of SharePoint On-Premises, our organization is ready to help with a strong history of successful migrations. It was and is very typical in the process of the over 100+ intranets we have implemented.
We are ready and happy to support your migration efforts with our Microsoft MVPs and extensive knowledge and experience with migrating to SharePoint sites, files and folders from various document libraries and platforms.
