A recipe for a successful SharePoint migration involves thoughtful research, planning, resource management, and proper execution. Businesses with their content still on legacy systems need to quickly migrate to SharePoint to access efficient content management and collaboration. It will ensure higher security of their business-critical data against the prevalent cyber-attacks, breaches, ransomware, or phishing attempts.
Most SharePoint migrations include upgrade from traditional file systems or on-premises SharePoint to SharePoint Online. However, the process includes way more than just a few drag and drops of file and other content from one place to another. Following the right process defines how your business organizes, manages, and accesses the SharePoint data after migration.
How to Target a Perfect Data Migration?
With SharePoint, you get better organization of data, vast storage, and secured intranet sites for day-to-day communication as well as collaboration. Follow the ultimate migration procedure that helps you to stay competitive among other businesses.
Prepare a Roadmap
Every process that starts with a roadmap outlining the objectives and explaining the whereabouts is directed to successful completion. A SharePoint migration roadmap includes:
- Identify objectives: Sit with your team and discuss what are the major objectives that you want to achieve with this transformation.
- Data inventory: Prepare a data inventory to help you find out what all is in the source. It makes it easy to decide the data you wish to move to the destination.
- Assign resources: Organize a team that will perform this data migration in SharePoint and make sure that they precisely understand both environments and know how to do it right.
Sort Out Current Environment
Migrating everything from source to the SharePoint destination just doesn’t make sense. It will unnecessarily occupy a lot of space and waste most of your time migrating data that you don’t actually need further. Here’s what you can do to sort out the source:
- Data categorization: Simplify the source environment (on-premises file share, SharePoint, Google Drive, or others) by categorizing data. Differentiate data as outdated, duplicate, and irrelevant. This allows you to discover what data you need and what you need to get rid of.
- Cleanup current environment: After the classification of data, it’s time to get rid of all those files and folders that are not necessary and just holding up space.
This will help in cleaning the source environment and provide additional storage to keep new data items.
Map and Manage Source & Destination
Analyze both source and destination environment and configure the required permissions to access data in the destination. It is also equally important to see that there is ample storage space available in the destination to accommodate source data.
Make efforts in planning how to appropriately map the source and target environment. The mapping of each file and folder should be done carefully to avoid mapping all the data to a single library or folder.
Be Ready for Unexpected Situations
You might encounter certain errors and situations that appear unexpectedly once you finish migration in SharePoint. You’ll need to resolve these errors promptly.
Regular Monitoring
Ask the users and shareholders accessing the new SharePoint platform to provide you the feedback. You need to monitor the environment regularly to avoid any possible downtime.
Based on the regular monitoring and feedback, make improvements to the SharePoint platform if needed.
What is the Best Approach to Migrate to SharePoint?
We now know what is the efficient procedure to run a smooth SharePoint migration. However, another major query that needs instant addressing is: What is the best method to migrate SharePoint?
- There are not many approaches available to migrate data to/from SharePoint. One common approach is simple drag and drop of files and folders. However, it may take a lot of time and is also vulnerable to risk of data loss.
- SharePoint Migration Tool by Microsoft is another utility that you can try but it has some limitations too. The tool shows complications with the handling of complex metadata. It also doesn’t support SharePoint Online tenant to tenant migration.
- Apart from these approaches, the best way to do the data migration is using a professional SharePoint migration utility. A third-party tool serves robust features and simplify the process for all users. It will make complex and bulk migrations easy as well as minimize errors and downtime.
Conclusion
After preparing the roadmap, use a SharePoint migration utility to accelerate the process and to migrate with utmost precision. Kernel Migration for SharePoint is one of the best tools to consider to migrate data to SharePoint. It guarantees end-to-end secured migration without affecting the source environment. With features like pre-migration analysis, you can avoid possible errors during the process.
Moreover, remember that migration alone is not efficient to improve the efficiency of your organization. It is also crucial to regularly review data, access control, data retention as well as security policies, and upgrade to utilize the latest features.
