SharePoint Migration: 5 Steps to Follow for a Successful Migration

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The First Step to Your SharePoint Migration – Have a Plan Before You Start
A plan is the first step to your SharePoint Migration roadmap. Quite literally, your SharePoint migration plan should be a plan for how you’re going to do your SharePoint migration. You should consider what files you want to migrate, for example. Here is your chance to work with departments to get rid of some of the content that doesn’t need to come over and get them used to the idea of using the new environment. There are lots of cases where content cannot be brought over (or the content shouldn’t be brought over) due to it being old or no longer needed, so planning what content you want to migrate should be the first and one of the most important steps for your SharePoint migration.

Implementing Your SharePoint Migration Plan: 4 Steps to a Successful SharePoint Migration
Now that you have the plan in place, it’s time to consider the actual migration. Your SharePoint migration requires four additional steps to be successful: 1) Governance and Clean Up; 2) Test Migration; 3) Migration; and 4) Decommissioning.

SharePoint Migration Step 1: Governance & Clean-Up
When you’re coming from another file share site, or even another SharePoint site, it’s important to come up with the standards for the new environment, so you don’t bring over any old junk. This step of the migration plan is a good time to organize your documents, decide on the tags you’re going to use to categorize them, remove any duplicate copies of files that are on your current system, and determine some governance around your new system.

SharePoint Migration Step 2: Test Migration
This is the step in the migration plan where you run a test migration on your SharePoint site before doing the actual migration. Migrations aren’t the easiest thing to do – there are a lot of restrictions when working with data on Office 365. There are limits on the length and characters used in file names, limits on certain file sizes, limits on the length of the file path, etc., so the test step is an important part of the process. Ensure that you run the appropriate test tools to make sure everything will be migrated over properly.

SharePoint Migration Step 3: Migration
Once the testing is done, it’s time for the actual migration of your content to your new SharePoint site.  This is when you decide how your SharePoint migration will go. Maybe you want to only move ten people or a department to start. Maybe moving over one server at a time. It’s up to you how to take down your old system.

SharePoint Migration Step 4: Decommissioning
After you’re finished with your SharePoint migration, it’s time to decommission your old site. Again, this can be done in phases: phase out each server, decommission ten people at a time, or other decommissioning plans.

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