Migration is not just a technical activity - it is a metamorphosis. More and more companies are beginning to understand this as they hear stories from the field, learning from the experiences of those who have made early migrations to SharePoint 2010. While Microsoft would love to see everyone make the jump to 2010 (and renew their enterprise licenses along the way), many companies are actually slowing their upgrade plans in order to spend more time planning. They are thinking more about the impacts, about what needs to happen to allow them to maximize the value of their SharePoint investments, and to take advantage of this move as an opportunity to rebuild, redesign and transform.

But where should companies start? On which areas should they focus their planning?

Based on recent interactions with several customers in the midst of migrations, I've come up with a short list of things that every company should be doing as part of their planning process. The list is not all-inclusive, but it is a place to begin:

1. Consolidate your content types.
   As you review your existing environment, this should be one of the first steps - especially if you plan to deploy the Managed Metadata Service. A clear map of your content types, the sites that consume them, and the teams / admins who own them will help propagate your MMS plan.
2. Clean up your folder structures.
   One of the major shifts in SP2010 is to move from folders to metadata. While metadata and taxonomy should drive much of your architecture, there may be organizational and business process reasons for retaining folders. Flatten what you can, but understand the requirements.
3. Refine your keyword taxonomy.
   As with content types and folders, it is important to outline your top-level taxonomy, and work with your teams and business units to delve into the site and site-collection-specific keywords. Just understand that this is an iterative process which will continue on past your 2010 deployment.
4. Standardize your site structure and templates.
   One of the huge benefits of the service application model is the ability to centrally manage templates and structure, while allowing people the freedom to create and collaborate within that structure. For the long-term health of your environment (and future upgrades), standardize as much as possible, and always create your templates following best practices and within the SharePoint framework.
5. Build a consistent navigation.
   Do you see a theme here? Migration is a great opportunity to clean up, simplify and unify your navigation so that it makes sense to your users, helping them find the right content - in a logical site structure.

These are just some of the basic steps to transforming your legacy SharePoint environments as you prepare to migrate to SharePoint 2010. Obviously, there is much more to do - and should all be based on a sound SharePoint Strategy that includes architecture, infrastructure, taxonomy and content metadata planning, training, and of course - user adoption. Hopefully this gives you a place to start down your planning and migration path.

Be sure to attend my session in October at the European SharePoint Conference to learn about more planning and transformation steps.

Christian Buckley is Director of Product Evangelism for Axceler (www.axceler.com), where he drives partner and community development. Christian previously worked at Microsoft as part of the enterprise hosted SharePoint platform team (now part of BPOS), and led an engineering team in advertising operations. Prior to Microsoft, Christian was managing director of a regional consulting firm in the San Francisco East Bay, participated in several startups, and worked with IBM, HP, Cisco, Matsushita, Solectron, Seagate and other large hi-tech and manufacturing firms to deploy collaboration and supply chain solutions. He is co-author of three books on IBM Rational Software configuration management and defect tracking solutions, and can be found online at www.buckleyplanet.com and www.twitter.com/buckleyplanet

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