5 Steps to Avoid a Migration Nightmare When Moving to Office 365

The purpose of this post is to provide you a process to migrate your data to Office 365 – SharePoint Online (SPO), and to share you some tips that can help you avoid migration headaches and nightmares. This article describes a migration process and will not show you how to do a migration from, a technical point of vue. It is a general guidance to prepare you to do a proper migration with minimal hiccups or speedbumps along the way. This article focuses on migrating from SharePoint 20XX only to SharePoint Online.

MigrationBy now, everyone has heard of Office 365, the Microsoft cloud solution for Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, and Yammer. This is a great offering for many organization to take advantage of the SaaS and IaaS platforms, as it eliminates the headaches of managing and maintaining their IT infrastructure.

When you made a decision to move your data to SharePoint Online, it means that you have already committed to making a platform change. Either you are migrating from file share, other platforms, older versions of SharePoint, or SharePoint 2013 on-premises, you need to plan your migration properly, otherwise you will end up with few speedbumps along the way, which will cause migration headaches for you, your team, and your organization.

Understand SharePoint Online (SPO)

The initial step in any migration process is to know the platform you are migrating to. Regardless if you are on SharePoint 2013 on-premises, or earlier version of SharePoint, SharePoint Online offers different features that do not exist on-premises and vice versa. You may have done some custom work at your on-premises tenant, for example, that are difficult to migrate to SPO, or your customization can be achieved with features in SPO that do not exist in your on-premises tenant. Features like Office Graph, Groups, Yammer, etc… give you great collaboration and enterprise social networking capabilities that you can’t get with your on-premises tenant.

You also need to understand the different licenses available for you, before picking the right license that meets your business requirements and budget. This Office article explains well the differences in all Office 365 licenses: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans.

Migration Lifecycle

After you have carefully reviewed the Office 365 plans, you will have an idea on what options you have. You may be confused which one is the best option for you, so understanding your current content and current farm will help you decide which plan is good for you.

Throughout the years, I have developed a Migration lifecycle that I have found it very successful in many migration projects I have successfully delivered. Figure 1 below explains the different steps needed to make sure you complete a smooth SharePoint migration project.

 A few steps to avoid a Migration nightmare - Lifecycle
Figure 1 – Migration lifecycle

Step 1 – Analysis

You really want to do a full analysis of your current SharePoint farm content. Your analysis should include:

1. How much content do you have and how large the content is: Even though you don’t care much about how the content is stored for you in Office 365, this is important to plan how long it will take you to migrate the content.

2. How many layers do you have: Web applications, site collections, and sites? This will determine the future information architecture of your SPO site collections and sites.

3. How are you managing your taxonomy, term store, metadata, site columns? Are you currently using a Content Type Hub? This information is crucial in deciding which plan you need to pick in Office 365.

4. Permissions: How many groups do you have and is your permission inheritance a mess?

5. What about your service applications: Search, BCS, Secure Store, User Profile, PerformancePoint? Note that if you are using PerformancePoint, you will need to use PowerBI now with SPO.

6. Custom Code or 3rd Party tools: Do you have any?

Step 2 – Plan

Now that you have analyzed your current farm, you can start planning your migration. At this stage you should pick your Office 365 plan, register your company and start playing with it, while you are planning for your migration. Your plan should include:

1. Content Planning: Most companies have content that is either outdated, duplicated or difficult to find. What you need to do is start planning what content needs be migrated, archived, or deleted. Triage your content!

2. Content Mapping: If you are changing the structure of your portal in SPO, then you will need to map the content from the old location to the new location. Start doing this very early, as it is very time consuming and will take a long time to finish. This includes your site collections, sites, and lists.

3. Service Application: Plan how you want to migrate your service application and if you need any hybrid approach like BCS.

4. Plan your resources: Identify key resources on your team and what roles do they have (Content owners, IT Admins, Developers, Testers, end-users).

5. Communicate: make sure you communicate your project with the rest of the organization and set the expectations of timelines and goals. You need everyone to be aware and ready for outage if it happens.

6. Plan your training: You want to plan when to train and who to train.

7. Pick your migration approach. Once you have identified and analyzed your content, you should have full understanding of the magnitude of your migration. Now, you will have to decide how you want to migrate:
                   a. Do I need 3rd party tools? There are many good 3rd party tools that work with Office 365. Don’t hesitate to contact them and get a trial version to get a feel on how comfortable you are with them. Most of them are very similar in nature. Some 3rd party tools are: Metalogix, AvePoint, Metavis, Dell, ShareGate
                   b. Can I do it with CSOM and PowerShell Scripts? You can definitely write your own script to migrate to SPO, but you need to consider how complex your current and target tenants are, and if it is worth doing it or using other tools instead
                   c. Should I do manual copy to Office 365? Even though you can, I do not recommend it. Yes, technically, you can use Explorer View in SharePoint to do it, but you are not migrating metadata, version history or maintaining any information about the content. Usually, this is out of the question and should not be an option, however, it is technically feasible.

Once you have defined and planned your strategy, you should be ready to execute.

Step 3 – Execute

Execution of your migration is the easy part in your project (if you have done your homework properly). Few of steps you need to do here:

1. Migrate your service applications first (or set them up if no migration is needed).

2. Execute a test migration: you need to try if your plan works, before you do your production migration. Test your content migration and check how the content makes it to SPO. If it’s not what you have expected, tweak your script, then retry until you are satisfied.

3. Migrate your content in stages: Do NOT migrate all your content at once. Pick the content based on the plan you did in the previous steps. Staged content migration is the most favorable one as it will reduce your risks and errors.

4. Repeat your migration: Not all your content will migrate; there are always exceptions that you could have missed during your analysis and planning. There is no 100% successful migration on your first attempt. Keep repeating your migration, until everything has been copied over.

Step 4 – Assess

Once you have completed your migration, you want to run some reports to make sure everything is completed. You may need to re-visit your execution phase to run minor the migration scripts again, if you are missing content reported by the users. Also, you want to run analysis on the new tenant permission to make sure the permissions have been copied successfully.

Step 5 – Sustain

Now, that you have migrated everything and your users are happy, you want to make sure that you sustain your new tenant. Few things you need to be aware of:

1. Turn off your old tenant, but do not throw it away. You may want to reference content in the future that you decided not to migrate.

2. What are your growth metrics? You want to assess how your content is growing and if you need to take any action item against it.

3. Governance & Support: Developing Apps and maintaining your SPO tenant is a bit different than on-premises. You want to identify how you are managing your new portal and who’s doing what.

As a recap, planning your project and knowledge of your environment are the recipe for a successful migration. Understand your content, your capabilities, and the SharePoint Online features before executing any migration, will pave a smooth path road for you.

Successful Migration To Share Point 2013 - Planning Considerations & Migration Strategies

About the auhtor Mike Maadarani;

Mike Maadarani Mike Maadarani is a SharePoint Server MVP and SharePoint Architect, and has been providing strategic SharePoint solutions for the past 13 years. With over 19 years of IT industry experience, Mike spent the last few years managing and delivering SharePoint solutions to a wide range of mid to large scale projects. He is an evangelist and visionary where he can and provide the business and technical leadership required for delivering successful global SharePoint projects. Mike is a Search and WCM expert and has deployed large SharePoint ECM and Collaboration implementations in North America.

 

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