Learn

The most important part of any migration project is learning about the existing environment. This includes the discovery of the following areas:

• Map-Servers and Farms – Familiarize with the logical components (such as web applications, service applications, site collections, databases) and physical components (such as web servers and database servers) of the SharePoint environment to determine the appropriate target SharePoint environment.
• Assess Current SharePoint Environment of Customization – Identify and document features that are currently used but not supported in the target SharePoint environment and extract the solution packages if needed.
• Create a Communication Plan – Create a high-level plan of what will be migrated and by when it will be migrated and how users will be kept informed about it. The communication plan also includes a test plan that details how testing activities will be carried throughout the migration.

Prepare

Once you have learned about the environment, the next phase is to prepare the current environment for migration. This includes the following steps:

• Environment Audit and Clean Up – Identify and remove sites, features, and document versions that are no longer needed or supported in the target SharePoint version. Plan to migrate only the necessary components in order to optimize migration efforts.
• Manage Customizations – Even if an environment is not using a lot of customizations, it could be using workflows that could be transforming data. Creating a plan for customizations, including for features that are no longer supported in the target environment is critical to the success of the project. Often rewriting features is an easier solution.
• Plan Environment Restructuring – It often happens that when looking at a site or even a list, the actual usage over the period of time could be different than how it was assumed to happen. Before moving to a new environment it is important to have a plan on how to deal with these cases.
• Plan for Performance – Every migration is different and needs to be treated so. Although all migrations can be done by using a migration solution, such as Bitwise SharePoint Migration, sometimes an attach and detach method works better. The upgrade strategy should be determined based on system architecture, level of customization, and nature of contents.

Implement & Test

In this phase, the actual content and customizations are migrated to the new environment. This includes the following steps:

• Setup Target Environment – Setup is different for migrations to cloud vs. on-premises. Migration to an on-premises environment consists of setting up the farm including front-end servers, application servers, database servers, search services server, and other servers. It also includes setting up the database backup structure as well. For migrations to cloud setup is a bit less.
• Deploy Customization – This simply consists of deploying the customization and ensuring they are activated on all the required sites.
• Tool-based migration – For better control over migration, using a tool like Bitwise automation utilities helps to migrate content from various sources like SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Ektron, Kentico, other content management systems, and shared drives to SharePoint.
• Quality Assurance – Have a solution for early issue detection and resolution.
• Apply Branding – Ensure necessary branding is properly applied through the site.

Validate

The validation phase consists primarily of user acceptance testing and user training. Key areas of this phase include:

• Migration Verification – One of the basic success criteria post-migration is the verification of migrated content in the new environment. There are very few traditional approaches like spot check that can be used to validate if the content has been migrated successfully or not. However, all these traditional approaches are time-consuming and lack accuracy, so a migration verification tool is recommended.
• Review Event Logs – Go through all the logs and provide reporting capabilities so that corrective action can be taken if errors are found in the log. Reviewing all the logs after the migration has been completed can be time-consuming, so an event viewer tool is recommended.
• Remediate UI/UX issues and Remediate Data Issues – When the migration is complete, users could face issues that could either be a data issue or user experience issue, or a training issue, all of which need to be resolved. Bitwise recommends setting up ticketing tools within SharePoint that users can leverage to report these issues and seek help. Setting up a ticketing tool helps later to analyze the issues better.

Takeaways

To summarize now is the right time to start planning on migrating to SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2019 as the extended support for SharePoint 2010 is ending in April 2021. Migrating to Office 365 or the latest on-premise version will enable your teams to take advantage of new tools like One Drive, Teams, Yammer, Power BI, etc.

Since the entire migration process can be time-consuming, we recommend partnering with a consulting company (like Bitwise), that has experience executing such migration projects and can bring in automation to streamline every step of the entire process so that it can be managed within budget and on time. For a complete discussion on migration, readiness for migration, and lifecycle of the migration, watch our on-demand SharePoint Migration webinar.

Stakeholders

Stakeholders are people who have an interest in and influence over your project, regardless of title.

Identifying stakeholders can often be challenging. Traditionally, it involves reviewing the effect of migration on different lines of businesses and how it cascades through the organizational structure. Bitwise recommends implementing a bottom up approach by studying the effect of change at the individual level and how it moves up the chain. To accelerate this process, we use automated scripts that help in identifying the top contributors, site owners, etc. with the click of a button.

Every stakeholder wants to know “what’s in it for me?” when you start discussing changing the way they work. Too often we make the mistake to start talking about product features and organizational benefits instead of empathizing with their day to day struggle to collaborate, communicate and get work done. This can easily be changed by shifting the center of gravity of the change program to be the stakeholders experience. We usually meet directly with the stakeholders on a regular basis and learn additional information about their business. We listen to their pain points and perceptions so that we can craft communications that will be successful and manage their expectations of what the migration can deliver and how it will change or improve their day to day activities.

Champions

Champions are an invaluable resource to drive change and ensure you have meaningful feedback from your employees. Champions could include key stakeholders. Champions are an extension of your implementation team that provide peer-to-peer learning, feedback and enthusiasm to your change project. Bitwise recommends building a platform for champions to share updates and successes and provide material ready to support their work, as well as build and nurture champion communities so that they can provide departmental and 1:1 support of employees during this transition. This will enable champions to drive messages and communicate the value and benefit throughout the rollout.

Planning the Migration Project

Whether you’re moving from SharePoint 2010 or 2013 to the latest on-premise version or to the cloud, the following steps will help you get started.

Timelines, Budgets and Success Criteria

Instead of going with the big bang approach, Bitwise recommends breaking down the migration project into manageable and logical pieces that can be boxed into fixed timeframes. Using this approach companies see the success earlier. When developing the project plan, it is essential to build in success criteria for measuring whether or not the migration has been successful.

Traditional success criteria of executing a project within given times lines and budget aren’t really a good measure of success. Success criteria should always comprise measures that include the health of the services for a full picture. People may be happy with the intent, but if they cannot get to the desired experience they will ultimately have negative sentiment. Quality, reliability, performance and speed with which issues are resolved must be included in success criteria.

User Adoption and Support

A common mistake in user adoption programs is to tout the benefits of moving to the cloud from the perspective of the organization or its IT department. These are not motivating factors for most employees. Employees are paid to drive results in a particular discipline, and so we must share with them how changes like the implementation of Microsoft Teams or other collaboration and communication solutions will benefit them.

Other benefits like anytime/anywhere access can often sound to an employee like “I have to work anytime and anywhere.” Instead, show the benefit of answering an important chat while in-between customers or while picking up your children from school (though not while driving!). Bitwise recommends using road shows, seminars/webinars, virtual broadcasts, lunch and learn sessions, etc. to help with user adoption.

Providing a support structure is essential to assist employees to adjust to the change and to build technical skills to achieve desired business results. There are various support models that can be used, such as on-call support, in-person support and online support, to help employees through the transformation.

Recap

The success of your migration depends on how well you communicate to internal stakeholders and champions before, during and after the project. Having a communication plan and framework in place will enable effective channels to build buy-in throughout the migration. Identifying the right migration approach and success criteria, and providing the right user support, ensures appropriate expectations are met to achieve successful adoption across the organization. For a complete discussion on migration, readiness for migration and lifecycle of the migration, watch our on-demand SharePoint Migration webinar.

Recap on Findings for Snowflake Load

Based on our experience, we recommend that CSV and Avro should be the preferred formats for loading data into Snowflake. Even if you are planning to keep a copy of data on object storage (S3, etc.) in ORC or Parquet format for direct query, it would be advisable to create another temporary copy in CSV or Avro just for Snowflake load.

We hope that these findings are helpful in your efforts to migrate data from your on-premise data warehouses to Snowflake. Bitwise offers a full range of cloud migration services to efficiently move your data and applications to the cloud, including a framework to help expedite your data migration from legacy database applications to Snowflake by using the best of breed technologies from the leading cloud providers and Bitwise in-built utilities to fill the gaps of cloud provider tools and services.

Contact us to learn more on how we can accelerate your migration efforts.