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.

Why Migrate SharePoint to Cloud or Next Version

As mentioned, our experienced SharePoint team has worked on a number of SharePoint development and migration initiatives across different regions, thus have seen quite a few peculiar scenarios.

Migration is always going to range from simple to complex, depending on the size, out of box vs customized solutions, third-party integrations, and of course depending on what you’re doing. You could be looking at going to the cloud with Office 365 or you are upgrading versions of SharePoint and looking to take advantage of the new features.

There are a number of reasons why organizations may continue to stick with the on-premises version, including cloud security concerns and cloud migration difficulties. We all understand the move to the cloud is not always as easy as it sounds. But there are advantages to moving to the cloud considering Microsoft’s cloud-first approach. They are releasing all the new features on cloud-first before evaluating what can be added to the next on-prem versions.

Eventually, the decision is with the end organization, and whatever the decisions may be to choose to migrate to the cloud or next version, or a hybrid, the decision should be based on “when the support is ending” and “what are new features available in the new version from Microsoft that will help define and improve the scope, scale, and reliability of SharePoint.”

Latest Capabilities

There are always new capabilities that users look forward to that are released by Microsoft. Being a Microsoft Gold Partner, Bitwise has firsthand insight on their roadmap, which we understand is more driven towards:

• Optimizing user experiences through SharePoint Online
• Content engagement across all browsers and devices
• Powerful scaling security and compliance capabilities

If you decide to go cloud or for example SharePoint Server 2019, you will see similar features as Microsoft is trying to deliver an enhanced hybrid experience to all users. Also, all the good qualities of SharePoint Online are now available for on-premise users, including modern sites, Teams, communication sites, and hub sites, and most importantly, the new rock-solid sync feature for OneDrive that makes it more compelling for enterprises to retire competing file, sync and share solutions like Box or Dropbox, allowing SharePoint to become their one-size-fits-all solution for all of these needs.

See our related blog How to Communicate Better when Everyone Works Remote using Office 365 for more on what makes SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive great for remote work.

So our recommendation on where to migrate is based on the immediate need of the customers and we can definitely help and be part of the evaluation when the decision is being made to go to the cloud or move to the next version on-prem. For a complete discussion on migration, readiness for migration, and lifecycle of the migration, watch our on-demand SharePoint Migration webinar.

What makes Teams and OneDrive awesome for remote workers

• Real-Time Co-authoring: multiple users are able to work on the same document.
• Group Chatting: ability to chat with multiple users as well as individual users.
• Audio/Video Connectivity: ability to have audio/video calls within Teams
• Share: share documents with different users and get their insight.
• Automatic Backups: all documents and data within Teams is automatically backed up.
• Version History: no accidental overwrites, all the documents can be restored from the version history or from the recycle bin if deleted.
• Ability to Chat within a Document: ability to chat from within a document and ask for comments from within the document.
• Tabs within Teams: ability to have frequently used apps and websites list as tabs within the team for easy access.
• Access Anywhere / Any Device: all data resides on the server, so you can log in from any devices and still have access to all your data.

These points cover some of the basics that will get you and your team collaborating efficiently regardless of where they are working from. What has worked or hasn’t worked for your team? We’d love to hear your experiences and explore areas to get the most out of Office 365. Reach out to connect.

Reminder for SharePoint 2010 users: Extended support of SharePoint 2010 is slated to come to an end on October 13, 2020. After that, anyone on SharePoint 2010 will be left without support. If your organization is using SharePoint 2010 or any other earlier version and needs to migrate to Office 365, watch our on-demand webinar for guidance on making the move.