Planning for the Right Kind of SharePoint Migration
One of your strategic considerations when planning for a SharePoint migration should be to understand what kind of migration needs to happen. Sounds pretty straight forward, but there is actually a lot of depth to this question. Even small deployments (based on the number of sites or size of your content databases) could have great complexity. Do you plan to apply homogenous rules and filters across all sites, all site collections, and different governing bodies (and site owners)? Probably not. Migrations are rarely that simple, but you need to do the planning to figure out just what you need to do.
Is your migration bigger than a breadbox? Probably.
Does the migration plan include content, sites, metadata, specific features, custom integrations and solutions? Each one of these things may bring with it a set of requirements and decisions. Is your strategy the same for the various organizations you serve? Are there special considerations for the different site collections? Different farms? Do you need to reach out to multiple teams and tailor your plans for each?
One of the most compelling stories for SharePoint is its sheer extensibility. There is no such thing as a homogenous deployment – SharePoint is build-to-suit. It’s a platform, which can make migrations very complex. One team may use SharePoint for their day-to-day product management efforts, and require migration of their look and feel, custom navigation, content types, and large content databases. Their system might be a high-availability, business-critical platform. Another team may only need their document libraries migrated, as they use SharePoint as more of a file share. These are two very different migrations.
The net-net here is that you need to understand the end goal of your migration. Is it a straight dump of sites, folders and content, as-is, with a plan to clean up and reorganize later? Do you plan to restructure as you migrate? Does each team in your organization have a different strategy? Answering these questions will help you properly scope your project, and reduce the risks associated with your SharePoint migration.
Another tool at your disposal is the Davinci Migrator, which provides granular planning to help you organize and orchestrate your migration, a discovery interface to help you identify the right content and sites to be moved, and a unique pre-migration analysis engine to help you clean up potential problems before you migrate. Learn more about Davinci here.