SharePoint Administration | SharePoint Migration

5 Steps of a Successful SharePoint Site Transformation

  

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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, and as they learn the lessons from early migrations to SharePoint 2010. Many are actually slowing their upgrade plans in order to spend more time planning. They are taking advantage of this move as an opportunity to rebuild, redesign, and to 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:

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. But hopefully this gives you a place to start down your planning and migration path. For more information about how Axceler can help with this process, please take a look at the datasheets for our administration product, ControlPoint, as well as our migration tool, Davinci Migrator.