Preparing SharePoint for Redesign of your Information Architecture
In my last few blog posts, I have been talking about the best practices surrounding site and data transformation – not just migrating your sites from A to B as-is, but cleaning up content and structure as you move, reorganizing and optimizing for search 
and, more importantly, to improve the overall end user experience. (See 5 Steps of a Successful SharePoint Site Transformation, and (4 More) Steps of a Successful SharePoint Site Transformation)
Prior to all of this effort, you need to do something even more fundamental as part of your discovery process – review your SharePoint site metrics. Studying your metrics will help you to understand how SharePoint is actually being used, allowing you to better prioritize which sites and content might need to be migrated / reorganized first, because the teams that use them are very active and rely on SharePoint for their day-to-day business. As outlined in our whitepaper on SharePoint reporting, the metrics you need to review and consider include:
- Permissions by user, by Active Directory or SharePoint group, or by permission level for your target site/s. So much of SharePoint revolves around permissions, that having a clear picture of who is in the system and what they can do is essential to your future planning.
- Usage and activity reports, such as page views, unique users, usage trends, and top sites visited. These are key to understanding who is using SharePoint, and possibly the content and sites which can be archived or deleted due to inactivity.
- Storage reports are a critical part of planning, with site and trend reporting helping you with your capacity and performance planning efforts.
- Audit reports provide an even more detailed view into how people are using your environment, and are a way to filter through the SharePoint audit logs to track events by user, date, scope, site, and URL.
With these metrics and reporting, you can more accurately map out the structure of your current environment. As you begin to plan your future environment (whether through migration, or in a brand new deployment), this data will help you identify gaps between the current environment and your new information architecture, giving you a clear picture of the work necessary to cross those gaps. Until you have an accurate picture of where you are today, you will not be able to properly estimate the number of gaps – or size of those gaps – and the effort needed to meet your business goals.
With many reporting options not available out-of-the-box, Axceler’s ControlPoint is an excellent resource for providing SharePoint data and analysis around these critical areas, allowing users to better clean up and restructure their environments before tackling a redesign of their information architecture. ControlPoint is the number one administration platform for SharePoint. Schedule a demo today and find out more.