When Should You Migrate Your File Shares to SharePoint?
This is not your typical blog post. It’s more of a discussion point for your team, rather than a declaration of what you should or shouldn’t do with your file shares. Like so many things in SharePoint, whether or not to migrate your file shares into the platform depends on multiple factors. It may not be as simple as “let’s put all of our content in one place.” That may sound great on the surface – and we’re happy to sell you software to help you accomplish that goal – but is it the right thing for your business?
While talking to a partner this week, followed by some internal email discussions, I attempted to simplify the business issue into three factors:
- What is the volume of content to be moved?
- What is the level of interaction with that content?
- What is the cost of maintaining the status quo?
Should you migrate based solely on the volume of content on your file shares? That factor alone may not be enough data for you to make a decision. You might investigate the level of interaction with the content – how often is it accessed, tagged, edited, or moved? And are the files so large that having them on SharePoint would degrade the overall user experience? You might also want to know the cost of maintaining the current hardware (in additional to your SharePoint support costs) or the effort required to do the migration.
Being a visual person with an MBA and time on his hands (a scary combination!), I wanted to throw these data points into some kind of graph or table to help me get my arms around them. And I’m sure most of you reading this are looking for some expertise and advice on what to do – so I am also going to share my “guesstimates” for when I believe it makes the most sense to migrate, or to leave your content in your file shares.
Consider this graph, where M = migrate, and L = leave where it is:
Here is my thought process on these recommendations:
- A small volume of content should always be migrated to help simplify the environment, removing one more thing to be managed. Remove the low-hanging fruit wherever possible, and mitigate any future risks around this content.
- Whenever the cost of maintaining the file shares exceeds the cost (hardware, support) of moving them – move them.
- While there are good solutions on the market for remote storage, if you require high interaction with your content – move your file shares.
Yes, there are circumstances and scenarios where it makes sense to leave your file shares where they stand. For most organizations, it is a combination of factors rather than any single factor that drives this decision: typically, it's a large volume of content combined with low hardware/maintenance costs, and low interaction with target content (its fairly static, rarely changes). You need to weigh these factors, and make an educated decision about what to do with your environment. And yes, there are great vendor solutions on the market to help you manage your content should you stay put.
My advice is to do your homework, understand the options, and – if you decide to migrate – take a look at our market-leading file migration solution, FileLoader 2010. It’s a powerful solution that can help you quickly and easily move your content to SharePoint 2010, mapping your files to custom content types and managed metadata using a familiar Excel spreadsheet interface.
