Migration or Upgrade

SharePoint Migration or Upgrade

We work closely with businesses to help them successfully migrate from legacy versions of SharePoint to the latest versions and help business owners to match their business needs with the right functionality. We will assess your SharePoint infrastructure and SharePoint solutions; discuss your upgrade objectives and future solution requirements before providing expert advice based on your specific requirements. Planning the strategy around upgrading your SharePoint environment is dependent on many factors.

Planning for migration or upgrade?


Planning is the most critical part of SharePoint migration or upgrade. The core principles of project management should be applied in this task. These include defining scope, use of project plan with timelines and assigning tasks to each resource i.e. setting up the ownership. Planning for the activities for SharePoint migration projects is little bit different than normal projects planning. The limitations of out-of-the-box migration approaches and many aspects for migration (like content, databases, existing farm configuration, security/permissions etc) can make migration project difficult and chances of risk are more. Doing complete & proper assessment and taking into account of all variables involved in the migration process is required when we are planning for migration.

Understanding customisation and integration


Customisations and integration with other systems - are the two topics that play important role in migration planning because these two things take most implementation time and effort. Because of this, cataloging and understanding what customisations that are in use is a critical part of the planning process.

Best practices to improve migration process


As a part of critical migration planning, it is important to create pre and post-migration checklists to ensure that issues that commonly occur are addressed in advance and that certain best practices are followed.

Assessment


A clear assessment & understanding of what content currently exists across an organisation and what content should be migrated into SharePoint is critical and important to the successful migration. This can include content from a variety of sources, such as file shares, public folders, legacy SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services [WSS] 2.0, WSS 3.0, SharePoint Portal Server [SPS] 2003 and MOSS sites and servers, legacy systems.

Architecture and taxonomy


The existing information architecture and taxonomy of the organisation’s systems should also be audited, such as permissions, users, features, customizations (including custom code) and how you integrate with other systems.


It is very important to identify where the critical data lies. Identifying content which is not used and not including that into migration will save time and effort. Identify the critical document stores in an organisation and audit access to that content so the security model can be carried forward into the SharePoint farm.