Effective SharePoint Migration tips – Part 2 Pre-migration Back

December 10 2020
SharePoint Online is a strong content management tool. With the power of Microsoft cognitive tool Cortana and with Project Cortex, it has become an intelligent tool. Hence, when migration is being planned it becomes of utmost importance to carry out the Pre-migration activities, which involves content assessment as one of its main components.
Let’s quickly delve into each of the activities in the assessment exercise.

1. Content assessment activities

  • Content types and document types assessment
  • Understanding the non-supported content types
    1. Content cleanup

2. Permission assessment activities

  • Review existing permissions
  • Assess permission
    1. By content type
    2. By content owners/department owners
    3. By Project types/hierarchy types
  • Review and build new permission matrix as per the new SP Online environment

File/Folder structure assessment activities

  • Review the folder structured
    1. Nested type of file/folder structure
    2. Review its naming convention
  • Review with management and as per the new SP Online, if needed do the renaming of the file/folder structure to avoid complexity.

Metadata assessment

  • Extract metadata from filenames and folder names
  • Extract from the content structure
  • Build a structure of managed metadata as per the department or project or content types.
  • Build a structure of managed content types

Integrations & Customization

In general, when migration from existing SP environment or any other systems, one of the crucial elements is to understand about integration and customization. The elements that need to be assessed are
  • Any customization in terms of web part
  • Customization in terms of portal design
  • Any workflow customization
  • Any document control customization
  • Integration of SP system with others like any database, erp or with any business connectivity services etc
Though there can be multiple types of integrations, these forms as a necessary assessment exercise to avoid cost overruns, timeline mismatch and project failures.

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