But we do it for a more welcoming or better frontier. When you think of why someone would choose to move to a new house/space, the common reasons include better amenities, need for more space, economic viability or expiration of lease with no option for renewal and then there can be things like security and well-maintained neighborhood. Similar analogies (reasons) are put forth for SharePoint migration where amenities are the new and advanced features which SharePoint 2016/2019 offers, More scalability and Space options that SharePoint Online offers (at a great value for the money), deprecating SharePoint versions which would no longer be supported by Microsoft and a highly secure and robust platform with improved security and governance that features of SharePoint 2019 can offer.

Looking at these similarities, I wanted to take a deeper dive into finding more analogies and how we can better plan our migrations. Highlighting some basic aspects that should be planned right for reaping the benefits of a big move.

Planning:

The most important exercise one forgets to perform is to evaluate the core business priorities, current pain points and set the goals to accomplish/fix. Taking a holistic approach to this, start from analyzing the entire the platform including site collections, topology, solutions, permissions, etc., anticipate the challenges and impact of adopting the new platform and how to overcome them with proper training your power users, defining guidelines. The reasons for a migration is to ensure a better user experience, improve collaboration and make the best of the new features.

Similar challenges and impact could with moving to new space, where you or your kids have to find new friends or get to know your neighbors etc., but it’s all worth it when it’s meeting your objective, for your its would be a good school district.

Mostly a vertical approach to migration is a go-to execution plan, where key workloads are identified and are picked up as pilots, for instance, it could be an Accounting department which could be identified as a top priority to be migrated, however a horizontal approach is equally important, for an organization to access the common object as a day to day activity example HR policy document, leave balance and management.

It is of vital importance to involve content owners in the early planning stage, as these business owners would define the success of the migration project and the adoption of a new platform

Know what to label:

Tagging feature on SharePoint is great to help users to make the content “findable”, but it’s should be used with caution, not everything needs tagging, as they say, ‘best option is the most simple one’ same applies to tagging your content, like it’s a wise idea to label the sugar, salt, tea, and coffee containers but not your car.

As the content size grows “searchability” becomes challenging thus involves re-evaluating your current, site structure, templates, Record and document management framework, taxonomy.

Governance:

Understand the current environment constraints and leverage SharePoint capabilities to meet your audit, compliance, legal, data retention requirements by planning effective Security and Governance policies.

SharePoint is permission driven and it’s through the right permission distribution and restricted access you can ensure that your environment doesn’t become a mess, for instance, should all your users be allowed to create additional sites, or security groups or edit site pages etc.,

Similar is the case with your house, where you don’t allow your 4-year-old access to liquor cabinet or take measure to restrict access certain sites on internet.

Good governance and good parenting are quite similar

Adoption and Training:

With change comes resistance. Every organization has a few segments who have their own comfort zone and not easy to think of a change, even if it means a better and more productive work life. Leaving them off our hook is not going to solve the problem as the legacy will always hit back on us, sooner or later. So, the key is to plan ahead for them and win their trust, create special training and showcase how new things can simplify and not disrupt their work.

RCA and address those specific potential problematic areas, the importance of user training cannot be undermined, educating power users how the new platform works, the extra set of features it offers alongside preserving the branding/design of the existing platform. Having an effective training to help users accept and adapt, would be the most important success factor.

It’s like telling your kids that they still get keep all their toys plus also have access to pool area and park to play in.

As experienced SharePoint consultants, we understand that migration goes far beyond a mere transfer of features and content. We consider migration as a new opportunity for organizations to improve their SharePoint implementation substantially, thus foster their business processes, employees’ productivity, and overall performance.

No two places are the same and similarly no two SP migrations, both require a careful planning, coordination and fair amount of time, and take a little while to get used too and adapt to new and better changes.