As part of the Office 365 suite, SharePoint Online is available as Software-as-Service (SaaS) and helps organizations to reduce their Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and their Operational Expenditure (OPEX) costs related to servers, storage, and management overhead. To reap these cost benefits organizations are looking to move to SharePoint Online. However, moving to any cloud service required laying down successful migration path and getting proper guidance. In order to migrate their Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to an improved version – SharePoint Online (Office 365), it is essential to consider all the technical aspects and business drivers while designing and implementing their migration strategy.
In this regard, a cloud specialist or cloud consulting company should clearly understand their client’s existing environment by doing an in-depth assessment of the same. This helps long way in order to suggest a complete and actionable migration path to the client.
As assessment is the first critical step in the laying the migration path for cloud, let me share experience from one of the projects (SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online migration) where our Cloud adoption services team did complete profiling of the client’s environment with a framework based approach, and made recommendations to make their environment migration ready.
Our approach for this migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online included the a set of steps/phases that helped us to understand the actual SharePoint needs of a client and the complexity within their environment:
High level migration phases for migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online
1. Analysis and Planning: The main goal is to technically analyze the source, target systems, identify the customization level, sites and sub-parts which are to be migrated. A complete planning for migration activities has to be developed. For example which content areas can be migrated through automated process and if not then what should be the best manual method.
2. Define Migration approach: Define the strategy for validation and testing of migration scenarios. Perform test migration and finalize migration strategy for production environment. With pilot testing, analyze the issues and the solution applied for the test migration, and also capture the time consumed for the same.
3. Customization Scope: In this phase all the customization work is considered including taxonomy changes, new feature implementation, changes in existing structure and hierarchy.
4. Validation: Test and verify the migrated content, structure, and their mappings as per the targeted content. This also includes fixing of any issue regarding content, webpage links, integration point, structure, content mapping etc.
5. Post Migration Steps: After successful migration, there is some cleanup work, deploy custom code if required. Site navigation and verification of migration content needs to be addressed in this phase.
In the next part of this article, we will explore a couple of points about how to analyze the existing customer environment, and how the required data can be collected from customer with minimum iterations. Stay tuned…
