Migrations Are Not Drag-and-Drop

Migration is a roadblock to moving forward with your SharePoint strategy. You’ve seen the new features in the latest version, but know that an upgrade will include a major clean up effort, an untangling of customizations and third party tool, and who knows what else. In short, there is nothing out-of-the-box about your SharePoint deployment, so drag-and-drop migration is, at best, unrealistic.

Search the web and you’ll find plenty of content that seems helpful at first glance, but leaves you wanting. They tell you to backup your hardware. Check. Run the out-of-the-box analyzer. Check. Prepare your users. Check. But what these articles fail to provide is any kind of practical guidance.

The truth is, migrations are phased, iterative, error prone, and not your ultimate goal:

Migrations are phased. How and what you migrate should not be determined by the technology you use – it’s about matching the needs and timing of your content owners and teams. A migration should be flexible, helping you to move sites and content organically based on those end user needs, not the limitations of the technology.

Migrations are iterative. Your planning should not be limited by the number of migration attempts you make, or by the volume of content being moved. A healthy migration recognizes the need to test the waters, to move sites, content and customizations in waves, allowing users to test and provide feedback.

Migrations are error prone. Drag-and-drop SharePoint migration does not exist in the real world. Maybe for plain vanilla sites without any degree of customization, but these sites are few and far between. There is no “easy” button for migration.

Migrations are not the goal, but proper planning and change management policies will help you to be successful with your current and future migrations. The goals should be a stable environment, relevant metadata, discoverable content, and happy end users.

The echoTechnology team understands the nature of SharePoint migrations and the ongoing change management needs of your business, and has developed a platform that fits within the ebb and flow of your migration lifecycles. The echo for SharePoint platform provides a powerful suite of managers to do your heavy lifting, and is flexible enough to meet your ongoing change management needs.

To find out more about echo for SharePoint, click here