File Shares: SharePoint’s Ugly Distant Cousin

One of the primary reasons you moved to SharePoint was to consolidate your content under one roof, right? You were sold on the vision of a unified platform: better organized content, improved discoverability, clear lines of authorship, permission trimmed accessibility, and all of those other end user and IT Pro features. But by far, the ability for distributed content management was one of the strongest value propositions for SharePoint. And yet your group has delayed your file share migrations again. As a result, you’re maintaining two separate, parallel systems.

In my latest post on the Axceler blog, I discuss the file share conundrum. As you begin to shape your SharePoint strategy and review your current environment, what are your file share plans? Is your plan to move them as-is and decommission your old systems, or do you first need to factor in a larger plan to clean them up? Are your users driving this process, or is it largely an administrative effort? Have you considered the need to apply metadata as part of this migration so that all of this content folds into your (as yet) defined taxonomy?

This is one of the defined steps outlined in my free whitepaper ‘11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration,’ and a critical component of your overall SharePoint migration strategy. Check out the blog for some planning steps and considerations.

And if you’re interested, check out the echo FileLoader on our website, or join our free file share migration webinar on December 15th, 2010 at 10am EST, and see the echo FileLoader in action! (The session will likely be recorded and made available on-demand)