End Users, SharePoint, and Migration Planning

What seems like common sense to some is often a revelation to many. The goal of any best practices presentation is to add upon what you already know, augmenting and improving the tools already in your toolset. And that was the goal for my webcast this afternoon with Axceler partner Grace-Hunt – to help SharePoint administrators and others who play a role in preparing to migrate to SharePoint 2010 understand where and when to involve their end users in their migration planning. (Thanks to @gvaro for the opportunity!)

The gist of the presentation is simple enough: involving end users early and often will dramatically increase the success rate of any SharePoint migration / deployment project. Why? Because the people who use the system want to have a voice in how it is shaped. And, more importantly, they need to understand why certain decisions (such as NOT turning on some of the new features or services in SharePoint 2010) are being made.

Plus, I always like to remind audiences that the people who use the system, and create and manage all of the documentation within in, are generally the right people to make decisions about how to migrate that content. Crazy talk, I know.

I’ve added my presentation to SlideShare (removing my “special sauce” slides for my live presentations) and you can view it here:

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.