Planning Your Migration to Office 365
SharePoint seems to be going through somewhat of a resurgence of late. I suspect it is primarily because Microsoft sorted out some of their messaging around the future of the on-premises version of the platform, building confidence in the vast army of IT Pros and advocates of the technology that SharePoint will continue to be supported on prem into the foreseeable future. This isn’t taking anything away from SharePoint Online as part of the broader Office 365 platform, but just recognizing that many enterprises have decided to stick with on prem in whole or in part. Regardless of the future path selected, what is most certainly happening now is that organizations are contemplating an upgrade – and so migrations are back in the spotlight. Of course, they never stopped happening, but I think all of the migration vendors would agree that the rate of growth of migration tools slowed a bit over the past year, and now seems to be picking up again.
Which is one of the reasons why I chose to speak on migration at this week’s SPBiz Conference (www.spbizconf.com) which kicked off today, and runs through end of day tomorrow, with over 60 free sessions streaming online. I participated as a session chair for Rene Modery’s session today, and in addition to presenting in the morning, I’ll also chair Asif Rehmani’s session tomorrow. Here are the details on my session:
Planning Your Migration to SharePoint Online (#SPBiz60)
Thursday, June 18th at 9am PDT
Join the roomThe success of any migration hinges on the quality of your planning, plain and simple. No matter what the “experts” or vendors tell you, there is no such thing as a drag-and-drop migration. They are an iterative effort, requiring a thorough inventory of your current environment, input and approval from content owners and admins, and a detailed understanding of where, when, and how you will orchestrate the move. Now, to add a wrinkle – move yourself to the cloud. In this planning-centric session, we’ll walk through the nuances and hurdles of a migration from SharePoint on prem to the cloud, and give you a framework around which you can start building your own migration plans.
Why is this topic of interest to the attendees?
It’s always best to begin with a plan, and this session will provide a framework for developing your own migration plan. While tools will help automate some aspects of the content move, much of the complexity of a SharePoint migration happens before a tool is installed. This session will help analysts, project managers and admin of SharePoint to reduce migration time and increase success.
Session Objectives
- Provide a migration framework
- Outline asset inventory best practices
- Provide details around SharePoint Online thresholds and limitations
- Provide guidance on how to improve migration performance
Audience Level:
Intermediate
Target Audience:
Business Analysts, Project Managers, Administrators
For those who may be in the midst of their own migrations, or getting ready to kick off a migration project, I’d like to point you toward a great new blog by one of my new team members, Dorinda Reyes (@dorinda_reyes), who just wrapped up an almost 2-year project with Microsoft IT helping them with their (you guessed it) internal migrations to Office 365. Dorinda is building out a Center of Excellence around migrations as part of our GTconsult consulting services, and has great insights and experiences into what it takes to move sites from every version of the platform. She launched a new blog at www.dorindareyes.com and is beginning to outline and share aspects of her CoE model. For example, today she posted on conducting migration pre-work, which is a topic I mention several times in my SPBiz session, and which is the single-most-important aspect of your migration project. IN fact, I would argue that success will be determined by how much time you spend building your inventory of existing content, artifacts, and system attributes. I’m sure Dorinda would agree.
Hope you can all make my session in the morning. Yes, the session will be recorded, and yes, the slides will be made available on the resources tab, as well as over on SlideShare.net
Update: The recording will be available soon, but here are my final slides:
