But in this blog, we pull together our planning top tips honed over fourteen years of successfully migrating customers to SharePoint, to highlight how to plan, the pitfalls to watch out for and why it’s sometimes worth slowing down at the beginning to accelerate out the other side of your migration. Ultimately to ensure your migration to SharePoint is a success first time.
1. Stop, collaborate and listen
Your implementation team and the top brass know what you want to achieve with migration to SharePoint, but what about the people who will be using it every day? The planning stage is a great time to involve your employees and get their feedback on your old system and what they would like to see in your new SharePoint platform. Also, by engaging them in the process they are more likely to embrace the new platform and ways of working when it comes to implementation.
This is also a good time to review your business processes. Reduce bureaucracy and duplication. Is it done that way because it’s the best way or it has always been done like that?
2. Become a SharePoint guru
Think you know SharePoint well enough to start your migration? Are you ready for the onslaught of questions and decisions that will inevitably follow your SharePoint adoption?
Are you going to use folders or metadata? What about SharePoint groups or Active Directory? Should you give permissions to an individual user? Know the difference between OneDrive and OneDrive for Business?
If you don’t already have answers to all of the above plus the myriad more questions you will encounter it’s time to do some vigorous googling or book a free consultation with one of our SharePoint experts.
3. Think about governance from the get-go
If governance is built into the design and process plan from the beginning it will be more simply adopted and followed. The more afterthought add-ons and complications the more likely it is to be worked around or forgotten by your end-users.
4. Plan for scale, even if you don’t know where you’re scaling too
SharePoint is a juggernaut. It can be a hugely powerful productive platform, but it can also quickly run away from you if underestimated.
This doesn’t mean you can’t start small, but you always need to have an eye on the future impact and scalability of your decisions. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not going to go anywhere.
5. Don’t customize everything
You’re probably not as unique as you think. And that’s a good thing. Why waste your and your developer's time creating new custom web parts when you can use existing out-the-box SharePoint solutions. That said your SharePoint platform will still be tailored to your business and built in a way that suits your processes and workflow, but you will save time and simplify future updates and upgrades.
6. Use a SharePoint migration expert partner, like Proventeq!
No, we haven’t forgotten how to count. But this is our bonus top tip. To truly speed up your migration to SharePoint use Proventeq’s Migration-as-a-Service and take advantage of our SharePoint migration expertise and industry-leading tool, Migration Accelerator. Take the stress out of migration as well as reducing costs, enriching your content with in-depth analytics and ensuring 100% accuracy. Find out more and book a free consultation with our experts today.
