Many times we feel overwhelmed at the mere thought of having to migrate with Microsoft Development firm. And when it comes to creating an Office 365 migration plan, the matter takes on an even more complex dimension, making it one of the hottest topics of discussion in the market right now. from the cloud.
But rest assured, this article is not intended to alarm you!
On the contrary, we believe that your migration to Office 365 is an exciting and extremely promising project, and we want to make sure that you start it off on the right foot. This article reviews some best practices that will help you craft your Office 365 migration plan in five key steps, each of which is essential for overall success.
Stage 1 of your Office 365 migration plan: detection and assessment
To realize the full potential that Office 365 and SharePoint Online hold for your organization, the discovery and assessment phase of your Office 365 migration plan will become the cornerstone of your migration success.
This phase gives you the opportunity to verify that the data you are migrating is indeed useful, is still in use, and can be hosted in the cloud. Your goal is to ensure that you only migrate cloud-enabled, mission-critical content to the new system.
You might be wondering why spend time and money on pre-detection before you even start planning and budgeting.
Here's the succinct answer: if you don't do a pre-assessment, you'll waste more time and money moving around unnecessary content.
Here's the long version: According to a recent study conducted by research and advisory firm Gartner , the firm's clients discovered while performing a pre-migration scan of their current deployment that 80% of their content was redundant. Gartner explains:
“On average, companies have deployed three versions of SharePoint on their premises in the 14 years since the product was launched. As migrations from one version of SharePoint to another progressed, they frequently implemented Microsoft's preferred approach of joining the database. While easy and efficient, this approach still pushes the issue of poor content quality and other organizational issues until the next release. »
Do you recognize yourself?
Now is a great time to take a close look at the outdated content in your environment and decide what to do with it: archive it or delete it completely. The information gathered will allow you to properly plan the SharePoint coexistence strategy, information architecture, mappings, and content filtering needed in the next phase.
Our advice for your Office 365 migration plan:
DON'T SKIP ON THIS STEP! If you realize that your content is redundant and does not need to be migrated, this will have a major impact on your budget, timeline, and strategic planning. It goes without saying that most of the information on which you have based your decisions about plans to migrate to Office 365 relates to the source content.
Step 2 of your Office 365 migration plan : strategic planning
Once you've taken inventory of all existing content and have a good overview of what to migrate, you can move on to project planning. During this phase of your Office 365 migration plan, you'll use the information gathered during discovery analysis to begin planning for the future of your business in the cloud.
To set the tone, let's start by discussing a normal expectation of IT experts cited in the Gartner report, "Best Practices Mitigate Data Migration Risks and Challenges." In 2019, more than 50% of data migration projects will go over budget and/or disrupt business operations in some way due to poor execution.
Implementing a new cloud-based SharePoint deployment without also putting in place the people, tools, processes, and technologies needed to maintain the technology will make your investment difficult and costly to manage going forward.
Also note that whichever solution you opt for, your company will need an internal migration team involved in the project from start to finish. The question is not whether the team will be involved or not, but what the extent of their responsibilities will be.
Our advice for your Office 365 migration plan:
When introducing a new IT system to a business, it is critical to understand the business requirements from which the IT requirements derive, and to ensure that the two align. To do this, it is necessary to engage in a dialogue with the various actors concerned within the company in order to access a global understanding of the strategies for using Office 365.
Why is this approach important? Migration involves significant development effort, and systematically migrating teams and departments using the existing collaboration environment means changing the way they work and changing the technology they use. This mission must be carried out without interrupting the daily tasks carried out by the users.
Step 3 of your Office 365 migration plan : pilot migration
This phase of your Office 365 migration plan gives you the opportunity to:
Migrate a small part of the content and control the results
Make any changes based on the result of the pilot migration
Carry out rapid tests of the plans and maps created during the planning and evaluation phases
You can also get an idea of the predictable performance throughout the migration and make any adjustments required to optimize the migration.
The pilot migration is not only used to perform the content migration, but also to test permissions and access, to ensure that the migration was successful, to identify and address any errors, to document the results and to compile migration statistics. It also provides you with the opportunity to optimize migration activities and should include testing for restoring the previous system.
Our advice for your Office 365 migration plan:
Engage enterprise users in your pilot migration. Organizations in which subject matter experts do not engage and provide data quality feedback during migration risk poor quality results, high user resistance to applications and processes put in place and see their activities disrupted.
Step 4 of your Office 365 migration plan : migration
You have reached the actual migration phase, the one where you have to do the heavy lifting.
If you haven't chosen the right migration method and are looking for additional information on how to execute your Office 365 migration plan, you've come to the wrong place!
Our advice for your Office 365 migration plan:
If you're going to run the entire Office 365 migration plan with your own team, or plan to use Microsoft FastTrack without third-party services, we strongly recommend that you evaluate different suitable migration software. to facilitate the work of your migration team. You owe it to yourself, your team, and your organization to formally evaluate several migration software solutions available on the market to choose the one that best suits your particular business needs!
Stage 5 of your Office 365 migration plan: validation and remediation
Once the migration itself is complete and you have recovered from your emotions, it is time to tackle the final phase of the Office 365 migration plan. You can now move on to managing all changed or adjusted items during migration and finalize destination content based on your information governance plan. You can also deal with sustainability issues, including deciding what to do with the old environment and how to assess and manage future content growth with Al Rafay Consulting Chicago.
To learn more about what to expect after migration and why the transition is a critical phase of any Office 365 migration plan, check out the recent article where we outline four major strategies implemented with our customers to ensure a seamless deployment. clash of Office 365 and SharePoint Online.
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