SharePoint Migration Consulting
Organizations typically find that the effort associated with a migration to be much larger than expected. Further driving complexity into this process is the shear amount of custom functionality that has been developed over years in on-premises SharePoint farms. If you are considering a migration to the cloud, much of that custom functionality will require refactoring.
Tools to help with migration
With a wide variety of migration types, we offer a wide variety of methods for your migration. We can accomplish it with our own proprietary software – DocPipesTM – through the use of a third-party migration tools, or manually with no extra software needed. We have experience with the majority of third-party migration tools available on the market and also actively engage in partnerships with most of them. This means that we can utilize whichever method works best for you.
Migration Assessments
At the end of the day, having a comprehensive plan and assessment of your SharePoint farm is the first step towards a successful migration. As part of our consulting process we provide a highly detailed migration assessment that can help quantify your situation. Let our consultants work with your team to both objectively collect data about your farm, and also the higher level business goals you hope to accomplish through your migration.
SharePoint Migration Case Study
Background
An eight campus public research university, based in the Midwest, wanted to migrate their primary intranet from a SharePoint MOSS 2007 environment to SharePoint Online. Their SharePoint Moss 2007 environment hosted two different intranets and three web applications. The university’s goal was to optimize the SharePoint design by migrating to a newer SharePoint version and leveraging improved SharePoint search functionality available in the online version to increase productivity.
Solution
Total Solutions created a migration plan that included performing the migration across multiple stages to minimize downtime. The first stage consisted of a Pre-Assessment with a review of the existing server configuration and migration needs. This included the existing SharePoint farm environment and proposed hardware configuration of the new production environment. Following the provisioning of the new production SharePoint Online environment, we conducted a test migration, documenting all the data and configuration items creating a detailed technical production migration script to be followed during the final production migration. Upon completion of the test migration, we worked with University personnel to develop a user acceptance testing process to uncover any issues associated with the migration effort. After resolving any issues uncovered during the user acceptance testing, we conducted the final production migration. To avoid downtime, we conducted the migration during off business hours and, during that period of time, set the current SharePoint 2007 farm into read only to still allow access to documents. Following the migration, we conducted a final user acceptance testing period to check for issues and then completed a final cutover to SharePoint online.
Benefit
Following their migration to SharePoint online, the university is able to provide a consistent and reliable platform that decreased confusion and increased end user adoption for its workers. Additionally, the university wanted a more collaborative environment that cut across departments and campuses to allow for better coordination and communication.