There are a lot of good blog posts out there which describe the things you should consider while migrating your SharePoint on-premise sites to Office 365-SharePoint online. What you will learn is that the most important step in any SharePoint migration is the planning; and yes, it is!
For planning SharePoint migration, you need a lot of information about your source environment so that the planning and execution of the migration can be as smooth as possible. From my experiences of SharePoint online migrations, I’ll try to jot down some notes which might be useful in planning migration and help you prepare for the dependencies before the actual migration starts.
Generate source inventory reports
Most of the migration tools in the market provide a separate tool or utility that can generate inventory reports and provide you an insight into the source SharePoint environment. If you are not using a migration tool (which is pretty rare) or find that the reports generated by the tools are not in a format you want, you can always write custom PowerShell scripts to export reports with the details you want. A few of these tools are not free and that can also be a deciding factor to write your own scripts. I have found CSV reports to be very handy because it enables you to sort, filter, categorize and present data very easily which is very important in planning phase of the migration.
Here is some of the information you would want from your source SharePoint environment inventory reports to plan the migration,
- Size of the site collections
This is probably the most important piece of data you want from the source enviornment for planning. This tells you approximately how much content you are going to migrate to Office 365 and helps in planning and sequencing the migration of site collections and define a schedule. - Number of subsites in each site collection
There is a boundry or a ‘recommended’ boundry to the number of subsites you can create in a site collection in SharePoint online. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/SharePoint-Online-software-boundaries-and-limits-8f34ff47-b749-408b-abc0-b605e1f6d498
If you are exceeding that limit, you may want to consider restructuring the subsites in different site collections, - List item count/Large lists
Sites with large lists may take more time to migrate. Knowing the list item counts in the source lists and libraries will help you plan/sequence the migration of sites. - Item versions
In SharePoint environment without any governance setup, you may come across items that have many versions. I have seen documents with 2500+ versions with each more than 1 MB in size. Now that is a lot of data, some of which might be unecessary.
During the planning phase, extract information about such documents having more than ‘X’ number of versions so that these can be cleaned up in the source site itself and then migrated to SharePoint online. - Site last modified
There may be sites in your source environment which have not been modified for years. If the source is a SharePoint 2007 environment, there is a possibility that a few sites may not have been modified for more than 5-6 years. Having information about such sites can help you get in coversation with the business users and decide if these sites must be archived and not migrated to the SharePoint online environment.
Refer : https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spweb.lastitemmodifieddate.aspx - In-use custom features
If some custom features are activated on site collections/subsites, there might be some custom functionality (fields, content types, webparts etc) in use in that site. You should know about such sites to plan the remediation/re-development of such custom functionalities in SharePoint online or atleast to anticipate what are the possible issues in the target migrated sites. - Lookup columns
Most of the migration tools handle look up columns pretty well but it is good to know the list of lookup columns in a site so that these can be tested thoroughly post-migration.
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