Brief
Most organizations are moving from the SharePoint on premise environment (2007/2010) to SharePoint online. This article will explain about the approach that we can follow for successful migrations of your contents as well custom applications.
Scope
The scope of this article is migrating contents from on premise SharePoint 2007/2010 and redevelopment of applications from server side components to client side developments.
Check Before Migration
Before you can start your migration do an inventory of your existing on premise environment. Make a list of what you have in the current SharePoint Environment:
- Site collections
- Sites
- List and libraries
- Pages
- Custom solutions
- Workflows
- Content types
- Site columns
- Permissions
- User alerts
- Retention policies
- Records
- Users and groups used
- Large lists or libraries
- Branding related content that you want to migrate
Sharegate is wonderful tool to get most of the details above. Also Sharegate will help you check the existing environment . From this pre-check analysis you will see the total size of existing farms and the number of possible issues which you can anticipate during migration.
During this stage you can think about information architecture changes, removing unwanted sites , preparing an action plan for orphan users etc.
Classic Vs Modern
When you are moving to SharePoint Online Microsoft gives two options here -- Cassic and Modern. It will be an important decision whether you want to go with Classic or Modern. Both of them have their own pros and cons, and it will depend on what your business is looking for.
As Microsoft is moving towards open source development and lots of wonderful features are in modern sites, I would suggest you go with modern sites.
How to Handle Custom Apps
List out all the applications which are using server side code and SharePoint Designer workflow 2010.
If you are planning to move to a Classic site you can convert your applications on the client side. You can opt for a responsive approach as well as using a Bootstrap framework but it will be more work.
If you are planning to go with the Modern site then you have to redevelop all the applications into SharePoint Framework.
For SharePoint designer workflow you can go ahead with direct migrations because SharePoint Online supports the 2010 workflow. If you would like redevelop your designer workflow in MS Flow that might be the best approach here.
If you want to go with the same information architecture then you can copy your existing Structure of Sites and Libraries to the new SharePoint Online Site.
During the copying of the structure you can map orphan users, templates, permissions etc. which is very easy in Sharegate.
Once the structure is ready then you can copy content from sites and Libraries. The last part is to remediate any major errors raised by Sharegate.
If you want to go with a different information architecture then you must create the structure that you want on SharePoint Online and follow the same steps as above.
Post Migrations
Once your content migration is completed you need make sure the below details are in place.
- Verify that Sites and Subsites are properly migrated
- Permissions of all users are in place.
- Document/record count is matching destinations lists.
- All custom applications are working correctly.
- Mark your on premise site collection read-only so that users will stop pushing content there.
Summary
Migration is an opportunity to decide about our existing information architecture, branding, and governance plan and think about redesigning our custom applications which you wanted to be provider and SharePoint hosted. Definitely moving to the cloud is a great experience considering the new features in SharePoint online ,and avoiding glitches for on-premise infrastructure, patching etc.
Happy Sharepointing!