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Best practices of on-premises to SharePoint Online migration
Written By
Aarti Chauhan
Published On
February 21, 2024
Read time: 4 minutes
Organizations are now moving to SharePoint Online, which provides additional features to the older edition, such as Power Suite. SharePoint Online is a modern tool that’s making team collaboration easy. With this Microsoft platform, it’s easy to manage documents, files, and sites and work together in real time. There are countless reasons explaining why organizations are migrating to SharePoint Online, some of which are mentioned below.
When an organization plans to migrate, there’s a lot on the plate to manage. They must manage a massive database and configurations to move. There are high risks of encountering SharePoint migration failure, but the key to a smooth and streamlined migration is communication and training. Let your people know about the change beforehand and guide them on how they can learn to navigate through it.
This write-up provides you with some of the best practices for migration from on-premises to SharePoint Online. Let us learn about these and some SharePoint migration tools (SPMT) with which you can migrate seamlessly.
Whether it’s migration, recovery, or any other task, planning is the key to attaining a smooth transition. Arrange all the necessary resources, plan what you need to migrate, and out of multiple methods available, find out which migration method you’re looking forward to. Try finding out what you need to move ahead with and what you want to dispose of.
Doing this helps in relieving the load on the platform during migration, and in the end, you’ll have data that is completely useful for your organization. Also, take note of all the customizations in your current on-premises legacy. It can include dashboards, logos, fonts, colors, surveys, web parts, and others.
If you don’t understand what customizations are working, turn the features off for some time. If your team members inform you regarding the inefficiency of any of the features, turn them back on and make notes to move during migration.
Organizing the data to eliminate cluttering and labeling properly will ensure smooth migration. Don’t forget to assign the required permissions for smooth migration. Get rid of any unnecessary or outdated data lying within the database of the SharePoint. To achieve this, first understand the on-premises system your organization is using at present and understand the benefits the upgraded version offers.
Work with the site owners to register the different business use cases and all the components they employ. Restructure the components (if needed) based on the features offered by SharePoint Online.
Pilot migration or test migration involves running a small batch of data for the migration from on-premises SharePoint to SharePoint Online. This will be efficient in analyzing if there’s any possibility of encountering errors during the migration of the entire system.
Once you perform pilot migration, you know what errors can occur. Resolve them and then execute the migration of SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online. You can attain this by manual migration, PowerShell script, SPMT, or with the help of any third-party migration tool.
Regular monitoring of the system is fundamental to evaluating the migration performance and avoiding the possibility of bottlenecks. Being preemptive during migration helps provide easy access to the users’ post-migration and ensures data integrity. It is also helpful to troubleshoot the errors (if any) arriving during the migration in a timely manner.
After the migration process, it’s time to say goodbye to your old on-premises system. But before doing that, check that the new system is working as required. Try recovering any license costs, if possible, and then you’ll be able to work on your new system just like earlier but with better functionalities.
If you’re planning to migrate SharePoint Server 2010, 2013, and 2016 to the SharePoint Online environment, use SPMT to migrate your SharePoint on-premises document libraries, lists, or regular file shares.
PowerShell cmdlets driven by the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) migration engine are also helpful in migrating files to Microsoft 365.
Kernel Migration for SharePoint is a great tool to migrate to SharePoint Online. It needs a few of your Microsoft 365 tenant details and you’re good to go. With this tool, you can migrate SharePoint as well as OneDrive, Google Drive, MS Teams, and public folders. SharePoint migration provides a user-friendly and cost-effective solution to all your cloud migration needs.
These are the practices you can follow to migrate your on-premises SharePoint legacy to SharePoint Online. However, if this seems a bit complicated to you, there are always handy tools to do that more easily. Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool and Kernel Migration for SharePoint make it much easier for organizations to transfer their sites entirely to the cloud.
