Your new SharePoint environment is up and all set to for deployment.
You’ve chosen a tool for migrating all your content into the latest version and migrated your organization’s data to the latest version of SharePoint.
I’m sure, you know the kind of planning that goes into the entire process of migration.
It is very thorough and precise and that is how it should be, because, without a proper content migration plan, you may lose your data. After migrating, many people assume that they can resume their work in the new environment, with brand-new features and a lot of ease. What they fail to give attention is the post-migration process.
Content Migration Plan
We all know the different phases involved in SharePoint content migration. There is a pre-migration phase, which involves the precise planning and strategizing of your content so that it can be migrated without any complication. Then, there is migration phase, where the content is migrated from the source site to the destination site, based on the planning done in the pre-migration phase. Contrary to the popular opinion, migration process does not end with this phase.
[Tweet “Migrated Content is just as essential as strategizing your content before migration. #ContentMigration @saketadotcom”]
The next phase of the migration process is the post-migration check. It is understandable that people tend to ignore this phase as their content is already migrated successfully. So, why waste time on this phase? Yes, it is true that your content is migrated successfully but, validating your migrated content is just as essential as strategizing your content before migration.
Here are the phases of the migration process, post migration and why is it important to give them their due:
Customizations
This stage is where all the workflows, versioning settings, templates, unique permissions and other customizations at the source site are verified with the destination site. If both the sites are identical to each other, then move on to the next. If not, migrate the missing content again and verify it again.
Metadata verification
After verifying the customizations and ensuring that they’re migrated intact, the next phase is to check if all the metadata is also successfully migrated. Check the author names, number of items in each list and library at the source site and check the same at the destination site. Again, if they’re identical, proceed to the final stage of migration.
Final validation
You will notice that there are a lot of differences between the source site’s content and the destination site’s content. This is because the content is migrated between two different versions of SharePoint. For each version, there are many features added and deprecated. Features that are newly added are usually an upgrade to the previous features in their place and features that are deprecated are replaced by their better versions. When migrating the content, these features are selected individually, matched to the source site’s requirement or customization and then migrated. All the content that is migrated should be thoroughly verified at the destination site, ensuring that all the content is migrated successfully, without any errors, however, the minute they might be.
Now that you know the phases involved in post-migration, wouldn’t it be great if there is a tool developed exclusively for SharePoint and does all the work mentioned above for you?
The Saketa SharePoint Migrator is one such tool that is developed exclusively to migrate SharePoint content. The tool provides very detailed reports of pre-migration and post-migration which will help you in narrowing down the errors.
Start a 7-day free trial here.
