Success factor of any SharePoint migration depends on the satisfaction levels of owners and users with respect to the new environment and its structure.
Most of the migration process fails as technical teams are unable to deliver the required content in the desired format. The complexity of this scenario made us have a deep look into it and search for its cause and their respective solutions. One of the major causes which we came across was Content Cleanup.
A Quick Glance into the SharePoint migration cleanup
A healthy SharePoint environment content adds to the overall business growth, however, any random, irrelevant, unwanted content may cause additional investment in terms of budget, resources and time. Henceforth, prior to planning for SharePoint Upgrade or Migration, do plan for your SharePoint data/ content clean-up.
SharePoint migration cleanup at times becomes messy and needs some advance preparations in multiple phases of Migration. Starting with the creation of a good governance plan for the new SharePoint environment, data clean-up is important in both pre-migration and post-migration governance plan. As content clean-up is a huge task, it is always advisable to involve all stakeholders and assign given the set of rules and governing policies to them about the Content classification – Large files, Useless files, Critical files, and older files.
Tagging each content file appropriately and establishing the versioning limits follows the next step named as Content Tagging post-classification. This step will allow the SharePoint Migration team to identify lists with additional version counts and useless content which is occupying storage and consuming performance. These two steps play an important role in data clean up during the pre-migration phase.
Precautionary Steps
While Pre-Migration Clean-up is progressing, it is wise to keep Business owners or any Site owners informed about the process and content purging criteria. This will avoid any unnecessary risks associated with data. In addition, Administrators can create a backup repository for all the content files which are meant for future reference or access, and move them safely, once post content tagging and classification are done. This improves SharePoint migration performance and at the same time reduce the risk of Data loss.
SharePoint cleanup checklist
Some quick Content Clean-up area to work upon:
- Storage quota check – Remove unwanted, unstructured and useless files & documents
- Monitoring Space consumption – Preparing a matrix of resources along with the space occupied by them which will help you in restructuring your new architecture
- Fine-tuning of SharePoint Enterprise Search – Checking Crawls logs about error and performance can help you save some space and provide you a pattern of search usage
- Implement real-time archiving of files and projects including all (hidden) meta information.
- Transfer Large, unused data from SQL Server content databases to other repositories prior to migration
Prioritizing your content clean up in SharePoint Migration enhances performance and helps you in achieving maximum productivity. Take care of the SharePoint Cleanup Best Practices for the best results as well.
