Migrating to Microsoft 365 is one of the most sought after operations in your organization’s digital transformation journey. Therefore, Maintaining an M365 Migration Checklist can be quite useful.
Maintaining an M365 Migrating Checklist can prove to be a great aid while planning a SharePoint migration to ensure minimal risks of errors or data loss. While migration is simply the process of transferring data from an older version of SharePoint to Microsoft Office 365 or any other latest version, the reasons for migrating may greatly vary such as the End of Life of some old versions, maintenance difficulties in older versions, shift from on-prem to cloud and so on.
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Effective M365 (Office 365) Migration Checklist You Must Tick-Off
1. Be Requirement Focussed
Before migrating, it is good to know the answer of “WHY”. It is always wise to be clear enough of why you wish to migrate and the benefits you want to derive from it. Drafting a proper plan with regard to how, when, and where the data needs to be migrated. This will eliminate the scope of numerous difficulties that may emerge when the process starts. This can help you save a considerable amount of time and money.
2. Analyze Your Requirement
Since you’ve already decided to migrate, it is good to analyze your data and requirements and sort them accordingly. Investigate your existing data to identify the redundant or unused content so that it can be segregated or discarded during the migration process. This will save up a lot of space for your new tenant.
3. Set up a Practical Timeline
Building up over a logical and practically achievable migration schedule is a must. We must have an existing knowledge of how much time needs to be allocated for a particular migration. You cannot expect a 1000 GB data to be migrated in 10mins. Having a real idea will ensure that we don’t run into any emergencies during the course of the migration process. Stopping an ongoing migration process abruptly can be a great waste of time and effort and can be a reason for severe errors or data losses as well. Therefore, set up a practically viable timeline to ensure the process is smooth enough.
4. Do a Pre-Migration
Resolving the probable migration issues beforehand can save a lot of time and effort. It will also ensure minimal post-migration complications. Consider going for a pre-migration check so that you can access the errors that can crop up while the migration process is in progress. This in turn can help you ensure that the data can be successfully migrated without any difficulty.
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5. Formulate a Migration Strategy
Strategy and Planning is by far the most important aspect to achieve a successful migration experience. Research to formulate a proper strategy and just stick to it. Sort your data into different categories, discard the scrappable ones and migrate them systematically. Categorize your data in the order of your priority so that you can migrate the most important data first and the rest can follow later. The absence of a good strategy can result in a lot of confusion and chaos. Therefore, it must reserve a must-have status in your office 365 migration checklist.
6. Choose Your Migration Type
There are different kinds of templates in SharePoint and migrating SharePoint data along with those templates needs work. Organize your data and migrate accordingly. Choose Object migration if you want to migrate an entire site and choose Content migration if you want to drill down and migrate just the data not its template and so on. You can opt for Teams migration as well. Also, plan the kind of governance you are looking for in advance.
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Also, double-check the URLs of both, the source and the destination sites. If you are migrating from SharePoint On-prem to Microsoft 365 or File System to SharePoint or a Cloud service to SharePoint, ensure that their respective URLs are correct to establish a proper connection.
7. Establish Effective Communication
Each team using the existing platform must be well informed of the tentative migration schedule. If anyone is still working on the content that is up for migration and unknowingly the migration process starts, there will be a huge loss in terms of data, time, and effort as well as some possibility of errors as well. So, let your SharePoint users and the migration team be well-coordinated to avoid any such complications.
Our Advice: Opt for the Online Versions
It is not a great idea to migrate directly to the newest version of SharePoint like SharePoint 2016 from an old version like 2003 or 2010. This is because there are a lot of features that are deprecated in the latest version and mapping all the templates will be a tedious task.
While SharePoint on-prem has its own benefits and advantages, SharePoint Online or O365 will always be a great choice as it offers so many different features and templates, has greater security levels and the best part, can be accessed literally from anywhere in the world.
So…This was our M365 Migration Checklist that we believe will ensure a successful migration of your content while reducing unnecessary post-migration complications. Just choose the pointers that best suit your specific requirements to build up your personalized Microsoft 365 migration checklist and get going.
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