5 Steps to a Successful SharePoint Migration

SharePoint migrations can be complex projects that require effective planning and implementation to minimize downtime and ensure success. If your organization is migrating to a newer release of SharePoint, moving to SharePoint Online, or reorganizing your existing content structure, a carefully planned strategy is essential.

Based on industry best practices and professional expertise, this report outlines five essential steps that can assist IT professionals in successfully navigating through SharePoint migrations with minimal downtime and speedy deployment.

Step 1: Define Your Migration Goals and Criteria of Success

Having a definition of what you mean by success with your migration is the beginning of any SharePoint migration project. If you don’t have clear objectives, your migration can become unnecessarily complicated and directionless.

Determine Your Migration Purpose

Before you begin technical work, you must determine the fundamental reason you’re migrating. Are you migrating to retire a legacy system to cut costs, take advantage of new SharePoint capabilities, or consolidate multiple systems? Determining your “why” creates value for your company and justification for the resources used. For instance, if migrating from another cloud provider will save your company $500,000, that’s a very clear business case with real monetary value.

Establish Specific Timelines

Open-ended migrations with indefinite completion times will persist indefinitely. Having a definite timeline will provide a feeling of urgency and will make it possible to properly assign resources. Your plan will have to have some key milestones and a completion date that will correspond to business requirements and technical deadlines, such as the date that legacy systems will be discontinued or license renewal windows for current platforms.

Define Measurable Success Criteria

“Business as usual” is not a good definition of success for a migration project. If you aim to maintain everything as it is, you would not have migrated at all. Instead, create tangible, measurable criteria that reflect the improvements you expect to achieve. These can be performance metrics, user adoption rates, or specific functional improvements that will exist after migrating.

Step 2: Take Inventory and Clean Your Environment

A successful migration requires a thorough knowledge of your current SharePoint configuration and smart decision-making around what to move.

Perform a Complete Audit

Begin with a complete inventory of your SharePoint content through a thorough audit of your current situation. The audit must include all sites, libraries, lists, workflows, customizations, and third-party connections. In-depth source analysis detects likely issues early and guides your plan to address them.

Utilize the RMR Strategy

When planning to move content, you can consider using the Remove, Migrate, and Rebuild (RMR) strategy. The RMR technique helps categorize content based on current value and future needs:

• Remove: Get rid of content that is redundant, out-of-date, or trivial (ROT) and does not have to be migrated. Such content includes unused websites, outdated documents, and content with no business value.
• Migrate: Determine what content is still relevant and needs to be migrated to the new platform.
• Rebuild: Some of the more complex pieces like customized solutions will have to be rebuilt rather than being migrated outright.

Clean up Before Migration

Cleaning your present environment before migrating reduces transfer time, reduces storage costs, and gives you a more efficient target environment. Remove duplicate, unused, or legacy content to make it easier to migrate and transfer content with value. Pre-migration cleanup is essential to avoiding digital clutter being migrated to your new environment.

Step 3: Design Your Information Architecture and User Mapping

Having a content organization and user management plan in place in your new SharePoint implementation is key to a successful transition.

Plan Your Information Structure

Before migrating, have a clear plan in place for your new SharePoint information architecture that will accommodate your business needs and user workflows. This involves planning your site structure, content organization, navigation, and metadata structure. A good information architecture will increase findability, user experience, and adoption of your new platform.

Map Users to Specific SharePoint Sites

User mapping is an essential element of migration if information is divided by user roles or groups. Use custom mapping to specific SharePoint Online sites using industry-standard methods like CSV mapping. This gives users appropriate access to corresponding content in their new location while maintaining security and compliance requirements.

Pre-provision User Accounts

One of the often-overlooked steps in migrating to Microsoft 365 is pre-provisioning user accounts in Microsoft 365 before migrating. Pre-provisioning accounts avoids conflicts during the migration and offers a smoother transition to users. It is particularly important in large-scale enterprises with complex user management requirements.

Step 4: Select the Right Migration Tools and Implementation Method

The success and efficiency of your migration will mostly depend on your chosen methods and tools.

Evaluate Migration Tool Options

Although free SharePoint migration software does exist, it usually has some constraints that will eventually cost you time and effort later. When choosing to use migration software, take into consideration:

• Quantity and complexity of content to be migrated
• Requirement of content transformation while migrating
• Automation requirements
• Reporting capabilities
• Support for incremental migrations

Utilize a Batched Migration Strategy

Segmenting users and content into smaller batches offers several advantages in case of mass migrations. When you move users in batches, you can lower risk, simplify validation, and resolve issues incrementally.

Testing Before Complete Implementation

Conduct pilot migrations with users and sample content before a full-scale migration. Testing helps identify issues early and ensures the new environment meets requirements.

Step 5: Carry Out, Communicate, and Validate

The final step is the actual implementation of migration, user communication, and thorough validation to have a smooth transition.

Include End Users at Every Stage

Engage key end users early in planning and throughout implementation. Having them involved will help identify key content, workflows, and user requirements that might otherwise be overlooked.

Convey Benefits and Changes

Successful adoption relies on effective communication. Develop a communications plan that includes:

• Notices of forthcoming changes
• Training resources and sessions
• Timeline of migration activities
• Instructions to access the new environment
• Channels for questions and support

Apply Comprehensive Validation

Post-migration validation ensures content integrity, correct permissions, and functional testing. Regular migration reports keep teams informed about progress and potential issues.

Establish Post-Migration Governance

Governance policies help maintain security, content lifecycle management, and ongoing optimization of the new SharePoint platform.

Conclusion

Successful SharePoint migration requires thorough planning, precise preparation, and intentional implementation. If you take these five important steps—defining clear goals, inventory and cleanup, information architecture design, selecting appropriate tools and techniques, and implementing with good communication and validation—organizations can reduce risks and downtime while accelerating deployment.

Remember that SharePoint migrations aren’t simply a matter of “lift and shift” — they represent an opportunity to refine content, improve information architecture, and enhance collaboration capabilities. If you do your planning and your SharePoint migration right, your migration can do more than shift where your content is located — it can alter how your organization uses it.

For businesses that need to move their SharePoint platform with minimal disruption, it’s all about the right expertise. At InterraIT, we have expertise in SharePoint Migrations with best-of-industry practices and current tools to make it effective and seamless. If you’re upgrading your SharePoint, migrating to SharePoint Online, or restructuring your content, we’ll help you through every step with a professional and experienced team.

Work with InterraIT to enjoy a hassle-free SharePoint migration experience. Contact us now to start.