Migration from an older version to a new one will definitely have new features added in the newer versions. Office 365 has now become a lot more appealing than SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 with some great features. Also, the SharePoint 2010 version is very popular among organizations due to its radical features and remarkable integration capabilities. To make this migration from SharePoint 2010 and 2013 to Office 365 as continuous as possible it is better to create a migration road-map, a governance plan, and an information architecture. This Microsoft SharePoint 2010, 2013 migration will absolutely bring a set of features for you; in terms of efficiency, services and cost. This will help transfer the apt data to the right place. Before making these plans it is also better to consider what features you might be losing from the existing version of gaining with Office 365.
A Migration Plan
It is a good idea to map out the process of migration by building a road-map. This gives a complete overview of the project and the goals. Decide earlier what data is to be migrated, rebuilt or upgraded. choose the best migration style that best suits your organizations. There may be various third-party solutions to create a road-map with, or you can even use SharePoint to create it. The aim is to simply list all the affected sites and choose if they will be migrated or removed.
A SharePoint Governance Plan
This sets out the rules that aid the use, maintenance, and operation of the application. With the enterprise wiki in SharePoint, you can link pages and tag each page with a Wiki that identifies "topic pages". The governance plan should state what the SharePoint environments you will be using with a description of what they should contain.
Information architecture
The information architecture helps you in identifying what can be grouped together and how it will need to exist in SharePoint. Migration is a good time to reconstruct and consolidate your information architecture. Make sure that you cover the content types, site columns, site document libraries etc.
SharePoint feature assessment
Although you are migrating from one of the SharePoint version to another, they are not the same. However, you can subscribe to multiple Office 365 migration plans each carrying a different set of features for SharePoint online. Therefore it is imperative to check if the features you are using in your Office 365 plan.
Microsoft has very detailed comparison charts of SharePoint features availability across:
--Office 365 plans
--SharePoint online standalone plans
--On-premise solution
Also Read: Harness the Power of SharePoint
Office 365 has been an ideal solution for businesses to cut down the cost of the infrastructure related to collaboration. With Office 365, enterprises can have their own Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online managed by Microsoft and other O365 features like MS Team, Yammer, OneDrive for Business etc. SharePoint 2010 is utilized by various enterprises and a majority of these associations are upgrading to a much more powerful SharePoint Online. Planning for SharePoint migration is the most critical element in SharePoint Migration. An effective migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online Office 365 requires complete planning and analysis.
Requirements
You should have an Office 365 membership with a site collection that you might want to move your content to. Likewise, you should:
- Build an Azure Storage resource.
- You should install the SharePoint Online Management Shell rendition 16.0.4017.1200 or above. However, that in itself has some requirements. You should also install SharePoint PowerShell 3.0 prior to Online Management Shell.
- The new Migration API will move your metadata for both list and document libraries. In any case, the column does need to be made in the target list or library inside SharePoint Online, first with the same name and same data type. You can't create the column after the upgrade and expect them to show the values.
Let’s discuss on some of the few pitfalls, you need to consider during SharePoint Migration:
Migration Goals:
- Safeguard Version History, Created and Modified By (Authorship), and Modified Dates.
- Preserve existing features and look and feel (transparency).
- Refrain from URL changes as much as possible.
- Save Security and Permissions configuration to a possible extent.
What to know before the Upgrade
Migrating from SharePoint 2010 to Office 365 is a good scenario. There aren't many potential issues to keep an eye out for, however, there are things you should know.
- Update SharePoint 2010 with the latest service packs installed on your SharePoint 2010 farm.
- Document farm configuration settings in SharePoint server 2010
- Change the SharePoint 2010 web apps form the classic mode to claims
- Clean up the environment by deleting the unused site collection, removing unused features and deleting orphaned sites and users.
First of all, we need to take a look at what you will use for our identity store. The SharePoint 2010 On-Premises that you have is currently utilizing your Active Directory to see clients and groups and also for authentication. So before initiating a SharePoint upgrade, you need to make sense of what you will do with this.
Also Read: The New Features of Office 365 that Makes Your Workplace Creative
Realize what you have and inventory SharePoint
You can’t migrate every functionality from SharePoint 2010 to Office 365 SharePoint online, but if you don't understand what you have or where they are in your environment, then it is useless. Your SharePoint inventory is vital for this upgrade, you should always keep a detailed inventory of SharePoint to enable you to better manage it in the future.
There are a couple of approaches to inventory SharePoint:
Third-party Tools:
If there is a requirement for anything in SharePoint, you don’t need to bother much, as there is a large community to clear every issue you come across in SharePoint. There is multiple 3rd party migration tool to make the migration process easy. As a first step after the initial analysis, We- Aufait will identify the right tool which will be the best suit and cost-effective tool for migration.
Power-Shell:
Power-Shell is extremely effective and can do your inventory for free. The drawback is that you have to know how to legitimately use Power-Shell. You can make use of Power-Shell to start building your inventory and obviously work your charm to make the Power-Shell give you precisely the data that you require.
Making the switch and Migrating from SharePoint 2010 to Office 365
It doesn't need to be an overnight thing; SharePoint has a favorable position of being a web platform. SharePoint is full of hyperlinks and you can create your own. It means that even if one is SharePoint 2010 On-Premises and the other Office 365 with SharePoint 2013 the user won't know and doesn’t care.
Fortunately, the migration from SharePoint 2010 isn't a hard one as far as technical features are considered. What you have to look out for, other than in the list specified in the URL earlier are things like Customization through code, Workflows and Content Editor Web Parts that have content they weren't intended to. Normally HTML, CSS and JavaScript can be found and it basically does not play well after the migration. Another important thing to mention is that the design you developed in SharePoint 2010 is a bit difficult to be migrated to Office 365. However, with our previous migration experience, we can assure you a successful migration of SharePoint 2010 to Office 365.
Also Read: What Can SharePoint Do For Your Business?
In short, for the question, how do I migrate from SharePoint 2010 to office 365, migrating three times is not the answer. You can also directly migrate from SharePoint 2010 to Office 365 or from any on-premise version of SharePoint, but take care, there are mistakes to stay away from. Whether you are a business owner looking to know what pieces of your SharePoint site to move or a SharePoint administrator looking forward to migrating from SharePoint 2010 to Office 365, we are ready to discuss the key elements you need to plan, execute and manage your migration to succeed.
Even though you’re migrating from a version of SharePoint to another, they aren’t really the same. Now let's consider some approaches while migrating from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365.
Aspects to Consider while Migrating from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365
1. Why are you actually Migrating
First of all, identify the reasons for your migration to Office 365 and what you would like to accomplish from this migration. This may appear like a simple procedure, but defining your objectives during the initial stages of migration will help you focus on the rest of the migration. Objectives you want to define could improve the information architecture.
2. Play out an Inventory Audit
After identifying the reasons behind SharePoint 2013 to office 365 migration,” you should analyze the infrastructure of the organization. find the aggregate size of your content database, as this figure influences the duration of the migration process.
Next step is to identify various segments of your content. For instance, would you prefer SharePoint to save image files, CAD documents and other formats of files? It is really important to understand what you are working with as some formats are hard and consume time in transferring than others. Moreover, you have to redo the customization that you have already applied to your current SharePoint solution since they cannot be migrated.
It is a typical misconception that a migration will fix all the current issues. While that would be advantageous, but unfortunately, it isn’t. Migration of any broken components from your current SharePoint solution to Office 365 won’t make them work again; rather, you’ll have to fix them before or after the migration. So take your time to distinguish the parts of your current SharePoint service that isn’t working prior to the migration process.
3. Analyze What Your Office 365 Solution Will Look Like
Once you realize what you are really going after, it’s time to take a seat and design your new Office 365 solution. Apart from considering the technical infrastructure, you will also need to consider the user experience.
Migrating to a new platform dependably changes the UI somehow, so it would be better if you could address the issues of the current system and rectify it accordingly.
Also Read: SharePoint Overview for Dummies
4. Create Your Solution
Set up your new Office 365 solution, once you have the design in hand. but, don’t launch it. All you have to do is to map the existing SharePoint content to its new environment. (That way you know where all your content is saved.
5. Plan Your Migration
Before going live with the Office 365 environment, you will have to decide how you will move the content over from the old system. The most ideal approach to migrate content from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 is to utilize a third party SharePoint migration tool. Attempting to migrate SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 all by yourself may end up in losing your data and will take quite a while.
6. Test Your Migration
Once you are done with the content migration of your Office 365 solution, test your migration plan by running it on a little subset of your content to find the content transfer rate. This rate decides to what extent the migration will take.
7. Migration and Decommissioning
Finally, it’s time to pull the trigger and move your content. Decommissioning your old system ensures employees to work under the latest system – an advance toward effective user adoption.
Microsoft demonstrated this with a detailed article which offers all the features in a Comparison Chart of SharePoint 2013, for both On-Premises, Online and Office 365.
Also Read: Top 10 Benefits of SharePoint Online
Different Scenarios of Migration from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365
In here, we will discuss different approaches for migrating to Office 365 from SharePoint 2013.
1. Manual Migration
The least practical way for migrating SharePoint 2013 to Office 365. The process is fairly simple where you can move all the files using the explorer view in SharePoint. However, you will lose the metadata of the author and the date it was created. These will be replaced with the name of the person responsible for copying.
This isn’t recommended since no one will be interested to see their files owned by another individual along with the same date and time.
2. Utilizing the Office 365 Migration API
The Office 365 Migration API is the latest approach for migration since it increases the speed of migration by using Azure.
Basically, you move your content into a migration bundle that is sent to Azure Storage. They’ll take that bundle and place the content in your Office 365 environment, as per your bundle settings.
This is a solution developed by Microsoft to make SharePoint migration simple; nonetheless, it’s comparatively hard to set up and is only applicable for migrating content.
3 .Migration with Microsoft FastTrack
Microsoft offers a free data migration service that can guide admin with the migration. But this service is only accessible for Office 365 users with more than 150 users.
Also Read: A Complete Guide on Lotus Notes to Office 365 Migration
If you want to migrate from any version of SharePoint, be it SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2016 to Office 365, following these steps will help you have the capacity to proactively deal with difficulties or issues that may derail your SharePoint On-premise to cloud migration, however, you’ll own an Office 365 environment that better address the flaws of your association and offers an intuitive client experience.
Aufait is a SharePoint development company providing SharePoint consulting and development services for a decade. Aufait takes up SharePoint migration services from any version of SharePoint to give your solutions a new life to support the working environment in your organization. Our team handles migrations from SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 etc to various latest platforms with the deep technical knowledge of SharePoint on-premises and in the cloud and in addition helps the organization change their SharePoint deployment model and adopt Office 365 or SharePoint online.