11 Strategic Considerations
for SharePoint Migrations
Christian Buckley
cbuck@axceler.com
@buckleyPLANET

My Background
Christian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler
• Most recently at Microsoft
• Microsoft Managed Services (now BPOS-Dedicated)
• Advertising Operations, ad platform API program
• Prior to Microsoft, was a senior consultant, working in the software, supply chain, and grid
technology spaces focusing on collaboration
• Co-founded and sold a collaboration software company to Rational Software. Also co-authored
3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking for Rational and IBM
• At another startup (E2open), helped design, build, and deploy a
SharePoint-like collaboration platform (Collaboration Manager), managing
deployment teams to onboard numerous high-tech manufacturing companies,
including Hitachi, Matsushita, Seagate, Nortel, Sony, and Cisco
• I live in a small town just east of Seattle, have a daughter in college and 3 boys at home

Axceler Overview
• Improving Collaboration for 16+ Years
– Mission: To enable enterprises to simplify, optimize, and
secure their collaborative platforms
– Delivered award-winning administration and migration
software since 1994
– Over 2,000 global customers
• Dramatically improve the management
of SharePoint
– Innovative products that improve security, scalability,
reliability, “deployability”
– Making IT more effective and efficient and lower the total
cost of ownership
• Focus on solving specific SharePoint problems
(Administration & Migration)
– Coach enterprises on SharePoint best practices
– Give administrators the most innovative tools available
– Anticipate customers’ needs
– Deliver best of breed offerings
– Stay in lock step with SharePoint development and market trends

Why is this presentation important?
• Most content focused on the technical aspects of migration
• Migrations are not so much about the technical act of moving
the data (although very important), but more about the planning
that goes into preparing for the migration
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Email 10/19/2011 Cell Twitter Blog 5

Despair.com
Email 10/19/2011 Cell Twitter Blog 6

This is your technical
migration, i.e. the
physical move of
content and “bits”
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cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

This is the bulk of your
migration – the planning,
reorganization, and
transformation of your
legacy SharePoint
environment
10/19/2011 8

What is migration?
• Microsoft defines migration as three separate activities:
Move Migrate Upgrade
• Use the procedures for • Use the procedures for • Use the procedures for
moving a farm or migrating a farm or upgrading a farm or
components when you components when you components when you
are changing to different are changing to a are changing to a
hardware. For example, different platform or different version of
use these procedures if operating system. For Office SharePoint Server
you move to computers example, use these 2007.
that have faster procedures if you
processors or larger hard change from Microsoft
disks. SQL Server 2005 to SQL
Server 2008.
• The reality is that a single migration may include
all three concepts

What is migration?

Why migrations are difficult:
Migrations Migrations Migrations are Migrations are
are phased are iterative error prone not the end goal
• How and what you • Your planning should not • There is no “easy” button • Proper planning and
migrate should not be be limited by the number for migration. You can run change management
determined by the of migration attempts you a dozen pre-migration policies will help you to be
technology you use – it’s make, or by the volume of checks and still run into successful with your
about matching the needs content being moved. A problems. Admins and end current and future
and timing of your content healthy migration users do things that are migrations. The goals
owners and teams. A recognizes the need to not “by the book.” should be a stable
migration should be test the waters, to move Customizations. Third environment, relevant
flexible, moving sites and sites, content and party tools. Line of metadata, discoverable
content based on end user customizations in waves, business applications that content, and happy end
needs, not the limitations allowing users to test and run under the radar. users.
of the technology. provide feedback.

What are the Microsoft options?

Email Cell Twitter Blog
cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

Email Cell Twitter Blog
cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

Email Cell Twitter Blog
cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

For more information
• Contact me at
– Christian Buckley, cbuck@axceler.com, 425-246-2823
– On Twitter at @buckleyplanet
• Resources available from Axceler.com
– White papers
• Mastering SharePoint Migration Planning
• The Insider’s Guide to Upgrading to SharePoint 2010
• What to Look for in a SharePoint Management Tool
• The Five Secrets to Controlling Your
SharePoint Environment
– Tools
• ReadyPoint (free)
• Davinci Migrator
• echo for SharePoint 2007

Email Cell Twitter Blog
cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

11 strategies you should
consider as part of your
migration planning
1. Understand the as-is and to-be environments
2. Conduct proper capacity planning
3. Understand the customizations on your source system
4. Understand the migration schedule
5. Plan for the right kind of migration
6. Plan for file shares
7. Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy
8. Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments
9. Stage your platform for migration
10. Decide where and when to involve the users
11. Determine that your migration is successful

Strategy #1:
Understand
as-is and to-be
environments
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Cell Twitter
Blog Blog

Strategy #1: Understand as-is
and to-be environments
A migration is an extensive business analyst activity
• Prior to any system redesign, understand your
environment
goals and purpose:
• What works
• What doesn’t work
• What are the organizational
“must have” requirements
• What are the “nice to
have” features
• Based on these requirements, you need to model out
the “to be” environment

The tendency is to jump to solutions
before you understand the problem

Strategy #1: Understand as-is
and to-be environments
• What is your goal?
• What is your mission statement
(Just kidding)
• What are you key use cases?
• What are your priorities?

Strategy #1: Understand as-is
and to-be environments
• Migration is about transforming
your existing system to meet
operational needs.
• It’s as much about retooling current sites and
content as it is about deploying new
technology
• Don’t just tear down and rebuild if there’s
something to be saved. Understand what you
have to work with, have a vision for what it
should look like, and move the pieces that
should be moved

Strategy #2:
Conduct proper
capacity planning
10/19/2011 24

Strategy #2: Conduct proper
capacity planning
• Understand your current environment:
• Number of users
• Number of sites
• Number of site collections
• Database size
• Geographical needs of your organization
(how many sites, what are their usage patterns)
• Line of business application integration

Strategy #2: Conduct proper
capacity planning
• Think about your future needs:
• User growth
• Estimates on site creation
• Estimates on database growth
• Security and Search needs

Strategy #2: Conduct proper
capacity planning
• Map out your:
• Hardware
• Topology
• Performance requirements
• Security requirements
• Scalability
• Disaster recovery
• Business continuity

Strategy #3:
Understand the
customizations on your
source system
10/19/2011 28

Strategy #3: Understand the
customizations on your source system
• Pre-Upgrade Check provides some of the analysis:
• Searches content sources and start addresses
• Outlines Office Server topology
• Identifies servers in the current farm
• Lists SharePoint version and list of components running in the farm
• Outlines supported upgrade types
• Provides Site Definition and Feature information
• Details language pack information
• Identifies Alternate Access Mappings that will need to be recreated
• Outlines Customized List Views (these will not be upgraded)
• Outlines Customized Field Types (these will not be upgraded)
• Identifies WSS Search topology
• Provides list of Content Databases and SQL server location
Joel Oleson, SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate

10/19/2011

Strategy #3: Understand the
customizations on your source system
• What kinds of customizations are on your source system?
• UI design
• Web parts
• Workflows
• Line of business applications
• 3rd party tools
• Custom features
• Site definitions
• Field types
• Custom SharePoint solutions
• Any changes to the file system on your SharePoint servers
• Pre-Upgrade Check provides some of the analysis
• How many of those customizations are
outside of the SharePoint framework?
• Are there any customizations which can
be replaced by out-of-the-box functionality?

Strategy #4:
Understand the
migration schedule
10/19/2011 32

Strategy #4:
Understand the migration schedule
• What are the business drivers, not just the
technology drivers?
• Cost
• Time
• Resources/People
• Do you have a defined project methodology?
• How long per phase, what is moved,
what are the priorities?
• The schedule should be defined only after you understand the future state, set
priorities, and get management buy-in.
• In short, what is the scope?

Strategy #5:
Plan for the right
10/19/2011
kind of migration 34

Strategy #5:
Plan for the right kind of migration
• Does the migration plan include content, sites, metadata,
and/or solutions?
• Each one brings with it a set of requirements and decisions
• What is the end goal? Is it a straight dump of everything, and
you’ll clean up later, or do you need to restructure?
• Is your strategy the same for various organizations, different
site collections, or farms?

Strategy #6:
Plan for
file shares
10/19/2011 36

Strategy #6:
Plan for file shares
• Most file shares have become a dumping ground.
• Is the plan to move
as-is and
decommission old
systems, or is this a
clean up process?
• Are users driving, or is it an administrative effort?
• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy?

Strategy #6:
Plan for file shares
• Understand what is
out there
• Who owns the content?
• Does it need to be moved?
• Does it need to be
indexed/searchable?
• Is the folder structure important?
• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?

Strategy #6:
Plan for file shares
• Users generally have three options:
• Move content, as-is, into SharePoint and clean up there
• Clean and organize content first, then move to a new structure in SharePoint
• Migrate content in waves, using the iterations to sort through and organize your content
while in transit, moving some content as-is, reorganizing and transforming others
• To be honest, option 3 is very difficult to manage in
SharePoint, but 3rd party tools do a great job here

Strategy #7:
Plan for
agging, metadata, an
d taxonomy
10/19/2011 40

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging,
metadata, and taxonomy
In Biology, taxonomy is the science dealing with the description, identification,
naming, and classification of organisms. “however, the term is now applied in a
wider, more general sense and now may refer to a classification of things, as well
as to the principles underlying such a classification.”
“Metadata provides context for data. Metadata is used to facilitate the
understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data. The metadata
required for effective data management varies with the type of data and context
of use.” Wikipedia.org

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging,
metadata, and taxonomy
Common Migraines
• Ad-hoc content migration leads to junk in portal
• Legacy content gets migrated slowly, if at all
• Inconsistent taxonomy across farms and site collections
• People author locally - multiplies problems globally
• Authors don’t apply metadata= “shotgun” approach to search OR Authors
apply metadata without common classification = better search, but worse
authoring experience
• Portal lacks high fidelity search
• User can’t find the right content
• As a result, poor portal adoption and low user satisfaction

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging,
metadata, and taxonomy
• What is your broader Managed
Metadata
strategy for tagging, Service
metadata and taxonomy?
• Map out your high level Term
taxonomy (web applications Stores
and site collections) and
schemas (Content Types)
Improved
• Understand the as-is and to- Governance
be, and how it relates to
your metadata

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging,
metadata, and taxonomy
• Map out your high level taxonomy (web applications and site
collections) and schemas (Content Types)
• Understand the as-is and to-be, and how it relates to your
metadata
• With Managed Metadata Service in 2010, it is critical that you
set up a governance model to guide this process, or it will
quickly get out of hand

Strategy #8:
Understand
centrally managed
and decentralized
environments
10/19/2011 45

Strategy #8: Understand centrally
managed and decentralized environments
CENTRALIZED DECENTRALIZED
• PROS • PROS
• Improves consistency • Requires no planning
• Reduces metadata duplication • Requires little upfront effort
• Easy to update • Works across site collections and portals
• Easy to support and train on • CONS
• Allows document-level • Decreases consistency
DIP, Workflow, Information Policies, and • Increases metadata duplication
document templates • Hard to update
• CONS • Hard to support and train on
• Requires planning • Only allows list-level Workflow, Information
• Requires upfront work Policies and document templates
• Hard to manage across site collections and • Difficult to reverse
portals

Strategy #8: Understand centrally
managed and decentralized environments
Do we lock
Do we deploy down team site
MySites? creation?
Do we implant
microchips in
their palms?
Common Topics around
Centralized /
Decentralized

Strategy #8: Understand centrally
managed and decentralized environments
• Use of services greatly improves concerns over the
decentralized model:
• Services can be centrally managed
• Sites and Site Collections can consume these services, within certain
boundaries
• You still need to understand the administrative impacts
• You need to clearly define roles and
service owners
• Define your governance model / change control board

Strategy #9:
Stage your
platform for
10/19/2011 migration 49

Strategy #9:
Stage your platform for migration
• Understanding your requirements:
• Hardware / software
• Network
• Virtual environments
• Hosting / datacenter
• Downtime / end user impacts
• Communication
• Location of your teams
• Backup/recovery
• Coordinate your planning with the operations team

Strategy #10: Decide
where and when to
involve users
10/19/2011 51

Strategy #10:
Decide where and when to involve users
• This is the most fluid of the
strategic considerations, as it
really just depends
• At a high-level, end users who
participate in the creation of a
system are more likely to
accept / support that system
once deployed

Strategy #10:
Decide where and when to involve users
• Where end users should be involved:
• Creation of use cases
• Creation of as-is documentation
• Prioritization of requirements for to-be environment
• They know their content – let them drive
• File share migrations, or organization
• Taxonomy development
• Metadata assignment
• Signoff on overall project plan

Strategy #11:
Define what
success looks like
(probably not this)
10/19/2011 54

Strategy #11:
Define what success looks like
Definitely not this

Strategy #11:
Define what success looks like
• Possible success metrics:
• Target number of end users migrated
• Target number of sites migrated
• Databases migrated
• File shares migrated and decommissioned
• 2010 live, users able to manually migrate their content

Strategy #11:
Define what success looks like
Words of Wisdom:
If you fail to plan, then plan to fail.
Then again…
There is nothing you can’t accomplish
if you put the bar low enough

Online and offline resources
• 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations (Buckley), http://slidesha.re/d3RHNH
• Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 (Anders Rask), http://bit.ly/bjWXMS
• Migrating to SharePoint 2010 (Randy Williams), http://bit.ly/bNgX0U
• Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/dm2kDO
• Hardware and software requirements for 2010 (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/bTGe2b
• Capacity Planning and Sizing for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, http://bit.ly/eXf0Cy
• SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate (O’Reilly, Safari), http://oreil.ly/chSHli
• Migrating to MOSS 2007 (Stephen Cummins), http://bit.ly/9Ismfp
• Planning to Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 (Joel Oleson), http://slidesha.re/16iiUX
• What’s New in SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning (Joel Oleson), http://bit.ly/9cT9aa
• ReadyPoint migration planning tool for 2007 to 2010 migrations (Axceler), http://bit.ly/9GgDuY
• PreUpgradeCheck (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/cIHIlA
• SharePoint 2010 Products Upgrade Approaches (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/dphQ2W

For more information
• Contact me at
– Christian Buckley, cbuck@axceler.com, 425-246-2823
– On Twitter at @buckleyplanet
• Resources available from Axceler.com
– White papers
• Mastering SharePoint Migration Planning
• The Insider’s Guide to Upgrading to SharePoint 2010
• What to Look for in a SharePoint Management Tool
• The Five Secrets to Controlling Your
SharePoint Environment
– Tools
• ReadyPoint (free)
• Davinci Migrator
• echo for SharePoint 2007