The document provides lessons learned and best practices for migrating content from file shares to a new system like SharePoint. It emphasizes that migrations are complex projects that require thorough planning, executive support, appropriate resources and timelines. User adoption is also critical and requires communication, training and delivering the features users want based on information architecture and governance frameworks. Testing is essential throughout the process.

1. Lessons Learned & Best Practices for
Migrating Content
Gareth Davies @gmdavies
Corporate Information Manager
Wales & West Housing

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5. The bulk of a migration project happens
well before moving anything
Migrations are complex and multi-layered with many
different points of failure
Develop the project plan and the ‘to-do’ list
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6. Have you go the right support?
Get buy-in from the Executive and make sure they fully
understand and endorse what you are trying to achieve.
Migration projects tie in people for long periods of time
and will compete with other projects & priorities.
Executive support will stop you being cast adrift on the
sea of migration
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7. What are your timescales
How long have you got? - It will
take longer than you think!!
If you are serious about migrating
information out of file shares –
think months if not years!
Try and get it embedded into
continuous improvement not just a
stand alone project
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8. It’s a long road without the right people
Used to rely on Techie’s/ SP Admins, Project manager
Delivering real business improvements requires ‘living’ in
the work
A new type of I.T. person is required; someone who can sit in-
between the business and I.T.
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9. You want everyone on-board
A plan for user adoption is essential.
Migrating file shares will involve lots of change for your users.
Users cannot go back to old habits – they will if they can!
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10. Keep a constant flow of
What’s your information trickling
communication plan? through
Try making it fun with
gamification
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11. Information Architecture
You want to build something so that end users can find and
share the information they need to get their jobs done.
Create consistency and smooth navigation.
Content Types, managed metadata, site columns
Think about what your users want and how they will find it
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12. Governance
Decide on what you are going to govern
One version of the truth
Migrating old documents – if so how far back
do you go?
Quotas/retention periods/versioning
Permissions – who can create sites?
Decide on the mechanism for
governing
Who agrees the ‘what’?
How do you make on-going
changes?
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13. Business Alignment
Link solutions & design to the needs of the business
Discover business requirements before migrating content
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14. And finally, testing and more testing….
Get the right environments – Development, Test & Live
User Acceptance Testing is critical in building the correct
solution and gaining adoption
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15. Successful migration projects are
unlikely to work this way
Each migration is different and unique.
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16. Time to migrate
Key questions we asked…
Understanding our information
Cleaning up information
How much are we
dealing with? File shares
Do we migrate first
Do we know what then clean up or Migrating content
is being used & vice versa? Do we get rid of
what is not? them?
Do we move What does the
everything? How long do we future state look
need? like?
Do we only move
what we want? What about Where is the
performance information we
issues want to move?
Who & how are we
going to move the
information?
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17. The state of our information
Example high level overview of our file share content
Not only do we get a picture of the size of data (about
500Gb) it also leads to other questions, such as;
Approx. 23% of content is held in ‘personal’ file shares – not
much collaborating going on there!
In regions and public there are approx. 65,000 folders – this is
metadata!!
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18. Our file types
File share content broken down into file types
Photo’s everywhere - 178,000 photos on 4 file shares.
Most uncategorised!! Do we want to store this is SharePoint?
High proportion of Excel
do we embed links in these and will these get broken?
Linktek.com
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19. Our email
Email retention, accessibility and why PST files are so
popular.
Do we store pst files in SharePoint?
How do people access archived (pst) email on the road?
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20. Cleaning up – clear out day
Saved 90Gb (20%) cleared approx.
215,000 files and 15,000 folders.
Incidentally we also threw out
over 3 tonnes of paper
Before After
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21. Cleaning up - Data quality
Linking with other systems - term store information pulled
from our core housing application
Clean up required in other applications before migrating content
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22. File shares
What do you take with you; only what makes sense, leave
the rest behind
Not everything fits into SharePoint!
Even though you don’t want to, you might still have a need
for file shares!
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23. Migrating content
Previous migrations
Increased user
adoption
Hybrid
Bulk migration & limited
re-engineering
Manual Adhoc migration with
1 person from each dept.
Manual Adhoc migration
1 or 2 people involved
2001 2003 2007 2010 SP Version
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24. Moving to 2010 - our hybrid approach
We decided it had to be a phased approach
Phase 1
Phase 2
Core content from
SharePoint 2007 Phase 3
into 2010. Introduction of
new ‘killer’ Phase 4
Migrate known features High level
content from file information
External partner aligned to key Migration of
shares
portals business values personal file shares
Master data map into My Sites
Migration of file
shares (Dept. stuff) Community portals
Difficulty: Low/Med Effort: Low Prioritisation: Easy
Tools: mainly 3rd Party & partial manual migration Difficulty: Med/High Effort: High Prioritisation: Hard
24 Tools: mainly manual migration

25. Master data map
Detailed picture of what we had existing in SharePoint.
It identified dead sites, unused pages and documents, and inactive
users.
It also prioritised the content we wanted to migrate first
Advantage is that is stops you migrating across the bad with the
good and allows security to be reviewed
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26. Re-engineering Workshops
Business units of approx. 12 staff (max 2hrs each)
Speedboat • What users want
(Innovation games) • Requirements
• Requirements
Actors & Scenarios • Business Needs
• Information architecture
Card sorting • Content classification
• Navigation
Mindmanager • Information architecture
• Building a richer picture
Balsamiq Mockups • Early proof of concept
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27. The effort required... It takes a lot!
Approx. 3-4 sessions (average 2hrs) to arrive at an IA with 2 sessions to get
the users familiar to the new way of working (Total 12hrs)
Effort
Approx. 2-4hrs preparation time for each session (Total 12-15hrs) before
development time
1 business analyst can do approx. 3 business units at once.
Time between sessions can be as much as a month due to users other
workloads. This is why it takes a long time
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28. The result… features that users want
Unstructured to semi-structured example of migrating
content into a development project site
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29. Features that users want
Content migrated from documents spread across file shares
& exchange public folders
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30. User adoption - our strategy
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31. User adoption – auto-tagging
Requirement for this was gathered in the discovery phase of
the new intranet
Content to be put into this section was from documents
spread across the file shares & exchange public folders
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32. User adoption - read only file shares
As each business unit is migrated across, their file shares are
made read only for 6 months
Page viewer web part is used to access the old location
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33. Training – enhancing user adoption
Biggest issues arising from training was conceptual ones
People getting their heads around metadata and how this
differed from using folders
Breaking the habit of naming files differently
Understanding that certain file types could
not be uploaded
Using applications for what they were
designed for
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34. 3rd party migration tools
Worth it and save huge time and effort, not to mention
metadata values! However, test these products on
your environment.
Test on your largest list – ours was 25,000 items
Library & lists/InfoPath/Sites OK, but not formatting on
web pages/additional code
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35. Extra Tools
Software
Mindmanager
Compendium
Bizagi Process Mapping
Nintex Workflow
Balsamiq Mockups
Books
User Adoption Strategies – M Sampson
Heretics Guide to best practices – P Culmsee
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36. Key Takeaways
Best Practices Lessons Learnt
Executive Buy-in Clear Out
Resources Build a picture
Timescales Hybrid approach
User Adoption Deliver features users want
Information Architecture User adoption is key
Governance Re-engineering Workshops
Testing Training
Communication 3rd Party Tools
Business Alignment
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37. Questions?
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