Best Practices for Successful Migration to SharePoint 2013

Recently Microsoft has announced SharePoint 2013 beta version release, and its full version is expected to be released in early 2013. And well, you might already be considering migrating to SharePoint 2013? Here let us discuss all about SharePoint 2013 Migration.

There is so much to learn and various new features to be discovered and what certainly will be interesting is how quickly businesses migrate to the new platform. Taking those steps will gain you immediate benefits in your current environment in order to ensure you are ready to quickly take advantage of the new SharePoint 2013 features.

Migration to SharePoint 2013

Many organizations are planning to migrate, consolidate and restructure their legacy content to the next version of SharePoint. There’s more to do than just sit and wait: you can take steps today to prepare your environment for the new release.

Whether you are looking to move today or tomorrow, whether migrating your data to SharePoint on-premises or SharePoint Online, you should do it by keeping an eye on how it will impact the inevitable. You can seamlessly move your entire SharePoint environment, as well as Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, and Windows files, to on-premises versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, or a hybrid of the two.

Here are some of the best practices to be considered while upgrading or migration to SharePoint 2013

Best Practices for Agile Migration      

• Before upgrade, ensure present environment is fully functioning
• Perform a trail upgrade on a test farm
• Take the backup of your present database
• Set original data as read-only, while migrating
• Migrate all of your content to both SharePoint On-Premises and the Cloud either anyone of them to save time and money
• Migrate content with simply drag and drop option, move content when you want to move it, schedule it during non-working hours with bulk migrations or phased
• Consolidate the data to a single location from all of your sources to improve productivity
• Migrate multiple SharePoint site lists and libraries simultaneously and save project costs and timeframe.
• Assign metadata to content, which improve intelligence.
• Simplify Your Project Management with schedule steps in migration and get real-time progress reports.

 

Migration Methodologies

Now we all know some of the best practices of migration and that migrating content is no simple task and every migration activity is different. We have two types of migration processes—Manual Process Migration and Automated Process Migration, which helps to migrate the content from one server to other.

Manual Migration

Let’s talk about manual process migration for moving the database from your SharePoint Local or Public Folders to SharePoint On-premises or SharePoint Online. This process could be used if you had a small number of Public Folders to migrate.

Manual Migration is the old traditional way of migrating the data, cutting and pasting of content to new server. This process of migration is cost effective, yet time consuming and importantly error-zone solution.

If you are migrating small or huge data from public folders to the new server, it is better to go with the automated migration as it is error-free, low cost and saves time.

Automated Migration

Automated tools make your SharePoint Migrations completely seamless and easy as 1, 2 & 3. Just select the sites you want to migrate, define your settings and click migrate. Tools will take care of the complete migration and migrate the entire site along with associated Meta Data, security and versioning.

Most of the companies rarely migrate the data from server to server with custom settings and with selected site; in this case automated migration is the best choice to migrate the data. While migrating log files are created and we can track the process and avoid losing the data during migration. Luckily, there are few companies who help you in confidently preparing for your SharePoint 2013 migration with readiness solutions; some of them are:

• Quest
• MetaVis  
• ZSL
• e-Zest
• Metalogix
• Logimindz
• Infosys