Each migration needs to start with an assessment because you need to know precisely what to plan and prepare for during the migration. From a simplistic and high-level perspective, we need to identify and decide on the content that will be migrated. Determine priority both based on business and technical complexity, who owns the content and the content itself.
Lastly, it's important not to forget that the target Microsoft 365 environment should also be assessed for readiness. As we are about to highlight in the following phases, there is much more to be assessed than just the collection size that's to be migrated. So first, let's take a look at site structure assessment.
The site structure assessment is all about taking a snapshot of the site structure of the existing portal, but this assessment does not end here. After the existing site structure has been assessed, it often needs to be updated or adjusted to reflect corporate changes or other requirements.
Now, if we look at content assessment, during the content assessment, documents and structured data like lists of data are being assessed. This assessment aims to understand the data and the types of documents currently hosted within the old environment.
Another goal here is to identify the amount of data currently existing in the old environment. Although the amount of data is usually reduced after the content cleanup, it is helpful to have an idea of how much data is about to be migrated.
Now looking at the workflow assessment during the workflow assessment, all workflows used within the existing environment are being assessed. Simple enough, right? This assessment includes the type of workflow built in, SharePoint designer, custom or third party, the location, the use case, and the associated business process.
Also, during this assessment, workflows marked as active or in progress for an unusually long time will be identified.
It is a good idea to decide what to do with frozen workflows being migrated. Now let's move on to the next phase of assessment. Custom solution assessment.
Custom solutions or custom applications are mainly used to enhance existing functionality or add functionality that does not exist in SharePoint.
Most custom solutions are either built on server-side code or client-side code, and they are either built in-house or purchased from a third-party vendor. These little bits of information will be key when properly assessing the custom solutions in place.
Last but not least, the assessment tools that are going to help you along the way are two tools here that are going to help you.
One is the SharePoint migration assessment tool, which will scan the contents of your SharePoint farm to help identify any issues with data you plan to migrate to SharePoint online, as well as the results report, which points you to articles to help you fix any issues that were discovered the tool runs in the background without impacting your production environment so you can operate carefree. We hope these different phases of assessment have been helpful.
If you want to know everything there is to know about migrating to SharePoint online, you can download our definitive whitepaper available at 2tolead.com
