SharePoint and Migration tools overview

SharePoint is a powerful collaboration and content management platform from Microsoft. It enables organizations to manage their documents, data, and processes in one place and provides a suite of tools to help teams to collaborate and work together.

For organizations that want to move their data, documents, and processes from one version of SharePoint to another, or from another platform altogether, SharePoint migration tools can be a great asset.

Lets discuss the key features that make a good migration tool as there are many 3rd party applications out there as well as Microsoft’s own tool for SharePoint migration.

Understanding these differences will help guide you in the direction of what tool fits your organization and migration needs.

It is important to note that many vendors will also offer trials or allow you to migrate a certain number of documents for free in order to try out and test out to avoid many of the potential pitfalls mentioned below.

Remember, All migration tools for SharePoint are not the same so what should you be looking for?

Any solution chosen really needs to answer the following key criteria:

1.) Efficient and Secure

The application or migration engine should be able to transfer data, documents, and processes quickly, accurately, and securely. Do you want to really be stuck in a solution that will take weeks to process and migrate your content, or something that can handle it more efficiently? You need to have a good idea of how long it will take to migrate some of your content with the tool.

2.) Must be able to handle or manage large sets of data

Any migration tool for SharePoint will need to additionally handle large amounts of data and be able to manage pausing and resuming integrations, especially if you have a large content repository that you are migrating and something falls over mid process.

Remember in SharePoint many things are being stored documents, pdfs, in some cases even video and other different large content types that you might not expect. This is an important aspect to consider.

3.) Flexability

The migration tool should provide the ability to customize the migration process to fit the needs of the organization. Sometimes these needs will happen on the fly and unexpectedly.

Flexibility is key here and to explain here are some common examples where some tools will fall flat.

• what if you have a large deployment and need to incrementally migrate files?
• what if a team wants to split their content into multiple sites, or document libraries?

Flexibility is key, so remember you will have questions so the key is ensuring you have a tool for before and potentially post deployment if needed.

4.) Any migration tool must maintain all revision history

You will want to ensure that the tool will also migrate historical versions of all content. Getting just the current version will not work and the drag and drop method will lose valuable history on what users made changes over time.

That is alone worth spending money on a great migration tool and revision history is something you cannot recreate or get back if not migrated properly between systems.

5.) All Permissions Must Migrate

Another consideration is that the application needs to handle and migrate all user permissions from one deployment to another to ensure that users that had access in a previous environment also have it in the new target environment. This will save you from running around post implementation trying to give access to all users who need access to the content migrated.

6.) Compatibility with your deployment

Make sure that the migration tool is actually compatible with your version of SharePoint! Not all applications are the same and happen to support all versions of SharePoint. Oh you are still on SharePoint Foundation 3.0? Yikes..

7.) Cost

Oh yes this is also important, but remember this is your organizations data so there has been a lot of time and energy invested in creating the organizational data that is out there, so it shouldn’t be the only consideration. You want it migrated correctly to save costly mistakes later.

If cost is the ultimate factor then the only solution here to choose is the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft. This tool will assist you migrating offline and on premise sources up to the cloud and the configuration files can be somewhat tweaked as needed and works great for small to medium SharePoint migration projects.

In conclusion

There isn’t always a one size fits all, or one solution is always the solution. I have migrated deployments that I have went only 3rd party on that were great and had no major issues and others that I have only used the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft.

The most important part is that you understand your data and migration requirements first so that whatever selection you make for your SharePoint migration tool of choice can handle the size and complexity of your organization’s data.