This blog covers how to adopt SharePoint today, the reasons and processes for migrating to it, guidance on choosing the appropriate platform, and whether an SharePoint Online upgrade or full migration is the better approach.
SharePoint’s penetration of the Intranet market had advanced far beyond where it was eight years ago when the Nielsen Norman Group reported on the strong foothold SharePoint already had in that space at that time.
Today, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies employ SharePoint, which also holds a dominant 75 percent share of the market for content collaboration software. SharePoint Online’s average annual revenue is $2 billion, and its average project success rate is 50 percent, with retail and healthcare being the two fastest-growing SharePoint sectors. Microsoft reports that more than 200 organizations and 190 million people use SharePoint for intranets, content management and team sites.
A Suggested Adoption Checklist
Despite this impressive record, SharePoint adoption and Intranet implementation can be a very demanding task – something that’s been apparent ever since AIIM’s 2016 study that found 11 percent of its 195,000 respondents had reached an impasse with adoption, while 22 percent had run into challenges that were plaguing their user communities.
What can make the task much easier is developing an adoption checklist that can successfully guide the deployment of a new SharePoint environment. Key points on this checklist include:
- Creating an information architecture to ensure an effective Intranet search by your users and more intuitive sites.
- Implementing your visual design, either by following SharePoint’s prebuilt layout or matching your hub sites to your corporate brand to guarantee consistency and user-friendly operation.
- Establishing security and governance policies that cover steps such as configuring sensitivity labels, adding classification labels, putting metadata in place, and controlling user access.
- Training stakeholders with materials that cover common end-user pain points and FAQs and educate users about how to easily search for and find files and documents.
- Migrating site content for your SharePoint collaboration space once your environment is in place and ready for use, then testing and validating the content to verify that the migration happened correctly and the customizations and functionality work properly.
- Deploying existing or new customizations and third-party solutions that best suit your organization after you move all the data, documents and files you need into your new SharePoint environment.
Why and How to Do a SharePoint Migration
Since Office 365 now is Microsoft 365, it’s not necessary to do anything to migrate SharePoint from the former to the latter. Just as Microsoft bundled SharePoint and its whole family of apps into Microsoft 365 a dozen years ago, so, too, did Microsoft rebrand Office 365 as Microsoft 365 in April 2020 to highlight the larger suite of Office products and services (such as artificial intelligence capabilities and cloud-based productivity) beyond the core Office software portfolio.
There are solid reasons for implementing a SharePoint Online migration of data from whatever file system you have, including easier access, more efficiency, and less miscommunication and confusion. And, whether you’re migrating SharePoint into Microsoft 365 or already have your content hosted within Microsoft cloud, there are several types of SharePoint migrations you can implement:
- From one on-premises system to another (the fastest type of SharePoint migration) where organizations can do things like move content from a file share into a structured storage system such as SharePoint.
- From an on-premises system to a cloud provider, such as Microsoft 365 – a still-common migration since some people haven’t fully migrated into cloud services.
- From one cloud provider to another (e.g., from a non-Microsoft entity into Microsoft 365 or between Microsoft 365 tenants), an increasingly common choice to accommodate businesses that are merging or divesting but one where content download is very slow.
- Within a single cloud provider, where content moves – again, slowly – from one cloud section to another (such as from SharePoint Online classic to Modern sites), in what often is a long-term project.
- From a cloud provider that an organization isn’t using anymore to an on-premises system, where content is transferred into local storage.
SharePoint Online or SharePoint On-Premises: Which to Choose
As has been the case for several years, organizations face a choice about whether SharePoint Online – SharePoint’s cloud platform – or SharePoint On-Premises – the platform that IT staff manages in an organization’s own data center – is the better option to meet their needs. Both of them let you deploy a multi-tenant server to flawlessly store, share and manage content.
The two platforms have several significant differences. Online doesn’t require dedicated hardware. On-Premises does. Online gets automatic updates and patches from Microsoft. On-Premises gets this from the internal IT team. SharePoint Online has cloud data storage. On-Premises has local network storage. Online data security conforms to industry standards. On-Premises data security is the organization’s responsibility. There are limited customizations for Online, but unlimited customizations for On-Premises. There are other points of departure regarding external users, scalability and the introduction of new tools.
So, then, how to decide?
If you’re building a scalable intranet, go with SharePoint Online: it cuts costs and reduces complexity, saves the time and money that otherwise would be spent on creating the necessary infrastructure; and has a lot of multi-purpose features (including documentation and collaboration, centralized management, user- and support-friendly design, more protection, and integration into existing applications).
On the other hand, SharePoint On-Premises is the way to go if you have a dedicated infrastructure in place. It’s a perfect match for you if you require high compliance standards and levels of customization, more storage space than Microsoft provides, more control over your SharePoint farms architecture, and the intranet would only be available on your business network.
In the end, the decision depends on business requirements for business continuity, compliance rules, data security, and digital transformation.
Upgrade or Migrate: Which SharePoint Path is Right for You
While SharePoint Online is always up to date, that’s not the case with SharePoint On-Premises. Although On-Premises usually receives new features with each new release, it still maintains existing features with patches and other add-ons.
Nevertheless, whether a business uses the cloud or in-house version, it must stay current with the latest capabilities for either platform. There are two ways to do this: migrating or upgrading SharePoint. But what’s the difference, and when is one option better than the other?
An upgrade, which is a more restricted process and doesn’t change the taxonomy or architecture of any existing systems, can be performed in two ways. An in-place upgrade is a revision in which underlying operating system bits are replaced and rewritten with newer codes instead of undergoing a wipe-and-replace deployment. A database upgrade installs the new SharePoint version from the ground up, and the existing legacy system databases are attached to it.
The more extensive SharePoint migration process collates and transfers all existing data to the new SharePoint environment. In this case, all content, metadata, and other things that keep applications and sites relevant are moved and reconfigured to fit into SharePoint.
The upgrade option makes more sense in any of these cases:
- Current tenants on later versions of SharePoint must move up to a more recent one.
- Current systems have well-established taxonomical structures with appropriate site collection architecture and content databases.
- Content is highly distributed across deep folder structures.
- Default site templates (e.g., team site, document center, records center) have been deployed.
Migration is preferable, however, in any of the following situations:
- SharePoint isn’t the existing content repository.
- The current legacy SharePoint version is completely unsupported and is so outdated that it’s no longer relevant.
- Users must leapfrog over several versions to get the desired features.
- The taxonomy can (or should) be rebuilt, and it can’t or needn’t be replicated.
- Poor database performance prevents the achievement of recovery time or recovery point objectives.
- Shallow, suboptimal content is interfering with migration.
- Site template customizations are causing complications.
Planning Is Key for Successful Migration to Microsoft 365
The most critical part of a SharePoint migration to Microsoft 365 is planning for the migration itself. That’s why Microsoft has a step-by-step setup guide in the Microsoft 365 administrative center that contains instructions for installing and configuring SharePoint, including Microsoft’s best practices for SharePoint and suggestions on deploying SharePoint for optimal performance, security and user experience.
The guide addresses all the essentials needed for a fully successful SharePoint rollout in Microsoft 365, such as site creation and document libraries; workflow setup; data migration; how to manage user permissions and search and share settings; app protection policies for safeguarding company data on mobile devices; information rights management (IRM) for encrypting and assigning file usage restrictions; data loss prevention (DLP) for protecting sensitive information; and a network connectivity test to see SharePoint-related results.
If you’re a medium-to-large corporation that’s planning a SharePoint launch, you should ask yourself what your high-level goals are for the rollout, what you need for file storage and collaboration, how you want to transition from the tools you have into SharePoint, and how important content migration is to this process.
Microsoft also has a user-friendly SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) for migrating content from on-premises SharePoint sites to Microsoft 365.
Conclusion
Since its debut eight years ago, SharePoint has become a preferred solutions choice for Intranet search and for content management, transfer and storage. By conducting your due diligence on everything SharePoint platforms have to offer, you can ensure that your SharePoint adoption, migration or upgrade will happen seamlessly and effectively.
With Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint, governance and adoption are key.
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