The

ultimate
SharePoint
migration
checklist
 Contents

About Benjamin Niaulin 3

Get ready to migrate 4

Make a detailed inventory of your environment 5

Clean up your old environment 6

Prepare your destination environment 7

Communicate with your users 8

Start your migration 9

Post migration 10

For your custom development 11

Considerations for your custom solutions 12

Considerations for your custom solutions (cont’d) 13

About
Benjamin Niaulin
Benjamin Niaulin is an Office Servers and Services
MVP, recognized as one of the Top 25 SharePoint
influencers in 2014 and 2nd for Office 365 in 2015.
Being a Microsoft Certified Trainer since 2008 has
allowed him to become proficient in simplifying complex
technologies, making him an expert in SharePoint &
Office 365 vulgarization. He’s spoken at over 200
conferences around the world.

Follow him on Twitter @bniaulin

3
Get ready to
migrate
Depending on what you’re planning to do, migrating to
SharePoint can be a difficult task. More often than not,
though, the actual migration is the easiest part. What
causes headaches is trying to make sure you’ve thought
of everything prior to migrating.

That’s why we’ve developed a convenient checklist to

guide you through the process. Whether you’re migrating
from a previous version of SharePoint, going to Office 365,
or even simply moving files in from your File Shares, this
migration checklist will be very helpful.
Make a detailed inventory of your environment
By having a detailed inventory of everything you have, you’ll be able to make better decisions
and estimates on the effort of the migration. The more information you have, the easier it will
be to plan and respect your migration deadlines.

Establish an inventory:
Site collections Retention policies

Sites Records

List and libraries Users and groups used

Pages Large lists or libraries

Custom solutions All files that have a dependency

to another file using a URL
Workflows
Blocked file types
Content types
Branding
Site columns
Any other UI customizations
Permissions (JavaScript, altered menus, etc.)
User alerts

Notes:

5
Clean up your old environment
SharePoint is all about helping people build what they need to get the work done, but it
doesn’t mean you still need everything today. Take the time to find, remove and reorganize
things in your environment.

Find and remove “orphaned users” Clean up items containing too many custom
permissions
Remove empty SharePoint groups
Remove unwanted versions from your version
Put users with explicit permissions back history
into groups
Reorganize lists and libraries with too many
Delete any unused custom content types, site columns
columns and workflows
Rethink and reorganize very large lists
Find sites that haven’t been accessed or
modified to see if you still need them

Ask users to check-in any document currently

checked-out, including those that have never
been checked in (ensure you migrate the most
recent version)

Find large site collections

Break them up into multiple

site collections

Find large sites

Promote them into site collections

Remove duplicate content

Notes:

6
Prepare your destination environment
A migration is the best time to wipe the slate clean and start over. Make sure you take the time
to plan and structure your new home according to your needs. You might not get the chance
again for a long time.

Map your destination’s architecture Configure your new Search Topology

Optimize your new SharePoint Servers’ Set SharePoint up to import user profiles from
performance [At the install] any specific sources

Configure all Web Applications Map a plan for the metadata on your content

Check desired authentication & Look at your customizations

authorization rules
If required, convert them to work in the
Back everything up new model/destination (see appendix)

Test the restore

Check the databases for corrupt data

If any corrupt data, delete it.

Run a Test migration

Highlight any unsupported elements

Notes:

7
Communicate with your users
Your biggest challenge for the migration is bringing change to your users. For this to be
successful, you’ll need to make sure they know what’s going on and why it’s happening.

Inform your users before starting

Downtime planned by the migration

The reason for the change and the value

for them

Possible changes in the environments

URL changes

Bookmarks

Document references
(Excel macros, etc)

Estimated timeline for the migration

Create sandbox sites for hands-on previews

Notes:

8
Start your migration
The actual migration effort shouldn’t be too complicated if you followed the previous steps.
It comes down to moving, and dealing with, anything that pops up that didn’t show up during
testing.

Workflows

Complete or Stop running workflows about

to be migrated

Migration scenarios

If migrating from SharePoint 2013

On-Premises:

Perform database attach-upgrade to

bring everything as-os

Use a third-party tool such as

ShareGate Desktop to granularly
migrate and restructure as you move

If migrating from an earlier SharePoint

version:

Use a third-party tool such as

ShareGate Desktop

Notes:

9
Post migration
Before you swing open the doors and let everyone into your SharePoint, make sure everything
is ready for them.

Test your destination environment

Ensure everything migrated successfully

Test/run all workflows

Check user permissions

Create a backup of your new environment

Remove access to the old SharePoint

Run a full crawl

Notes:

10
For your custom
development
From Erwin Van Hunen Microsoft MVP and Microsoft
Cerfitied Master working at Rencore.

As a product owner for transformation tooling, Erwin helps

customers migrate from on-premises solutions to the new
add-in model for SharePoint.

Additionally, Erwin is also a core member of the Office

365 Patterns and Practice team, and a regular speaker at
SharePoint conferences around the world. He is one of the
organizers of SharePoint Saturday Stockholm, the largest
SharePoint focused conference in Scandinavia.
Considerations for your custom solutions

Create an inventory of your customizations. Take a look at what needs to

be migrated. A migration is often the perfect time to identify what you don’t
need anymore, and leave it there. Also, make sure you have a good overview
of what you have in your sites (WSP, Sandbox, etc), and if one depends on
another. Map it out to be sure to deploy everything in the right order at the
destination.

Are you running any Farm Solutions? The good news is that they still work in
SharePoint 2016. However, Microsoft recommends you stop using them. Also,
they can’t be deployed to Office 365. If you do migrate them, open the WSP
and change the target deployment.

Do you have any Sandbox Solutions? They still work in SharePoint 2016, but
as with Farm Solutions, they recommend you to stay away from them. Instead,
look at the artifacts within, and convert them to provisioning in the add-in
mode. If you are going to Office 365, though Sandbox Solutions will continue
to work, those with Code will not.

Notes:

12
Considerations for your custom solutions (cont’d)

Pain Points when migration to Office 365:

Converting any Web Parts you developed to Add-Ins may prove to be

difficult.

If you’ve built Timer Jobs, there is no real solution when going Online. You’ll
have to find new solutions that give you the same result.

Event Receivers: you’ll also need to find a way to host them somewhere, and
rewrite them to continue getting the same result you used to.

You may need to reconsider how you deploy your declarative artifacts. You
may need to do this using an Azure Web App, PowerShell, etc.

Custom Fields is something you should stay away from. Instead, see if
Display Templates can help you display content the way you wanted it,
instead of creating a new field for it.

Depending on your migration method, item IDs in lists and libraries will
change during the move. If you are using them in your logic you will need to
take that into account.

Notes:

13
Every business will eventually move to the cloud and adapt
to it. That’s a fact. ShareGate helps with that. Our products
help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the
cloud, increase cloud adoption while reducing sprawl, and
control cloud costs.

www.sharegate.com