SharePoint Online Migration Checklist for IT Admins

Is your organization planning a Microsoft 365 migration? In this article, we have prepared an extensive SharePoint Online migration checklist. Master a fool-proof SharePoint Online migration with our meticulously shortlisted checklist.

Refer to our brief checklist to move data to SharePoint Online accurately during your migration.

What is SharePoint Online Migration and What Are Its Key Components?

SharePoint Online migration refers to the migration of data and metadata to SharePoint Online.
Key components of a SharePoint Online migration are:

• Seamless data migration to SharePoint irrespective of data size
• Accurate user permissions transferred to SharePoint Online
• Replication of complete file features in SharePoint Online.

With a trusted cloud migration vendor such as CloudFuze, businesses can migrate seamlessly to SharePoint Online.

What Are the Potential Pitfalls and Challenges in SharePoint Online Migration for IT Admins?

Challenges in SharePoint Online Migration for IT Admins include:

• Transferring high-volume data to SharePoint Online without downtime issues
• Replicating file versions, permissions, timestamps, etc. in SharePoint
• Proper working of hyperlinks in the SharePoint cloud without link breaks
• Transferring incremental changes to the SharePoint cloud
• Moving thousands of users to SharePoint Online without any misses

CloudFuze Migrate helps you overcome migration challenges when moving to SharePoint Online.

1. Requirement Analysis

The first step in a SharePoint Online migration is to know the exact requirements.

Strategize the migration timelines, the scope of work, migration responsibilities, computing resources, and choosing a migration partner. This provides a clear picture of what to expect and how to handle any challenges.

Define your company’s goals before moving to SharePoint Online. Have a clear idea on the need for your transition. Set the direction for your migration plan by having clear migration requirements.

2. Audit Your Current Environment and Source Data

Audit your source cloud to understand:

• Total data storage
• Underlying data architecture
• Duplicates and irrelevant data
• Data and metadata to transfer
• Data to be archived

Ensure proper working of your current systems. This helps you prevent unexpected delays during migration. A well-prepared source environment makes the transition smoother and eliminates post-migration issues.

A well-prepared source environment makes the transition smoother and eliminates post-migration issues.

3. Execute a Pre-Migration Assessment

A Pre-migration assessment helps you evaluate and decide on necessary aspects of the SharePoint migration. For example, choose from the list of metadata to migrate while transferring data from the source platform to SharePoint Online.

• Shared and embedded links
• Version History
• Comments
• Permissions
• Timestamps
• In-line comments

4. Overcoming SharePoint Limitations

When moving your data to SharePoint Online, your IT team must be aware of the limitations of Microsoft 365. Some of them are:

• No support for certain special characters in file/folder names and paths.
• No support for file names exceeding 400 characters.

CloudFuze Migrate trims long file/folder paths to 350 characters. Then creates a folder called “LongFileName” and stores the remaining data in it.

CloudFuze Migrate then automatically replaces unsupported characters with a hyphen (-) or underscore (_).

5. Map Relevant User Accounts

Accurate user mapping across the source and the destination platforms is essential for an accurate migration.

With our end-to-end migration platform, businesses can choose from auto-mapping, CSV mapping, or folder mapping approaches.

6. Prepare your Destination Cloud

Before moving to SharePoint Online, prepare your new destination cloud beforehand.

• Create Microsoft 365 accounts for your users.
• Verify and cross-verify licenses and storage space.
• Pre-provision the user accounts in the destination by creating respective sites.
• Transform your source data into lists, libraries, and folders for easier migration.
• Connect the SharePoint sites to relevant hub sites for easier navigation and tracking.

7. Executing One-Time and Incremental Migrations

While executing large-volume one-time migration, incremental changes build up in the source as users continue to use the files.

To reflect incremental changes, businesses must execute a seamless delta migration.

Also, read our comparison article on delta sync vs one-time migration.

8. Data Backup

In your SharePoint Online migration plan, ensure to include a data backup of your source data.

Conduct a cleanup of your source environment. Review the existing user permissions and transfer all necessary data for backup.

9. Pilot Run

Perform a pilot run or Proof Of Concept (POC) before executing the data transfer. A pilot run helps you:

• Identify and address potential issues before the actual migration.
• Eliminate downtime
• Reduce the risks of data loss or data corruption
• Test the performance and scalability of the new environment

Start with a small dataset and validate migration performance and data integrity.

CloudFuze Migrate allows users to:

• Initiate pilot migrations with their user credentials
• Allows users to check the ongoing migration data
• Migrate with all our supported features during a pilot migration

10. Post-Migration Evaluation

Check the following during a post-migration evaluation such as:

• Batch & delta migration validation
• Data size verification across source and target
• Running a comparison delta to cross-verify the accuracy of the files

With these steps, conduct comprehensive testing across the migrated environment. Review libraries, lists, permissions, and workflows. Ensure that all data, structures, and user access rights are accurate in SharePoint Online.

Review libraries, lists, permissions, and workflows. Ensure data and user access permissions are accurate in SharePoint.

Perform intense monitoring and thorough analysis post-migration. This helps ensure long-term value.

Train your users and help them with adoption. This enables you to support your team’s productivity with the major transition.

11. Train End-Users

Switching to SharePoint Online from a different source can be challenging for the end-users to adopt.

SharePoint user interface can cause confusion and lower employee productivity. Provide adequate communication and hands-on training to your teams for a smoother transition.

Check out the Microsoft 365 adoption guide, which can help onboard your employees to the new platform.

To ensure a successful adoption, create a comprehensive communication plan with teams throughout the migration. Update users on new governance policies.

A well-structured SharePoint migration plan helps with easier adoption and eliminates disruptions as you transfer to SharePoint.

12. Decommissioning the Source Cloud

Decommissioning the source cloud helps you avoid unnecessary costs and cutdown licenses, or you may be paying for both clouds.
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based solution. Now, you no longer need to invest in or maintain servers and physical infrastructure.

Hence, consider decommissioning the source cloud license as an integral step in the SharePoint migration checklist.

What Metrics Should IT Admins Use to Evaluate the Success of Their SharePoint Online Migration?

Metrics to evaluate the success of SharePoint Online migration:

• Complete data and metadata replication in the SharePoint Online
• Proper working of embedded links without any issues
• User permissions assigned to the correct users
• Proper user mapping without any issues
• Complete transfer of incremental changes

A Quick Overview of our Migration Tool:

CloudFuze’s Real World Case Study – Dropbox to SharePoint

Michigan State University wanted to transfer from Dropbox to Microsoft 365 (OneDrive for Business and SharePoint).

With CloudFuze Migrate, we helped them

• With CloudFuze Migrate, we helped them
• Migrate 50+ TB of Dropbox data
• Transfer shared links, sharing permissions, internal and external shares, in-line comments, and version history.

Learn more about this case study here.

What Do Customers Say About Us?

As a reliable cloud migration partner, we have helped many firms migrate to SharePoint.

We have a rating of 4.7/5 in Gartner Peer Insights Review. Here is a Gartner review from one of our customers.

As per the review, the customer used our migration solution to transfer to SharePoint successfully.

We helped them migrate data to SharePoint along with necessary metadata such as permissions.

They praised us for quicker adaptation to requirements and benefitted by accurate transfer.

Move to SharePoint Online Smoothly with CloudFuzeMigrate

Our SharePoint Online migration checklist helps you define a well-planned SharePoint migration strategy.

To enquire about the tool, contact our team today!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How to migrate data to SharePoint?

CloudFuze Migrate helps you migrate data to your SharePoint account accurately and secure way.

CloudFuze Migrate helps you transfer data and metadata to SharePoint from source clouds like Egnyte, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. with complete replication.

2. How to transfer to SharePoint with minimal downtime?

CloudFuze Migrate helps you transfer PB/TBs of high-volume data with no downtime and complete accuracy. Irrespective of data size and user count, our migration tool helps you achieve seamless migration of data and metadata.

3. Why switch to SharePoint?

SharePoint can be the best cloud platform choice for your enterprise. You can collaborate with your teams, customize workflows, using Microsoft SharePoint with advanced security and governance controls built in.