Migrating documents & files in file shares to SharePoint Online in Office 365 or from an existing on premise SharePoint farm to SharePoint Online in Office 365 can be challenging task for several reasons. Here is a list of common SharePoint online migration challenges that one might encounter when migrating to the SharePoint cloud.
A few challenges in content migration are common regardless of where the SharePoint site resides, either on premise or an Office 365 tenancy. You can read our earlier blog post titled SharePoint document migration challenges when migrating files and folders for additional information.
Managing migration between disjointed domains
When migrating content between disjointed domains, it is necessary to be able to select and map the source and destination domains correctly and carry out an error free migration. The mapping process has to be fail safe, missing users and groups have to be created in the target site and finally, given appropriate permissions for the lists & libraries and its contents.
Migrating users and group permissions
During migration, care has to be taken to convert the user and group NTFS permissions / SharePoint roles to their equivalent Office 365 permissions to restrict access to the content as in the source location. User & group mapping templates, NTFS permission to SharePoint role mapping and permission level mappings can help the users to perform a smooth transition to Office 365.
Selective migration capabilities
The content owner or the administrator should be able to decide which sites, lists, libraries, folders, documents, items, content types, columns, workflows, web pages etc. to move to the cloud and leave the trash or unimportant stuff behind. This will help the site administrators to take control of the resources utilized in the Office 365 environment, where users will be charged based on the resources consumed on a monthly basis.
Execute high volume migration in small increments or stages
Site Administrators have to catalogue the full content hierarchy and batch the contents depending on business relevance and dependencies involved they wish to migrate to Office 365.
Vyapin’s SharePoint migration tool DocKIT Migrator can help administrators and content owners migrate content from legacy applications or SharePoint older versions to SharePoint 2010 / 2013 / 2016 on premise servers, as well as SharePoint Online in Office 365. Everything from site collections to individual list items along with their attachments can be migrated according to business requirements. The migration wizards take care to reproduce the original Site, site contents, folder structure and sub-site hierarchy along with the user permissions and document versions in SharePoint Online. Custom specifications help control content, metadata and permissions migration as required and can be automated when necessary.
