Each
organization selects the best file sharing software to make its
communication system more efficient and powerful. Based on its needs
and budget, a company has options to choose from a variety of
proprietary and open source content management systems. But many
companies prefer using the comprehensive solutions provided by
Microsoft SharePoint to transform its operations and operations.
SharePoint further enables businesses to preserve and enjoy the
benefits offered by their existing IT infrastructure, compliance and
structured process.
The
latest version of SharePoint offers a set of innovative features like
easy to design and brand a website; improved business connectivity
services; option to perform eDiscovery queries; and customized
identity management. SharePoint 2013 further makes it easier for
businesses to optimizing the viewing experience of users regardless
of their choice of mobile device and operating system. Similar to
other smart users, you must be thinking of migrating to the new
version to avail a number of advantages. This makes the search for
“Top
companies in Sharepoint”
who can help in migration torise to gigantic global numbers.
However,
many experts have highlighted the risks associated with SharePoint
2013 migration without proper planning. The lack of proper planning
will further make your IT professionals to spend a huge amount of
time and effort. Therefore, it is becomes essential for a user to
explore options to make the project successful without increasing
stress. It is also important to understand and implement some best
practices to migrate to SharePoint 2013 easily.
5
Best Practices to Make a Successful SharePoint 2013 Migration Plan
- Address Your Business Needs: When you are migrating to SharePoint 2013, you must use the transitional phase as an opportunity to thoroughly assess your business needs and governance. You can even make a comprehensive plan, and decide how to use the upgraded version, and what type of content you want to store in the new system. At the same time, you must review you existing content management system, and decide the files that must be retained or can be discarded. Reviewing your business needs and information infrastructure from the scratch will surely need some amount of time and efforts. But the investment will make your content management system more efficient and relevant.
- Organize and Externalize Business Data: Often a huge amount of unused data may affect the performance of your content management adversely. So you must make a cleanup strategy by using the data externalization feature provided by SharePoint 2013. The feature enables you to move a huge amount of unused and old data from your main server to secondary and inexpensive data repositories. For instance, you can use a special tool like Storage Maximizer to easily transfer these data from your SQL server databases to other open source databases. The data externalization will increase your server space, while reducing the time required to access relevant information.
- Make and Implement an Effective Communication Plan: When you are migrating to an advanced content management system, it is important to communicate the changes to all stakeholders. Often the files are accessed by your employees, clients, vendors and website administrators. So these people must be communicated about how to access the data in a faster and convenient way. It is also a good idea to call all stakeholders, and ensure that they clearly understand how to use SharePoint 2013. At the same time, you can also consider sharing a change management system to make the migration easier without disrupting day to day communication. However, you must set a deadline so that the users can understand how to access files through the hefty GUI provided by SharePoint 2013.
- Evaluate Your Business Environment Thoroughly: Each business has to store and share a wide range of documents, solutions and data. The files will be stored in SharePoint 2013, but these will be accessed by different users, stakeholders and website administrator. So you must gather their suggestion and feedback to optimize your governance plan. Similar to other organization, you may be storing all your data on network file servers and other collaborative systems. When you are making the migration plan, some or most of these documents can be moved into SharePoint. At the same time, you can also consider using SharePoint 2013 as a comprehensive record management system to manage your existing as wells a future data in a more efficient and organized way.
- Choose the Best Migration Approach: When a business decides to migrate to SharePoint 2013, it can choose from several data migration approaches. However, you must evaluate each approach based on specific criterions like your business needs and potential trouble spots. As the latest SharePoint version does not allow users to directly upgrade their existing data farm, you have to upgrade by attaching a database, or by using third-party tools. However, you have options to run two data farms at a time by using any one of, or combining the two approaches. It is also important to evaluate the pros and cons of each migration approach to decide the best option to suit your business requirements.
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please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.
