5 Tips on Effectively Planning for SharePoint 2010 Migration

By Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) Apr 21, 2010

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Mixed feelings about SharePoint abound in organizations today. Some say it's great and others don't want anything to do with it. That’s sooo 2007. Rest assured, with proper planning of your SharePoint 2010 migration, you’re well on your way to revolutionizing your organization.

Unless you’re living under a rock, I’m sure you know by now that SharePoint 2010 is set to be launched on May 12, 2010. CMSWire has great coverage on how you can prepare for the launch.

There’s a lot of excitement and flurry of activities that’s going on around SharePoint 2010. In fact, I’m currently involved with two SharePoint 2010 migration projects. Here are 5 tips that I’d like to share on how you can effectively plan for SharePoint 2010 migration:

Tip #1 Evaluate Organizational Need for Migration

Before you get caught up in the SharePoint 2010 frenzy, step back and clearly understand what quantifiable benefit does SharePoint 2010 bring to your organization. Gone are the days when we had unlimited IT budgets to deploy new technologies.

For example, if you are an educational institution currently using SharePoint 2007 where a sizable number of users are using Mac, a key challenge is the lack of full cross-browser compatibility. How much time, money, effort, custom code are you spending on supporting these users? With SharePoint 2010, it has greatly addressed this issue. If you’re interested, read this post: Maximizing SharePoint 2010 on a Mac + iPhone or iPod + iPad.

To get started, here’s a list of new features in SharePoint 2010 that can help you evaluate if you need to migrate.

Bottom line is, you have to make a business case on why migrating to SharePoint 2010 is needed. It’s necessary to do this to convince the higher powers — executive management — that it provides great value to the organization.

Though not SharePoint 2010 specific, here’s a great presentation from Paul Culmsee on how you calculate SharePoint ROI.

Tip #2 Identify and Prioritize Migration Scope in Detail

Once the business reason is clear for the need to migrate to SharePoint 2010, the next step is to identify the migration scope in detail:

Are you going to take a big bang approach and migrate the entire organization to SharePoint 2010 or take a phased approach and migrate one group at a time?
What are you migrating? Is it your existing internal SharePoint 2007 Intranet and/or collaboration sites? Custom SharePoint application? Public-facing site? Additional content sources?
How will existing content be migrated? Do you need to migrate them all? What’s the cost benefit of utilizing a tool to do content migration vs manually doing it?
Is your current SharePoint information architecture, site taxonomy and site templates well defined that you can replicate the model in SharePoint 2010?
How scalable is the current technical infrastructure (hardware, software, network, etc) for SharePoint 2010?
Does your current release management and or disaster recovery process apply to SharePoint 2010?
What type of training should you facilitate to best encourage user adoption for SharePoint 2010?

By identifying the scope, you can prioritize and appropriately budget for the SharePoint 2010 migration project.