Migration Phase Two

Communication is even more important when the actual migration is to take place. It is important for everyone to understand when they need to stop working, ideally at the end of business on a Friday, and when they should resume working when the migration is complete.

We typically recommend making the migration source read-only as the first step in any migration. This ensures that people don’t mistakenly keep working on documents as they are being migrated. This can be done easily by removing permissions, whether that’s to a file share or to an On-Premises SharePoint server. If people need access to a file during the migration, they can still get it, but they’ll have to hang on to their changes if need be until the migration is complete.

The same process used for the test migration is followed for the actual migration, and the same reconciliation and spot checking by the business needs to happen. Business is typically on standby on the Sunday, with the migration completed by Saturday night. This gives a day for validation, and a go / no-go decision can be made. A rollback plan should always be in place in case the decision is no-go.

Monday morning everything should be ready for the business to resume. This is where the training and change management that should have already happened becomes important. People should understand where they need to go to find their work, and what, if anything, has changed about how they work.

We typically leave the source repository available in read-only mode through this transition, so that if people have challenges finding their content or something wasn’t migrated that should have been, it’s still available for reference in the old system.

Whether it is a single migration or done in phases, the steps remain the same:

  • Inventory, Analyze, and Plan
  • Perform test migrations
  • Validate
  • Perform one or more incremental migrations
  • Communicate the cutover timing
  • Freeze the source system, ideally by making it read-only
  • Perform the final migration
  • Validate
  • Communicate
  • Support
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