Challenges During SharePoint Migration

1) SharePoint Customizations:

The complexity begins with the availability of SharePoint customizations, also commonly known as web parts. Apart from being a very noticeable feature of SharePoint, these web parts actually prohibit you from performing a standard migration and result in an unsuccessful migration process. An unsuccessful or failed data migration can cause loss of data and eventually business.

2) SharePoint Application Inventory:

 

A SharePoint Application Inventory would typically gather the following information:

• List of all SharePoint Farms, Servers, Server hardware details, Application Install path, Services running on server, etc.
• Inventory of Web application, Site collection, Custom solutions like Web Parts, Features, Event handlers, etc.
• List of Users, Groups and Application Level permissions details
• Size and Complexity of the applications
• While gathering the SharePoint Application inventory, you may categorize and group them, based on Business, Technical & Design parameters, which may not be always, correct.

 

3) Size & Complexity of the Application

 

• SharePoint OOB (out-of-box) template based applications are simple & easy to migrate. The complexity comes when you have SharePoint Custom developed application to be migrated.
• A SharePoint application will be complex to migrate, if it has one or more of the following design elements:
• Heavy customized Master Pages & Page Layouts User Interface.
• Custom Solutions like Web Parts, Features, Event handlers, Site templates, List template, Pages & User controls, JavaScript, CSS, CAS, Content Types, InfoPath form etc.
• Workflows with complex functionality.
• Custom Search scopes, external content sources.
• Integration with external systems (SAP, Oracle and etc.)
   
  4) Post Migration Challenges
   
  Once the Migration is complete based on selected migration approach. In case of Database-attach approach you may face many challenges post Migration as many SharePoint design elements are not migrated successfully. Here one should be ready with all the Post migration steps and work around if no out-of-box solution is available.
  Depending on the customization of the SharePoint application, this could potentially result in a lot of post migration related activities. Typically, these would include moving 14 hive folders like images, js, css, etc., master page customisation, visual upgrades, update web.config, resolve absolute URL issues, resetting views for List view Web part, configuring search scopes, etc.
  Some Design elements will have challenge to migrate:
• Email Enables Lists.
• The “In Progress” workflow tasks, will have challenge to migrate.
• SharePoint Web Analytics system is not available in the newer version now. It’s been replaced by new 2013 search service. The previous analytics reports will not be imported into new version.
• Some of Templates are removed and not supported in the newer version
   
  5) Migration Planning Challenges
   

• SharePoint Migration Project becomes complex if you have Applications/Sub sites to be migrated in hundreds/thousands, and content size is huge, you need to better plan such migration projects. Large migration projects are generally distributed in smaller migration lots for ease in migration, but managing multiple migration-lots with multiple migration-teams is another challenge.
• SharePoint Web Application Migration prioritization is a big question – whether to migrate complex application lot first, which will increase the confidence of the migration team and user community, or Plan for simple SharePoint OOB template base application migration, which will migrate quickly and can be released to user community. Normally this decision is driven by business or User requirements.
• Setting up the environment for Migration & Testing is a challenge. If requirement is for migrating multiple multilingual applications, than you need to verify Migration Tool capability for such requirements.
• Consider content Migration Time for large Content database with large size attachments, this typically takes significant time while migrating content with Migration Tool.
• As Migration progresses, you need to plan for Farm Design & Topology, Taxonomy, Capacity Planning, Scalability Requirement, Backup and Disaster management, User Training etc.