SharePoint Online

Being a Cloud-based solution, SharePoint Online offers businesses all the benefits associated with the Cloud, including anytime-anywhere availability, hassle-free maintenance, and significant cost savings. It relieves you from the burden and cost of maintaining your hardware infrastructure and staff and frees you from timely maintenance in terms of upgrades. Thus, it’s ideal for businesses with smaller budgets and those which don’t need significant customizations. 

​

​

​

Benefits of Migrating to SharePoint Online 

• • • It’s a significantly cost-effective option with no cost for infrastructure and staff. 

    • Ideal for organizations that don’t have a dedicated team to manage SharePoint Implementations. 

    • Offers all the Cloud-related benefits, including automatic version updates, enhanced collaboration, hassle-free external user management, cost-effectivity, and certain features that will never be available on On-Premises versions like PowerApps, Delve, Flow, etc.

​

​

What are the critical steps for a successful migration?

No matter what your reasons for migrating to SharePoint and OneDrive, the process can seem overwhelming. You have so much to consider: What content do you have, and where is it stored? What will you move? What needs extra consideration, like regulatory compliance? How will you get data from file shares or third-party cloud apps into SharePoint and OneDrive? And those are just some of the logistical aspects—you also need to think about things like timing for the migration and how to communicate what’s happening to the rest of the organization. To help, we’ve outlined some critical steps for you to consider for a successful migration.

​

Consider your current environment

 

The first step is to understand your current environment. Many organizations have a combination of solutions: file servers with many years’ worth of data, third-party storage solutions holding archived data for legal or regulatory reasons, or third-party cloud storage apps adopted by specific business units. In considering your current environment, you’ll want to review:

 

• Where your data is located, and whether you need it. As a first step you need to determine what content you have, what you need to keep, and what you want to get rid of.

• What content people are using. You’ll also want to understand how people across the organization are using the file shares or cloud storage apps to do their daily jobs, so you can plan around the way people work to avoid disrupting productivity.

• Who has access to what. You probably have certain groups who need to share a lot of information with external parties—clients, partners, or vendors. You’ll need to know what access has been granted so you can ensure they still have access once the content is migrated.

• How you want to structure things going forward. Once you’ve collected that information from the business, you can reconsider your file and permissions structures for more streamlined administration and better security.

• Whether you need help. All of this can be daunting, so consider enlisting support: Focus IT Support can help you get started by helping to assess your environment and develop a plan, Focus IT Support can help you migrate your Small Business Server file shares,  or other cloud sharing solutions to Microsoft 365.