Planning Your Migration to SharePoint OnlineChristian BuckleyOffice 365 MVP andManaging Director, Americas at GTconsult

@buckleyplanet

Christian BuckleyManaging Director, Americas

www.buckleyplanet.com

@buckleyplanet

cbuck@gtconsult.com

About GTconsult

Questions we’ll answer:Is the move toward the cloud inevitable?

What are my options?

What are the best practices for migration?

What are the platform limitations?

Are there ways to improve performance?

What is driving migrations?1

Collaboration has evolved

We’re moving from these “systems of record” to a more

social, collaborative “systems of engagement” model

~ John Mancini, CEO of AIIM.org

SharePoint Growth & Evolution

SharePoint Releases Metadata

Content

Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will grow

$47.4 billion in

2013

more than $107

billion in 2017

http://www.eweek.com/small-business/public-it-cloud-services-spending-to-reach-108-billion-by-2017-idc.html

Organizing for the Cloud

As SharePoint continues to expand its footprint, companies are demanding flexible architectures to help them better meet internal and external collaboration needs

• Reducing costs• Reducing headcount• Doing more with less• Focusing less on traditional IT

activities and more on activities that will help drive the business forward

Why are some organizations delaying their move to the cloud?

Reasons for Delay• Key on premises features not yet available

• Concerns over time and cost of re-architecting business-critical systems

• Risk associated with potentially unreliable Internet connections

• Dependence on third parties to manage servers

• An improving coexistence story

Not everything can be moved to the cloud

Is there risk in moving my data to the cloud?

According to a 2013 Forbes survey:

of workers used an unsanctioned cloud service for document storage in the last 6 months41%

87%$1.8

of these workers knew their company had policies forbidding such practices

(billion) estimated annual cost to remedy the data loss

New Mobile Survey Reveals 41% of Employees Are Deliberately Leaking Confidential Data http://onforb.es/18h92Nv

Building TrustAccording to IDC:

• 74% expect their cloud service to be able to move a cloud offering back on-premise if needed.

• 63% expect to have a single major cloud service provider.

• 67% expect to purchase a wide variety of services from a single vendor.

• 84% want an established relationship with a vendor to trust them as a cloud service provider.

2 What is the right path to the cloud?

It depends…

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4633.what-is-infrastructure-as-a-service.aspx

Build

Buy

In HouseOut Source

Partner Hosted Private Cloud

• Dedicated environment

• Externally hosted

• Externally or internally managed

• Internally designed

Self Hosted Private Cloud

• Dedicated environment

• Internally hosted

• Internally managed

• Internally designed

Shared or Dedicated Public Cloud

• Shard or dedicated environment

• Externally hosted

• Externally managed

• Externally designed

Dedicated Public Cloud

• Partially or fully dedicated

• Externally hosted

• Externally or internally managed

• Minimal customization

Traditional on premises

Move to the Cloud on your terms

What about my existing investments in SharePoint on prem?

• Most SharePoint deployments have included customizations to meet critical business needs• User Management & Administration• Security and Compliance• Auditing, Reporting, Alerting• User Adoption, Records• Branding, etc…

• Consider the business problems you’ve already invested in solving

O365 and On PremWhat you get:• Search

• BCS

• Duet integration (SAP)

What you do NOT get:• Global navigation

• Global site directory

• Combined social/newsfeed experience

• Blended search experience

• Auto-deployment of branding, solutions, content types, taxonomy/metadataChris O’Brien’s blog http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2014/02/office-365-sharepoint-hybrid-what-you-do-and-do-not-

get.html

3 What is the right migration method?

On Premises Cloud

1. Migration

On Premises Cloud

2. User-driven (osmosis)

3. Phased

On Premises Cloud

4. Hybrid transition

On Premises Cloud

ADAzure ADADFS

Migration Methodology

Methodology used internally at Microsoft

Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle

Five things you should consider before making the move:

1 – Collaboration & Content Strategy

2- Create a SharePoint Inventory

Create a SharePoint Inventory

URLs

Site Collection Name

Site Collection Size

Sub site count

Large Lists

Document Versions

Customizations

Site Location/position

Content DB – Size, Number

Site Collections per DB

Duplicate or Orphaned Site Collections

My Sites – Content DB, SizeSharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limitshttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

3 - Plan to Leverage New Functionality

Community sites

Managed Navigation

Social Features

Mobile Devices

Deprecated Site Definitions

New functionality can significantly increase potential adoption if used well:• Managed Metadata & Navigation –

find relevant information faster!• “New” file storage and sharing

capabilities

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261834(v=office.15).aspx

4 - Develop Information Architecture (IA) Evaluate current business

process

Consider existing site structures

Departmental/team reorganization

Publishing requirements

Search/findability

Navigation

Content Growth

“Over half feel they would be 50% more productive with enhanced workflow, search, information reporting, and automated document creation tools” 1

1 – The SharePoint Puzzle – adding the missing pieces, AIIM, 2012

5 - Assess Your Migration Options3rd Party Tools?

Out of the Box?

Getting Ready to Migrate

Strategy & Inventory

Updated Information Architecture & New Features

Prepare - Reorganization?

Prepare - Migrate, archive, or leave behind?

OOTB vs. 3rd Party Migration Tools

Advantages of a Migration ToolSkip SharePoint versions e.g. 2007 straight to 2013

Site collection-specific vs. content DB

Reorganization, splitting sites & lists taxonomy, permissions, content types

Re-template sites

Implement a customized migration or upgrade strategy

Support for Workflow

Remember to prioritize your plansDetermine which sites, site collections, and solutions should be moved first

Organize your information architecture, map the old system to the new

Select test sites, use UAT to refine your plans

Determine the right migration approach for each site and site collection

ManualScripted3rd party toolAssisted (partner or Microsoft)

4 What are the SPO migration limitations?

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Limited APIs. Migrations to on-premises and private cloud (e.g. Azure/Amazon/O365-D) implementations of SharePoint support the use of the full SharePoint Server Object Model, the richest API available for SharePoint, or a thin web services layer that exposes the SharePoint Server Object Model (Metalogix Extensions Web Services/MEWS), for both reading, and writing SharePoint Content.

Due to the multi-tenant nature of SPO, Microsoft cannot expose the full SharePoint Object Model in SPO.

Limited automation and controls around migration and provisioning.

Microsoft currently expose three, relatively limited API’s that are useful for migrations: • The Client Side Object Model

(CSOM) • The Native Web Services (NWS) API • The REST based interfaces to the

CSOM

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to connect at the Farm/Tenant level (CSOM) - With the full SharePoint Object Model or MEWS, users can connect at the Web Application or Farm level. With the CSOM adapter users cannot connect at the closest equivalent, which is the Tenant level

• Users have to create Site Collections in the SPO admin page prior to connecting to them.

• Using 3rd party migration tools, users may have to create a separate connection for each Site collection in SPO. Users are unable to browse/search for all root level Site Collections, and may require more steps to promote Sites to Site Collections.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to preserve Item IDs in lists

• Lists with dependencies on other lists such as Lookup columns rely on Item IDs in the Lookup lists.

• Because the CSOM does not support retaining the Item ID of list items, some 3rd party tools have created workarounds that may impact performance.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Copying MySites can only be done one MySite at a time, and does not include User Profile information.

• Unlike on-prem to on-prem migrations where MySites can be moved in a single operation, in SPO admins must first create each MySite.

• Admins then need to connect to each MySite Site Collection separatey, and then copy the content from the source, pasting it into the target MySite.

• Admins cannot copy MySite profile information.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Versioning limitations in the CSOM API.

• No support for migration of minor versions of documents

• Authorship information for rejected versions in a document library with approval is lost.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Nintex workflows cannot yet be migrated to Office 365 due to these same CSOM limitations.

Nintex workflows must be recreated using the Nintex SPO offering to the best extent as possible.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Most on premises 3rd party solutions are either not available in SPO, or their functionality is greatly reduced

Work with vendor to understand product roadmap and capabilities. Other options are to build using out of the box capability.

SPO Limitations

Limitation Impact

Inability to troubleshoot issues Required to work through Microsoft support and SLAs. Retrieving a correlation ID for a error could take days/weeks

5 Are there limits to migration performance?

SPO Performance

SPO is on the open internet, and is a multi-tenant environment.Microsoft utilizes a number of methods to protect SPO customer environments and the integrity of these server farms.Based on performance benchmarking by SharePoint ISV Metalogix, there is an impact of between 40% and 45% on the performance of migrations to SPO because of some of these necessary protection mechanisms.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

User and Tenant-based throttling, which ensures that no single user or tenant can perform so many simultaneous operations that it would cause performance issues for other tenants*

Large or complex migration jobs can be cut off mid-migration.

*For more information, see HTTP Request Throttling in SharePoint 2010 which still applies to 2013.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Farm-based throttling. If a SPO farm becomes unhealthy due to extreme levels of activity, Microsoft may throttle migrations to SPO and not permit them to continue until farm health returns to normal.

Any migration job can be throttle at any time of day (usually during peak time. This makes migration performance extremely unpredictable, and variable based on time of day, day of week, and other variables out of your control.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Virus scanning SPO requires stringent virus scanning to ensure all tenants on the shared farm are protected, but it slows down migrations as each document migrated must be scanned.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Hardware-based load balancing determines which Web Front End (WFE) server in the farm to route incoming traffic, based on how busy any given WFE is at that time

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Third-party commercial denial of service monitoring platform for monitoring and throttling capabilities*

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

*See The Office 365 Trust Center for more information.

SPO Performance

Mechanism Impact

Third-party commercial denial of service monitoring platform for monitoring and throttling capabilities*

This can slow down migrations that are large (content) or complex (many items with multiple metadata fields, and/or many versions)

SPO Performance

Microsoft now offers a new Office 365 migration API that moves files through Azure using a dedicated path.

Most of the migration tool vendors now take advantage of this “conduit” to migrate files/content by packaging up exports of your content and sending them to Azure, and from there Office 365 can import the data more quickly.

Works for SharePoint files, file shares, and person file shares, but still requires you to build out your site collections, information architecture, etc.

SPO Performance

Due to the migration performance, it is recommended that you take a gradual migration approach

May involve migrating one division at a time, and going live with that division.

Allows you to assess the impact on your business users and your helpdesk after moving one group of people to a new user interface.

Also allows you to use focus groups to determine which features you would like to implement as you gradually migrate the business to SPO.

Final Thoughts

Things to consider:

Be clear on your system constraints

Understand and prioritize your key use cases

Determine what should be local, what can be in the cloud, what should be available via mobile devices

Constantly review and take action on what can be automated and optimized

Resources• The Definitive Guide to Better SharePoint Migration Planning http://ow.ly/KsuA7

• Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle http://bit.ly/1ATXECn

• Beyond Migration: How to Transform Your SharePoint Environment http://ow.ly/Omvhv

• Defending Your Office 365 Data: Five Threats That Microsoft Can't Defend Against, But You Can http://ow.ly/OlQIH

• Top 8 Migration Tips for Office 365 http://bit.ly/1DmwwQw

• SharePoint On-Premises Or In The Cloud? Why not both? (John Ross) http://bit.ly/1pl2UOY

• Office 365 and Hybrid Solutions (Scott Hoag and Dan Usher) http://slidesha.re/1r6oIeP

• Your SharePoint Path Forward: On Prem, Cloud, or Hybrid http://bit.ly/1or8ngE

• SharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limits (TechNet) http://bit.ly/QC7mK1

• Plan for SharePoint 2013 (TechNet) http://bit.ly/VTcuuY

• Demystifying OneDrive for Business http://bit.ly/1rCyYPR

• Migrate Cloud Files to SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business (free tool) http://bit.ly/1LfLdqQ

• Yes, You Can Move Straight From SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 http://bit.ly/1lyyg3L

Office 365 Deployment Centerhttps://deploy.office.com/

• Provisioning help• On-boarding guidance• Case studies• Best Practices• Partner services funding

Thank you!

www.buckleyplanet.com

@buckleyplanet

cbuck@gtconsult.com