4 Easy Steps to Migrate Data to SharePoint Online

The powerful document management and storage system, SharePoint has many functionalities and features that make any SharePoint developer to go weak on knees. Microsoft always makes some modifications in SharePoint to launch a new version with some new functionality. There are many organizations that still work on the older version of SP and want to move to the newest version. However, to migrate to the next level of SP, some preparations are required to make for a hassle-free migration.

Now that SP is up and running in your organization and you want to migrate the content to SharePoint Online, which is not an extraordinary process but needs to consider few things in mind before making a move.

Simply put, SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that helps organizations to share and collaborate data with users within or outside the organization among colleagues, partners, and customers. SharePoint Online allows you to access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere, be at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.

First things first, before getting into building and configuring organization’s SharePoint Online environment, ask yourself a few questions. For example, how your organization going to manage sites and users? Do you require making any customization's or building any solutions?

The planning process can be divided into four easy steps that will help you to guide the process and make the right decisions. Also, it will help you to get acquainted with SharePoint Online.

1.    Setting up SharePoint Online environment-  To set up your SP Online environment, SharePoint Online Admin comes into picture to manage site collections and global settings in SP admin center. Putting the hat of the SharePoint Online admin, one can use the SharePoint admin center for a number of tasks:

•    Creating and managing site collections along with allocating and monitoring site collection storage
•    Overseeing permissions and users. And securing content on sites
•    Managing user profiles and configuring personal sites (My Sites)
•    Enabling and configuring specific SharePoint Online features or global settings

Another way to set up your SP Online environment is to first store your files. And for that purpose, the best ways to do is to use OneDrive for Business and an Office 365 team site together. This is an ideal setting for a small business with a less number of employees. Moreover, Office 365 includes a basic team site for small businesses to get started. This will allow them to immediately start storing files in OneDrive and collaborating on files in team site.

2.    Planning sites and managing users-  The most important thing while migrating to SP Online is to manage sites and site collections successfully because it will ultimately give you happy users. To achieve this, a well planned and sustainable approach to site and user management is required. To understand the process and get the desirable results, there are some key tasks and concepts one can implement to plan sites and manage users. The SharePoint Online admin can perform the following tasks:

•    Create, delete, and manage site collections
•    Allocate and monitor site collection storage
•    Grant access to site collection administrators
•    Set the default SharePoint site
•    Plan for multilingual sites
•    Manage user profiles
•    Plan and manage features such as managed metadata
•    Turn external sharing on or off

3.    Organizing site content and planning content features-Now comes the content part. Technically when the content of a site is organized and have an easy navigation, it becomes easier for a site owner to maintain and manage, and proves to be more productive for site users. For a site collection admin or a site owner, it is absolutely necessary to build an effective site strategy before creating a site. That will depend on the size of organization and the volume of content that needs to be put on the site. If the content is in colossal amount, sub sites will be required to be created under the main site in order to organize the vast number of content. There are many possible ways you can choose to organize sub sites, putting them under different categories, such as:

•    Team or department
•    Content category
•    Project name
•    Customer sections
•    Permission level or sensitivity

4.    Customizing sites with solutions & apps- To customize your team site and share files with external stakeholders doesn’t come that easy because branding and customizing SharePoint Online is a little different from SharePoint Server products. The reason is it keeps on updating with new features on a regular basis. This may affects some types of customization's. However, Microsoft always recommends certain techniques for customization and branding of your site which are easily available and help to streamline the specific purpose. To understand it better, if there are structural changes to be made to the master pages, it is almost imperative to stay updated with the ongoing product modifications applied to SharePoint Online. The easiest way to stay informed is to watch the Office 365 Road map and monitor the Office 365 Blog. One can also preview the changes within the portal by going to SharePoint Online admin center and enabling ‘Preview Features’.

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