“Movin’ On Up” by Ja’net DuBois was a theme song for The Jeffersons and additionally should be for Microsoft SharePoint. As clients know, SharePoint is constantly changing and clients encounter moving up on versions through deployments and migrations. While Bamboo Solutions continues to deliver SharePoint WebParts in our Product Catalog, we also offer custom SharePoint development through our Services group. The growth of SharePoint has seen numerous iterations and changes from Microsoft for each new version of SharePoint, which has produced challenges for IT staff when migrating and moving to a newer version of SharePoint. Currently, SharePoint 2010 is coming to End of Life on 10/13/2020 for Extended Support. To complicate matters Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 support will end on 01/14/2020, which a lot of SharePoint servers still reside on as a Windows Server OS. These End of Life support and Extended Support bring a lot of IT Departments to decisions to upgrade and migrate Windows Server and Microsoft SharePoint. The options for SharePoint range from SharePoint 2016 to SharePoint 2019, and Office 365.  Any version of SharePoint before SharePoint 2016 does not have a direct migration path for success to SharePoint 2016, 2019, or Office 365. This can result in many challenges throughout organizations that either does not have the expertise or the bandwidth to manage these migration/upgrade projects.  Do you know what is on your current SharePoint farm? Do you feel comfortable knowing that you’ll get your upgrade and migration done correctly including workflows and data? 

The good news is that Bamboo Solutions is there to help not only in assisting in a migration strategy for your SharePoint environment including data but additionally the best approach to rebuilding your SharePoint portal. A proper method and recommended Bamboo Solutions’ best practice for a SharePoint migration starts with a SharePoint migration discovery. This includes a review of the current farm infrastructure, content, and security that we put into 4 phases. The process we’ve used across clients are identified by our Analyze, Insight, Plan, and Migrate phased process. Bamboo Solutions helps you determine what can and can’t migrate. What is out of date?  What is abandoned or forgotten information that might not need to migrate? What solutions are sandboxed and possibly won’t work in a newer version of SharePoint?  What will or won’t work on Modern pages? Is your company ready to roll out a new portal with proper training? These all assist in identifying the overall migration scope while ensuring that you are migrating over the most useful data and information for your corporate SharePoint portal. If moving to SharePoint on-premise this same pre-migration discovery assists in identifying the proper farm requirements for hardware and storage to ensure your farm and architecture will support the current SharePoint environment and future growth of SharePoint in your organization. 

Analyze is the process of discovering what is in the current SharePoint environment. How many site collections, how many sites, lists, libraries, amount of data, custom permissions, workflows, custom coded solutions, etc? Knowing this information is crucial to determining what makes up the current farm and SharePoint portal so that we can ensure we encapsulate and accurately account for everything that is on the current farm. Bamboo Solutions creates and utilizes a pre-migration checklist that assists in documenting our findings throughout the Analyze phase. This document is a living and breathing document through the process that we utilize and helps account for any challenges or items that we mark as possible issues for a migration to a newer version of SharePoint. A detailed inventory helps facilitate decisions with clients on data, applications, and SharePoint-related content and initiates a higher level of effort for migrations as we work through the process. Our team works directly with you to discuss and ensure that all information is reviewed, analyzed thoroughly, and accepted into a final migration scope as the outcome. 

Insight is our process of working with the clients and the pre-migration checklist so that you fully understand the complexity of migration.  Bamboo Solutions wants to ensure and help clients understand issues that can arise during migration from security, checked-out files, workflows, farm solutions, and sandbox solutions. Our team of SharePoint experts will help uncover these issues that can arise during migration so that an upgrade and migration can be a smooth transition resulting in a successful deployment of SharePoint within your organization. Our consultants will work directly with you through the SharePoint Pre-migration checklist to confirm with you and your stakeholders what needs to be migrated and what doesn’t. This can range from unused lists that date back with a timeline from 2 years ago, 3 years ago to 8 years ago that could contain information not relevant to the organization anymore as a few examples. This is the type of insight that can help facilitate a cleaner, quicker, and leaner migration so that unnecessary information is not brought over to a new instance of SharePoint. 

The Plan phase is an important phase that helps us know how much, and how long and provides an accurate timeline in our Sprint cycles of when migrations can be accomplished and achieved. We like to call this the overall project scope so that your organization can understand that it will take X number of weeks to create a new SharePoint portal, build-out departments, and work with your team to migrate the data, remediation, and testing during the migration process. 

Migration is the last part of the migration project that results in data contained in lists and libraries in your new SharePoint portal providing you and your company with a new fresh and updated portal for collaboration, Microsoft stack integration, and a one-stop-shop for company information.   

Are you ready for the upcoming upgrade and migration of SharePoint? Take the worry out of your SharePoint upgrade and migration projects. Utilize the 80+ years of combined SharePoint knowledge at Bamboo Solutions. We are not just the leader in SharePoint portal solutions but have a diversified skill set of all things SharePoint! Schedule a consultation call today to get to know our team, our SCRUM Methodology, and our vast knowledge of SharePoint upgrade strategies and migration plans! We look forward to assisting current clients and future clients, so join the Bamboo Solutions family today!