How to get your data Office 365-ready - 1

There are several key areas to focus on when migrating content stored in SharePoint to the cloud. These include:

1. Some content will simply not function in the cloud. Office 365 offers a different set of features than on-premises SharePoint. Some page components are not available, certain types of sites don’t exist and many customizations are either deprecated or illadvised. A review of all the content pages with a focus on what will and won’t work online can result in a great deal of data storage savings as

pages are refactored to be cloud-ready. There is little point in wasting time and bandwidth trying to move items to the cloud that simply won’t function in that environment.

2. Document versions can consume a huge amount of database space. Prior to SharePoint 2013, each version of a document resulted in a duplicate of the object being stored separately in the database. Over time this can result in gigabytes of storage that serves no useful purpose. Examining each document library and modifying version control settings to truncate old versions can greatly reduce the amount of data in the current on-premises database and minimize what gets sent over the wire to Office 365.

3. Sites and workspaces that are accessed infrequently on-premises are unlikely to be accessed any more frequently in the cloud. These can either be excluded from the migration process or the content archived and the site deleted. A thorough review of existing sites by content owners often results in the discovery of many unused sites, the elimination of which can provide a tremendous amount of storage savings.

Customization will be covered in next post ..