PREPARING TO MOVE TO
SHAREPOINT ONLINE
SharePoint Saturday Albany – February 1, 2014
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

ABOUT ME - ANDREA M. MONDELLO
•
Founder and Principal Consultant at Hudson Valley SharePoint based in Poughkeepsie, NY
•
Using and administering SharePoint since the early “SharePoint Team Services” days
•
Worked in a variety of verticals including digital advertising, magazine publishing, pharma,
accounting, and international development
•
Favorite quote, other than “These aren‟t the droids you‟re looking for” is:
“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to
give that to them.
By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” –
Steve Jobs
amondello@hudsonvalleysharepoint.com
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WHAT ARE THE OBJECTIVES OF TODAY‟S PRESENTATION?
• If you are getting ready to migrate to SharePoint online, I‟ll give you some
insights and tips based on real-world experience to MAKE YOUR MIGRATION
SUCCESSFUL.
• If you‟re struggling with the question of whether or not to move to SharePoint
Online, the material I cover will give you some additional perspective on
whether the service is for you.
• And if you‟re already migrated to SharePoint Online but aren‟t happy yet with
the results, I hope you‟ll get some ideas to help you get that project back on
track!
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

Communications
WHAT MAKES FOR
A SUCCESSFUL
Strategic Thinking
MIGRATION TO
SHAREPOINT
ONLINE?
Technical Details
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

Communications
WHAT MAKES FOR
A SUCCESSFUL
MIGRATION TO
SHAREPOINT
ONLINE?
• Selling the cloud
• Setting realistic
expectations
• Sharing the Vision
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SELLING THE SAAS CLOUD – WHO‟S THE AUDIENCE?
• Hardware
• Manpower
• Budgeting
• Licensing
• Change focus from
managing
technology to
managing
information
• Tap IT expertise in
other ways
• Platform stability,
99.98% uptime,
disaster recovery
• Scalability
• Shorter time to ramp
up new projects
Finance
Strategic
Managerial
• Always the latest
technology
• Anywhere, anytime
availability
• Community resources
Internal
Customers
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SELLING THE SAAS CLOUD – FAQS
•
Is it secure?
• Many (large) organizations have decided after doing their homework that their information is
at least as secure with Office 365 as it was before. For most SMBs, it‟s MORE secure.
• http://trust.office365.com – look for the security whitepaper and other resources.
• There is no “100% secure” solution, only solutions of varying levels of security and cost. Balance
the risk vs. the gain.
• Are you using Dropbox? Emailing documents to your personal account? Using Google Drive?
Office 365 eliminates the need for all these unsecure solutions!
•
What if the system goes down and our data is lost? What if the vendor goes out of business?
• This is the big advantage of Office 365: it has the experience and power of Microsoft behind
it!
• If you feel you must back up your data, there are now backup solutions for Office 365.
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SELLING THE SAAS CLOUD – FAQS
•
What happens when the system goes down?
•
•
•
99.98% uptime actual record. What is your current uptime?
Balance loss of control with all the other benefits.
Have a plan in place for mission critical information. SkyDrive Pro (OneDrive for Business) is a beautiful
thing.
•
If you are having trouble reaching MSFT support, or not getting the answers you need, reach out to your
Partner. We usually get through to the technical person we need within 15 minutes, and almost always
get a resolution within a day.
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SETTING EXPECTATIONS
• Cutting edge technology requires the “latest, greatest” – no more staying on
the same version of Windows or Office for ten years…
• SAAS = things change without your permission so plan to update training
materials or even provide new classroom or remote training as needed
(recent UI change to Office Web Apps)
• You may not see cost savings the first year
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SETTING EXPECTATIONS:
Email
migration
SharePoint
migration
“Email was migrated in a week.
Why isn‟t our SharePoint
migration done, too?”
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SHARING THE VISION
• What is going to be better in our organization because we have SharePoint
Online?
• Easier access to working documents and mission critical information, especially
“on the road”
• More collaboration / fewer data silos
• Stem the tide of “knowledge leak”
• One place to see data from various systems
• Records Management
• A cool, interactive intranet
• …?
Define the Vision and sell it, but CHOOSE WISELY – you can’t do everything!
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

SHARING THE VISION
• You can oversell the benefits of SharePoint, but you can‟t talk about the
vision enough - distill it down
• “Findability, Collaboration, Integration”
• When the going gets tough, the vision sees you through.
• “We just have to power through this.”
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WHAT MAKES FOR
A SUCCESSFUL
MIGRATION TO
SHAREPOINT
ONLINE?
Strategic Thinking
•Greenfield approach
•Boundaries, Models and
Decision Frameworks
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

“The term greenfield was originally
used in construction and development
to reference land that has never been
used (e.g. green or new), where there
was no need to demolish or rebuild any
existing structures. Today, the term
greenfield project is used in many
Re-vision
industries, including software
Define system of record for data points
development where it means to start a
project without
Clean up and simplify – all systems tend to chaos over the need to consider
any prior work.”
time, and that is especially true of collaboration platforms
GREENFIELD APPROACH
•
•
•
• Re-architect with new features in mind (if you‟re not
already on SharePoint 2013)
• Reflect new organizational realities and wishes
• Don‟t bring the mess of the past into the future
• Never, ever, EVER just copy Network Shares. Ever.
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WORK THROUGH BOUNDARIES, MODELS AND DECISION
FRAMEWORKS BEFORE BUILDING ANYTHING
Vision
System &
Security
Boundaries
Regulatory &
Business
Boundaries
Conceptual
Boundaries
Design Model
Logical
Architecture
Model
How do we make
high level design
decisions?
How do we
make Logical
Architecture
decisions?
Retention Model
How do we make
content lifecycle
decisions?
Information
Model
Content
Types
Libraries
Metadata
Term
Store
Information
Management
Policies
Sites
How do we make
information
management
decisions?
Lists
Site
Collecti
ons
Security
Groups
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

I KNOW WHAT YOU‟RE THINKING…
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WHAT MAKES FOR
A SUCCESSFUL
MIGRATION TO
SHAREPOINT
ONLINE?
Technical Details
• Migration approaches
• What about taxonomy?
• Tips from the Trenches
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

MIGRATION APPROACHES
Incremental
• Migrate content in
batches (usually by
team)
• Old and new intranets
coexist and are
connected via
navigation (or federated
search)
Big Push
• Migration all content
over a very short period
of time
• Old intranet is closed to
users during migration,
and new intranet made
available once content
is ready
Start New
• Nothing is migrated from
another system
• New intranet is ready as
soon as built
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

INCREMENTAL
Use when:
•
Allows time for careful
planning and
interaction with
stakeholders
•
You are resourceconstrained
•
You have the
bandwidth to
assure the project
doesn‟t die
halfway through
•
Can drag out so long
that cost savings and
enthusiasm evaporate
You can expect
sustained support
from management
You have limited
access to
SharePoint
expertise
Fewer resources means
Requires fewer resources less attention
at any given time
Pain of changeover lasts
Allows the project group longer
to learn over time
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

BIG PUSH
Use when:
•
Pain of change is over
quickly
•
Requires a long and
thorough preparation
process
No chance of people
“going back to the old Hugh resource drain
way”
and loss of productivity
Everything fits together during the migration
period
well since it was all
build at the same time
Requires a high level of
expertise
Your organization is
willing to invest
significant effort in
the planning
process
You are in a
resource rich
environment
•
You have access
to SharePoint and
migration expertise
•
There is little to
migrate
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

START NEW
Use when:
•
A small, discreet
group of users is
asking for
SharePoint but
can‟t get approval
through official
channels
•
You want to pilot
SharePoint‟s use
before you do
anything drastic
•
You don‟t care
about your old
content – it is fine
where it is
Can get up and
Nothing initially for
running very quickly users to see and do
Few resource
requirements
Hard to justify
resources
Starting with nothing May never get out
means everything is of „pilot‟ mode
a win
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WHO DOES THE MIGRATION?
Vendor Partner or IT
Content Owners
Temps or Interns
• Have tools to make
migration faster and
more accurate
• Minimal content
owner input
• Content owners not
as familiar with
tagging and location
of content
• Know content best,
no back and forth
• Content owners
become familiar with
metadata faster
• Takes significant time
away from core work
during migration
• Lower cost
• Less disruption to
content owners
during migration,
though there is some
• Can be problematic
in terms of accuracy
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

WHAT ABOUT OUR TAXONOMY?
• Creating an organizational taxonomy is as much business process discovery
activity as it is a information architecture one.
• While many organizations could benefit from that level of detailed discovery,
making your SharePoint migration dependent on it could mean you never
get off the ground.
• As far as SharePoint is concerned, you probably only need what we like to
call a “Functional Shared Vocabulary”.
• We define that as a taxonomy that is „fit for purpose‟ (that is, for SharePoint)
and is „just good enough„ to get everyone on the same page and allow for
findability, collaboration and integration.
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

YOUR TERM STORE MIGHT LOOK LIKE THIS
Who we are
What we do
Units
Topics
Teams
Projects
Offices
Tools we use
Document
Types
Organizations
we work with
Utility
Vendors
Time
Prospects
Statuses
Clients
Countries
Donors
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

TIPS FROM THE TRENCHES
• Choose your tenant name wisely – there is NO way to change it and it HAS to show
in the URL of your SharePoint private sites.
• If you have a free trial account, do not touch the root site collection. Play around
with a test site collection, and try not to use the Content Type Hub if you don‟t
need to test that. The term store is more forgiving, so go ahead and try that out.
• You don’t need to create a Content Type Hub – it‟s already there! Unfortunately, by
default only the user who set up the tenant account can access it. He or she has
to grant access to others.
• Find it at https://[tenantName].sharepoint.com/sites/contenttypehub
• It never appears on the list of site collections in your admin panel
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

TIPS FROM THE TRENCHES
- CONTINUED
• Don’t use the “Company Administrator” Account– this account is the “primary
owner” of the root site collection when it is provisioned. It is tied to the list of Global
Administrators of your Office 365 tenant, so if you don‟t want your Global
Administrators to have full rights to your root site collection, your search center,
your content type hub and your My Site Host, make sure to switch the primary site
collection owner to another account!
• Expect timer jobs to take longer to run – workflows, email alerts take a bit longer. It
may take an hour or so for new content types published from the content type hub
to be added to subscribing site collections. Plan accordingly!
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

TIPS FROM THE TRENCHES
- CONTINUED
• Get ready to reap the benefits of the cloud work style!
Once you get into the groove of „living in the cloud‟ you will never go back!
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

Communications
WHAT MAKES FOR
A SUCCESSFUL
MIGRATION TO
SHAREPOINT
ONLINE?
• Selling the cloud
• Setting realistic expectations
• Sharing the Vision
Strategic Thinking
• Clean-slate approach
• Boundaries, Models and
Decision Frameworks
Technical Details
• Migration approaches
• What about taxonomy?
• Tips from the Trenches
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com

LET US KNOW HOW WE CAN HELP YOU ACHIEVE
FINDABILITY, COLLABORATION & INTEGRATION
www.hudsonvalleysharepoint.com