On Thursday, we hosted a webinar around migrating to SharePoint 2013, which walked through the general guidelines and common pitfalls to avoid so that the transition will be successful. With the arrival of SharePoint 2013, many organizations are preparing to make the move to the new version, but may not be sure how to properly prepare and plan for the migration.
During the session, Suzanne George, Senior Technical Architect at Perficient, shared her experience upgrading sites to SharePoint 2013, and provided insight on what has made those implementations a success – and what to avoid. First, Suzanne discussed why to migrate to SharePoint 2013. Those reasons include:
- SharePoint 2013 is versatile
- SharePoint 2013 is social
- SharePoint 2013 has options
- SharePoint 2013 has apps
A word of advice from Suzanne, “Do not upgrade based on Microsoft’s release schedule. Upgrades should be driven by your business strategy.” Your organization’s motives to upgrade may encompass SharePoint maturity, governance, size of the organization, and anticipated growth, among others.
Suzanne went on to discuss how to migrate to SharePoint 2013, building a business justification for the migration, and providing more advice along the way. One tip that seems painfully obvious – yet many companies fail to properly do – is, “With SharePoint, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” She went on to discuss roadmap planning, cost considerations, and a form SharePoint migration communications plan.
She wrapped up by talking through the deployment, including guidance around execution and the next steps.
If you missed the webinar, you can listen to the session in its entirety, along with the Q&A portion, here:
You can also review the webinar slides, along with the poll results:
