SharePoint migrations are complex and risky projects, and you need to plan effectively. Let’s explore pre-migration readiness in more detail below.
In the course of your assessment, you will use various tools to collect relevant configuration and usage information about your existing deployment. If Migration Suite for SharePoint is your migration solution of choice, you have a few additional assessment tools at your disposal to simplify and automate pre-migration analysis, such as the built-in pre-migration report.
The pre-migration assessment report enables you to analyze the contents and configuration of a particular source SharePoint site (or set of sites), compare it against the intended SharePoint target and produce a report on potential pitfalls you may need to address.
There are a number of checks you can choose to perform on your site.
- The first group (Analyze Sites) is concerned with site configuration aspects such as site and list templates, features and web parts in use.
- Analyze Lists & Items inspects the site content to identify oversized lists, documents, etc. Typically, you will want to leave the checks selected by default for your analysis. If you are unsure of what any particular check will do, click on the question mark to the right – this will present a pop up description of the item.
- The target location is optional. If you provide a valid site URL, the tool will retrieve a list of SharePoint templates, features and web parts available for this site and compare it against the source site configuration. If left blank, the comparison will be against a list of standard SharePoint templates, features and web parts. This will be used to identify custom components that will need to be deployed to an out-of-the-box SharePoint environment in order for the site to properly deploy.
As with most operations in Migration Suite, you can run the tool interactively or generate a command line script to schedule the report (useful for large site collections).
The end result will be an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs corresponding to the selected checks. Therefore, by default you will have tabs for site and list templates, features, web parts, site workflows and list analysis.
You can probably see by now that the pre-migration report in Migration Suite can be a valuable assessment tool no matter which migration approach you subscribe to. If you want to evaluate it for you migration project, get a trial copy of Migration Suite for SharePoint and get 30 days of unlimited pre-migration reporting for free.
