SharePoint migrations with Quest Solutions

Good day. My name is Bryan Patton. I'm joined here by Ghazwan Khairi And today, we're going to talk a little bit about SharePoint. So Ghaz, want to kind of start it off, how long you been working with SharePoint? Oh man. I have been working with SharePoint since 2003 came out. My first job was migrations of Lotus Notes databases into SharePoint 2003. And I used to put SharePoint pages in custom mode and put some JavaScript on it. That was my first job. Now, the platforms of SharePoint have changed over the years. I've seen a lot more customers adopting Office 365, or Microsoft 365. SharePoint is used as the core for teams, OneDrive for Business, a lot of the different subsystems. What are some different challenges, or the biggest challenges you're seeing with our customers that need to get to the new platforms? Well, the challenges are getting less and less. So if you're going to SharePoint 2010 from say, SharePoint 2007, then you're worried about a lot of customizations that you've had in your environment. Now, as we iterate through more advanced features of SharePoint or more advanced releases of SharePoint, then the customizations are less, but the content is a lot more. So the challenges are more around content, making sure that the content is placed in the right place. But as far as customizations and things like that, we're not seeing a lot of it. What we're seeing is the volume of SharePoint content that's being pushed or volume of content that's being pushed to SharePoint, or SharePoint Online, or Office 365 content in general. Is there any content that's more problematic to move to Microsoft 365 than others? Most of it is easy, where you're going to have problems as if you're migrating, say, from a file share over to SharePoint or OneDrive. Then the file server structure, the way you name files, can or may not be accepted by SharePoint. For example, you can't have a dollar sign in a file in SharePoint. Or you can't have a folder with a specific name uploaded to SharePoint. Or if your file is more than x number of characters, SharePoint is just not going to accept it. Or you can't upload an executable file to SharePoint, because SharePoint thinks it's harmful. So if you're going from SharePoint to SharePoint, if it already resides in SharePoint, no problem. The next SharePoint version will take it. But when you come from different data sources or different sources, that's when you may have some challenges. But they're minimal. I mean, the ones I mentioned are probably 80% off them. Now, I know people have to move to the latest, greatest versions. And I know with COVID 19 that ingestion rates have been throttled by Microsoft. So how can we help out and best prepare for throttling to kind of keep the projects going forward to move stuff to Microsoft 365 for the best experience possible. Yeah. Well, we have the tools for sure. We have all the tools that migrate the content. But where we add value is, say, in our services organization or just when customers have what's called a migration factory. Or basically, multiple migration jobs defined for either throttling purposes, or security purposes, or sensitive content purposes, or just phasing out the migration so that you have, say, 10 different machines running various migrations, so that you are 100% migration utilized if something goes wrong on one server, other servers are still moving. It's a factory, right? You want to make sure that all lines of your factory are 100% efficient. If something goes wrong one place, you hope it's not going to affect the next line. But you parallel-y can still perform different migrations. And that's where our services department kind of shines, as we come with the expertise of the process of how we best migrate content to Office 365. And are there any other different [INAUDIBLE] you feel that we have with our services organization versus maybe some of our competitors? Well, you know, like I said, so setting up a whole migration factory is definitely one thing. We can help customers define the project in general, pick and choose the top five use cases that will cover 90% of your content migration scenarios. Define the roles for who's going to be performing the migrations. We normally, our service department will create a SharePoint site collection in your target environments so that everybody, all entities, all stakeholders, go to this one place, central place, to see what's going on from a project standpoint. Our services department has seen a lot of errors and issues in the past, so they are well aware of them and will document this information as we see them, so that when we hand off project to customers, they're up and running on their own. So from a validation standpoint, we have the process down. We've seen a lot of ups and downs with SharePoint migration, so we will help you keep your calm and perform the migration on time. So that's where we kind of shine, is we have expertise in the process itself, so that it's efficient and we're migrating the content. Any tool will do the migration. But it's really the process and the individuals you have around it. What are your recommendations about how to best manage once you migrated to the new environment? Any kind of gotchas or dings to consider? Well, obviously, and Quest can help with a lot of that as well, but governance is definitely a key factor. When we are often looking at migrations, our customers are looking to migrate, the number one question is, do I migrate permissions? When customers ask me that question, I ask them back, do you want to migrate permissions? Because it's much easier to define a governance strategy on a blank SharePoint site or site collection that defines who gets access to what, as opposed to push content or push permissions from source to target. So governance is definitely one aspect in which Quest can help from an auditing standpoint, from a governance standpoint, as well. And governance can mean different things. So Quest in the works of putting up a new module in our on demand offering that is actually called On Demand Governance. So we can walk you through a lifecycle of provisioning, and testing, and de-provisioning the different workloads of Office 365. So I say governance, backup and recovery, management, license management. Are we using the SharePoint sites? Are we using OneDrive? Are we using Teams? All that is part of what Quest can help and how we can help customers achieve efficiency with Office 365, in general. All right. Thank you Ghaz. I really appreciate your time today. And thank you all for watching.