We always recommend running a pilot prior to launching your Microsoft Teams migration with SharePoint development. This test run will help iron out any issues in your process and minimize any business disruption.
There are many variables that impact migration speed (throughput), including your infrastructure capacity, tool and overall burden on the Microsoft system at the time of the migration. A pilot is the most accurate way to get an estimate of your throughput.
Not only will it give you the most accurate picture of your migration speed, which will be helpful during the planning process, but it will also be a template for how you communicate and work with your users.
The Process:
Install FLY Platform (or other migration solution) on any on-premises or cloud server (e.g. Azure). Establish connections to your environments.
Dictate performance settings to increase or decrease threads based on your available server resources and best practices.
Choose when and what Teams you would like to migrate for your Communicate with the relevant pilot users. Create pilot user accounts in the target tenant and assign licenses. Configure your migration job and determine your migration policy for conflict resolution of containers and content — as well as user, column, content, and template mappings.
migration workload
Consider using a migration database to see detailed performance and throttling reporting. Execute and validate if all content has been moved over and locate any unsupported elements for SharePoint development. Record the performance metrics to accurately scope estimated time for phases. Gather feedback from pilot users.
There are generally two ways for a migration product to connect to your environment: creating a service account or an app profile. Some vendors may only support creating a service account, which is a legacy method of authentication that should only be used in special circumstances (for example, if it supports a migration workload like migrating Wikis that the app profile does not). Creating an app profile is not only more secure but it will be less throttled and make your migration faster.
Performance
Every vendor has their own specifications and guidance for how to determine which performance level is appropriate for your migration. Generally, an agent machine can perform at the product’s highest level with the hardware and network specifications above.
Pilot Selection and Mapping
For the pilot, we recommend selecting a small sample of 5 to 10 Teams with a diverse group of users. That are willing to provide helpful feedback on the process. Oftentimes, we find the IT department and one other department with some power users fits the bill with SharePoint development.
A pilot should not exceed more than 10% of the overall migration scope. It is a best practice to run the migration during non- business hours overnight or during the weekend with SharePoint development.
If your users are willing to test and provide feedback on the new environment. Even when they know it will be re-migrated. That is a preferable option to moving your pilot to production immediately. As you will not have users working in two production environments simultaneously.
We also recommend ensuring your pilot includes a few more challenging or advanced scenarios. With a diversity of content types (see planning section for more details on advanced settings and mappings). But try to avoid migrating Teams with sensitive data or external users for your pilot.
Execute, Validate, & Record
If your job had exceptions, record the error label and reference the migration tool user guide to troubleshoot as appropriate.
Once you have recorded your “in real life” speed or throughput, you can better plan how much content and mappings should be in each migration phase and how many phases you will need before completing the job.
Sites vs. Site Collections
Regarding structure in SharePoint Online, it’s easy to get confused between a Site and Site Collection. A Site is a website that can contain different web parts such as document libraries with SharePoint development. SharePoint sites can have one or more pages to display content to end users.
Site collections, on the other hand, are a collection of SharePoint sites. A site collection contains a top-level site and subsites below that. Another thing to note about Site collections is that each site. Collection has unique site properties (navigation, permissions, site templates, etc).
Now that we’ve discussed the differentiators with sites and site collections. The question becomes “Should I create a site or a site collection?”
A good rule of thumb is to create a site collection if you have multiple business units/departments. In a large organization or if you want to separate SharePoint administrative functions. If you’re a small organization, it’s a best practice to create a site rather than a site collection.
SharePoint allows for the creation of different types of sites:
Intranet-Related Templates
Classic Sites: You can create a site using a classic SharePoint template. This will allow you to create a team site (without an Microsoft 365 group). Document center, enterprise wiki, or a publishing portal. This is something most customers move away from once. They’ve become acclimated to Microsoft 365. Though from time to time we still see customers. Using classic sites because of supported customization.
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