3 Reasons Your SharePoint Migration Could Fail

SharePoint for the Win. Management has spoken. Options have been reviewed. Pros and cons have been weighed and after careful consideration, you’ve decided to jump aboard the cloud train and advantage of one of the most popular collaboration and productivity applications, Microsoft SharePoint.

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And while you’re looking to reap the benefits of your new cloud application, like anytime anywhere access to information, seamless coordination between other Microsoft tools like Skype for Business and Office 365 and of course what every organization wants, predictable and manageable costs – a SharePoint migration, doesn’t come risk free (unless of course, planned carefully).

The transition to the cloud should not be discounted as an ‘easy peasy’ project. The planning and processes involved in migrating from an established infrastructure to a cloud environment is a major undertaking. If you don’t take the right steps during your SharePoint migration process – we’re talking about planning, execution AND day-day management, application performance will be significantly comprised and all of those benefits you were hoping for will turn to dust.

Here are 3 reasons your SharePoint migration could fail.

1. Your Network Isn’t Ready for SharePoint

Getting your organization migrated over to SharePoint as quickly as possible might seem like an attractive option, especially if you want to prevent employees from using unsanctioned applications, but in the long haul, it will cause more harm than good.

Not knowing whether or not your network can handle a SharePoint migration in the first place, is a step that is often overlooked. SharePoint has specific network resource requirements needed to perform optimally. And while Microsoft does a great job of outlining these specifications, if you don’t have visibility into the current status of your network, these guidelines are irrelevant.

You need a full picture of your current network activity. Which applications are using the most network resources? Do you have enough resources to allocate to SharePoint as well as your other key applications? Understanding your network as it resides today and how resources are being used is essential prior to your deployment.

2. You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See

You’re passed the first hurdle, you’ve assessed your network, and you’ve followed Microsoft’s guidelines and allocated the network resources needed for your deployment. You can wipe your hands of this project, right? Not exactly.

It’s been a couple of weeks, how do you know if SharePoint is still performing well? With new users jumping on and off your network, the hottest new applications (or iOS updates) using up precious resources and old apps becoming obsolete – your network is in constant flux.

Ongoing monitoring of your network activity is crucial. You need visibility into how well SharePoint is performing at any given time to ensure a seamless user experience and to avoid a dreaded flood of helpdesk tickets. You also need to be able to identify bandwidth hogs, unsanctioned applications (Shadow IT) and any other network activity that is or has the potential to impact performance.

3. Bandwidth Hogs are Stealing Your Resources

After a few user complaints about lousy SharePoint performance, you’ve dived into your network to analyze activity and what do you know, numerous recreational and social applications are stealing network resources from SharePoint.

While knowing how users and applications are behaving on your network is informative, the information gathered from monitoring is really only useful if you can manage it. You need the ability to control how your network resources are allocated and guarantee that there are always enough available for SharePoint.

To avoid a poor user experience, you also need to be able to set limits that will prevent non-critical traffic like recreational, social and media streaming from impacting performance.

A successful SharePoint migration is vital to your organization. To maximize the ROI of your investment you need to ensure SharePoint is delivering on its productivity and collaboration benefits. This requires exceptional application performance. With careful planning and the right tools, you can ensure every stage of your SharePoint migration goes without a hitch and with a seamless user experience.