by 
The recently launched Office 365 suite has revamped a major portion of the design and the offerings as well. One of them include the Sharepoint 2013 version which is now available as a Software As A Service , helping corporations to reduce their operational expenditure quite significantly with respect to servers, storage and other overheads and
So its quite natural that many organizations have been quick to join the bandwagon in migrating to the Sharepoint online version (Office 365). For this to be successful ,they require a cloud specialist or cloud consulting company who would clearly understand their client’s existing environment by doing an in-depth assessment of the same. This helps a long way in order to suggest a complete and actionable migration path to the client.
One such IT/cloud consulting firm, Advaiya did a complete Sharepoint migration by doing a complete profiling of the client’s environment with a framework based approach, and made recommendations to make their environment migration ready.
Their migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online included a set of steps/phases that helped them to understand the actual SharePoint needs of a client and the complexity within their environment and listed below are some of the high level migration phases for the same, which I have listed
High level migration phases for migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online
1. Analysis and Planning: The main goal is to technically analyze the source, target systems, identify the customization level, sites and sub-parts which are to be migrated. A complete planning for migration activities has to be developed. For example which content areas can be migrated through automated process and if not then what should be the best manual method.
2. Define Migration approach: Define the strategy for validation and testing of migration scenarios. Perform test migration and finalize migration strategy for production environment. With pilot testing, analyze the issues and the solution applied for the test migration, and also capture the time consumed for the same.
3. Customization Scope: In this phase all the customization work is considered including taxonomy changes, new feature implementation, changes in existing structure and hierarchy.
4. Validation: Test and verify the migrated content, structure, and their mappings as per the targeted content. This also includes fixing of any issue regarding content, webpage links, integration point, structure, content mapping etc.
5. Post Migration Steps: After successful migration, there is some cleanup work, deploy custom code if required. Site navigation and verification of migration content needs to be addressed in this phase.
