Challenges in SharePoint Migration

In the wake of a new decade, Microsoft has added yet heavy artillery to its already pretty unrivalled arsenal – SharePoint 2010. It is the brand new addition to its class of SharePoint Servers. SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 are a few of the most infamous versions of this server. SharePoint helps organizations in building, configuring and maintaining their online services seamlessly and hassle free. If you are a SharePoint professional, the added features in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 will be of a huge advantage to you considering the heavily publicized features all around the web and on Microsoft’s website. However, if you are already running some services on a previous SharePoint installation and your company decides to switch over to SharePoint 2010 then you are suddenly left wondering about all the previous data including documents, websites and organizational information. The question actually stems from the importance of business critical data required for any organization’s daily functions. Even the slightest thought of losing this data can be a catastrophe. Migration is a solution that can save you a lot of time and energy and can make your life relatively easy. The availability of successful and reliable migration can make this business decision easy. However, there are certain important factors that hinder you from taking any such action. SharePoint Migration Tools are provided by many companies for free or a fixed price but these tools and techniques are only good as long as a standard migration is involved. The quantity of data, surprisingly, is not of much importance here because any SharePoint migration tool should be able to migrate any amount of data from one version of the server to the other. After all, what else are these tools for? However, the complexity begins with the availability of SharePoint customizations, also commonly known as web parts. Apart from being a very noticeable feature of SharePoint, these webparts actually prohibit you from performing a standard migration and result in an unsuccessful migration process. An unsuccessful or failed data migration can cause loss of data and eventually business. If you are working for a client or as a consultant, this can mean a bad reputation and termination of contract. A customized SharePoint migration is required in any such case that offers you a reliable guarantee for the integrity of data when migrated from one server to another. When you have a standard installation of SharePoint and want to migrate your data from one version to another, you can use some free tools. One such migration tool that is free and available on the internet is Xavor SharePoint Migration Tool (XSMPT). This tool can be downloaded from http://www.xavor.com/index.php/what-we-do/solutions/sharepoint-2010-tools . I have personally used this tool and have seen many organizations and professionals use it as well. The product support for this tool is free as well and they offer you limited installation and troubleshooting for the tool as well. However, if you are using web parts and want to shift to another version of the server, there are still plenty of affordable solutions for you available on the internet. A large number of companies around the globe are offering customized migration facilities but selecting the most suitable one out of them can still be a problem. I will discuss that in another article. Check this website for further details and custom SharePoint Solutionsrnhttp://www.dshift.com/