After Migrating, Consider: Wrapping Up a Migration
Microsoft SharePoint has evolved in many ways since it was first released in 2001. As we prepare for Microsoft Ignite, we’d like to briefly share some perspectives on SharePoint’s evolution, and on how SharePoint customer priorities have recently changed, primarily in order to leverage new opportunities in Office 365.
The most significant changes SharePoint customers are currently considering include:
- Compelling new opportunities in Office 365, with Office Graph, Delve, OneDrive for Business, Groups, and Power BI, topics we reviewed in our previous post, New Collaboration and Content Options in Office 365.
- The repositioning of SharePoint Online in Office 365 Sites, with a simplified application model that necessitates some redesign for organizations migrating custom applications from on-premises SharePoint. This shift has also provided a timely opportunity for SharePoint customers to revisit, and in many cases refactor, their previously-deployed SharePoint applications.
- A refined SharePoint tools strategy, with new Microsoft forms-oriented tools anticipated, InfoPath and SharePoint Designer being retired, and a vibrant partner tools ecosystem including vendors such as AgilePoint, K2, and Nintex.
The CASAHL DART solution greatly simplifies the process of optimizing SharePoint resources for Office 365 and SharePoint 2016. DART makes it possible to disaggregate legacy SharePoint applications, transforming them into collections of collaboration and content resources, as suggested in the diagram below; the collections can then be migrated to Microsoft’s latest cloud and on-premises platforms.
Protected within a layer of identity and access control services, SharePoint apps are typically composed of:
- Documents: at a fundamental level, SharePoint is a document database management platform
- Lists/tables: when items with common field types (e.g., customer name and address) are collected in SharePoint applications, the items can be viewed as lists (in some respects like database tables)
- Discussions: when organized in topic/response hierarchies, SharePoint documents facilitate discussions among distributed teams
- Team spaces: generally based on out-of-the-box templates, SharePoint team spaces support project teams with a combination of documents, discussions, and a team calendar
- Collaborative apps: last but not least, collaborative apps build on the core SharePoint services to support more elaborate workflow application scenarios, and often reflect considerable custom development (e.g., using InfoPath forms and/or custom .NET coding)
By making it possible, in a highly automated solution, to determine which SharePoint-based applications and resources are of high business value, transform them into collections as suggested above (while fully respecting identity and access control specifications), and then migrate the collections to a range of new targets in Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint (optionally integrating with the latest tools from AgilePoint, K2, and Nintex as well), CASAHL DART makes it possible for enterprises to accelerate their successful deployments on Microsoft’s latest cloud and on-premises collaboration/content platforms.
This all probably seems familiar, if you read our earlier post on the challenges involved in Liberating Notes/Domino-Based Resources, because large-scale legacy SharePoint deployments often have a great deal in common with legacy Notes/Domino deployments. CASAHL has been able to leverage its more than twenty years of experience in migrating and integrating Notes/Domino resources into building a uniquely powerful solution for SharePoint customers. For enterprises with collaboration/content deployments spanning multiple systems (SharePoint, Notes/Domino, Google Drive, Box, and popular ECM systems, for example), only CASAHL can provide a single solution that seamlessly supports multiple source and target systems.
We’d welcome an opportunity to provide more details about CASAHL DART and our migration customer experiences. Please consider visiting us in the exhibit hall (booth #619) at the Microsoft Ignite conference in early May, if you’re making the trip to Chicago for Ignite. Our migration experts will be there, ready to share insights from the thousands of successful migration projects CASAHL has undertaken over the last several years. You can also contact us via the CASAHL Web site.
