Let’s set something straight shall we? 

We all know a lift and shift won’t work. If it worked then we wouldn’t need to do it, right? If your data was in the correct format and in the proper place, then you wouldn’t be moving it into the cloud. The whole point of migration is to improve.

The whole thinking behind moving data from left to right is flawed.  

One of the key benefits of putting data in SharePoint is the improvement in searchability. Why would you want to increase the searchability when all that it is going to point out is that you have six versions of the same document. What we want to create is, what I have called it since SharePoint began, intelligent locations for documents. For example, you are an executive in a company and have access to the month’s finance reports. You go to the location where they are kept and find that this month’s report is not there. This does not mean that you need to look somewhere else, it just means it is not ready yet.  

This is the point we need to get to with our data. No more faffing around emailing, calling people to get it sent directly. The whole premise of intelligent locations is to think in terms of those who consume the data not just those who own it. You need to think in a third dimension of document framework: who will edit it, who consumes it (maybe contribute) and who can access it. You need to think about not just where it lives, what title it has but how it will be shared in a sustainable and secure way. The last thing we want is to delegate the ability to put data into a data/document management for everybody in the business to inherit an overhead on their job role of managing permissions. What we need to do is look at an information architecture that takes into consideration stopping people wading through junk to find information and not having to permanently managing permissions.  

Now I know some of this has been taken away in SharePoint with the current thinking by Microsoft Teams, but there is a very different set of requirements for using Microsoft Teams and using SharePoint. 

Part of these considerations are not just SharePoint. SharePoint is now a part of the fabric of Office 365. It is no longer a standalone product. It is integral to O365. What that means is even though OneDrive, Teams etc are all in SharePoint, they are all part of ‘the document layer’. SharePoint is for document and data management. It is not a relational database. So, we are largely talking about document and lists of data and then an automation layer on top, but we will not be delving into that right now.

The point is SharePoint can be used in different ways for different scenarios. For example, if you have an unstructured shared drive that contains two terabytes of data, where everyone has been managing their own folders so no one knows where anything really lives (resulting in multiple duplicates); if you just move that over, the technical debt will move with it. You will end up with the same issues just in a different location.  

Why Casper365 you might ask? 

Well, Casper365 has been developed from years of us being involved with customers, understanding and interpreting their data. The key thing we Found from their interactions with migrations was that it was easy enough to get them to say “yes, we want all that data moved here” but there was no thought about what happens to it on a granular level. You need to have more ownership. 

What Casper365 has been designed to do is allow you to not only plan in a planning centre, individual migrations e.g., by department or region but it allows you to create a pre-migration report and then it is able to deliver the functionality that says this report needs to be signed off by the Department Head and any other party involved. 

Once that pre-migration is signed off, the job can be scheduled, the migration can happen with communication and we can create a post-migration report to update you with the result: what migrated successfully, if any issues arose and how they were then resolved.  

Now, that not only allows you to use that data for the communication (e.g., talking to each department about the migration etc.) but it also allows a complete audit trial as all data gets uploaded to a site collection on your tenant.

This means in a year from now when someone asks a question relating to that data, you have it on record, ready to go.   

Simple, need I say more.