Phase 4: Application Remediation
This phase deals with the remediation of the applications discovered through the inventory process conducted with the business units during the previous phase. Generally, this is the most time-consuming process; each application is assessed to determine its specific requirements such as technology and level of effort. Generally, applications can be categorized as low, medium or high complexity according to the following guidelines:
• Low-- Your toolset and process has identified a simple solution. For example, simple code changes that remove specific public folder-related APIs and replace them with SharePoint-related APIs.
• Medium--Your toolset and process has identified a solution that involves moderate re-coding and testing. For example, simple code changes that removes specific public folder- and third-party product or Line of Business (LOB) applications-related APIs and replaces them with SharePoint-related APIs.
• High--Your toolset and process cannot identify a solution and therefore more detailed assessment is required. For example, the application requires recoding and additional products such as Office InfoPath to provide forms and SQL Server for a data repository.
I highly recommend that you perform application remediation early in the project. In large organizations, this phase should occur perhaps six to eight months in advance to the data migration phase.
Phase 5: Pre-Migration
This phase is all about making sure you (and your users) are ready to undertake the public folder migration. This phase is mostly about managing quality and risk. Also note that the premigration detailed steps are also specific to the toolset you choose. (For example, reporting is automated or a manual process). The following items must be double checked before migrating:
- With your design complete its time to communicate your plan to IT and the business.
- This is a good time to update your requirements and design documentation to reflect the realities of your organization. 3. Add resources or make project team changes based on how well people are working together, workload, and scope.
- Schedule migration jobs to run as predefined times (off hours). Use caution to schedule jobs outside of other resource intensive jobs such as backup, virus scanning and indexing. Tools such as Quest Migrator offer flexible job scheduling.
- It’s recommended that IT have an onsite presence to provide support, especially for complex requirements and or high visibility business users. It’s surprising how many companies forgo this.
- Create a master record of applications to be remediated. This list is co-developed between IT and the business. This will include re-writes and applications to be replaced by a consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) product. The list must contain contact information and some sort of complexity rating.
- The IT staff that will support SharePoint must be trained in SharePoint installation, administration, and so forth, and the business units must also be trained in general how-to and company usage policies prior to the actual migration.
Phase 6: Migration
This phase consists of the steps in the actual migration of public folder data to SharePoint sites. The actual steps for conducting the migration will depend on the migration toolset you've chosen because screens and options will be different. Therefore, I'll just generalize the basic steps, as follows:
- Notify IT that the migration is about to occur, and notify the business unit that their data is about to be migrated.
- Establish onsite presence and ready the Help desk.
- Using the migration job schedule you created during the design phase, create the migration jobs and schedule them to run accordingly. To support your test plan, make sure you enable logging so that when the migration is complete, you can check for errors and deal with them. Also, use caution when configuring the security aspect of the toolset; going with minimum permissions is probably the best approach. Finally, set filters to prevent the migration of data that doesn’t conform to your organization's policy.
- As the jobs run, monitor the jobs and the performance of the servers, storage, and the network. As the public folder data is migrated, it will tax these systems significantly unless the toolset provides throttling settings.
- Here you execute the test plan you created during the design phase.
- During and after migration, communication must be rigorously maintained between the migration team and the Help desk. Debriefing with the Help desk after migrations are complete for a business unit will help you learn and refine your methodology. Review the Help desk incidents to learn where improvements could be made. Also, expect some cleanup work to be done to fine tune the organization of sites and data. Depending on your organization's information architecture and expectations, this could be a lengthy process. Note that when escalation is required, you will require a process and clear ownership of tasks. From a governance perspective, you'll need a process for engaging with management in case you require their guidance or authority to obtain a decision or facilitate and action. An excellent book to help you plan your governance program is ‘IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results’ ISBN 1591392535.
Phase 7: Post Migration
During the post-migration phase, the organization is charged with maintaining the information architecture and enforcing the information management policy. Here are steps your organization can take to facilitate the success of these tasks:
- Establish monitoring and reporting process and tools to ensure data quality, information architecture compliance, and security compliance. Most tools have predefined reports that will help you with reporting; the time consuming aspect of this task is reviewing reports and escalating issues to management.
- Assuming SharePoint is new to your organization, you will have to ramp up staff and outfit your IT infrastructure with backup, monitoring, virus scanning, and other tools. And don’t forget about the SQL Server team--farm databases require regular maintenance to maintain performance. Refer to "Database Maintenance for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies," which provides valuable information for SQL maintenance specific to SharePoint.
- Educate IT about the changes in technology and how they affect the services they provide. Impacts to SLAs and operations must be communicated and understood.
- Educate staff and management about the changes in application technology and how they affect their jobs and their responsibilities. Involve human resources to make sure that both IT and staff take the educational training. Also, to facilitate user adoption, usage metrics should be added to the job descriptions of users so that usage in compliance with company policy can be measured. For example, project managers are responsible for uploading project related artifacts such as charters, schedules and design documents.
Making the Leap
Microsoft’s investment in public folders has noticeably declined in recent years, and SharePoint is clearly being positioned by Microsoft as the replacement platform. SharePoint offers many comparable features in addition to providing a platform for building, deploying, and managing applications. The decision to migrate your public folders to a platform such as SharePoint is specific to the organization's information strategy and is dependent on factors, such as the complexity of the current deployment, in addition to the availability of the necessary funds and resources.
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