{"id":11101,"date":"2016-03-16T11:46:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T18:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=11101"},"modified":"2023-06-16T15:57:13","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T22:57:13","slug":"sharepoint-to-the-cloud-learn-how-microsoft-ran-its-own-migration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/sharepoint-to-the-cloud-learn-how-microsoft-ran-its-own-migration\/","title":{"rendered":"SharePoint to the cloud\u2014learn how Microsoft ran its own migration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Microsoft employees use SharePoint every day, so the company had to be careful when it came time to move its own 185,000 sites and portals to the cloud. See what Microsoft learned when it migrated the company to SharePoint Online on Office 365.<\/p>\n

If you’re considering moving your SharePoint sites to the cloud, there are a number of things to think about first. Do you trust the cloud enough to make the move? If you decide to go, how will you deal with all of the sites that your employees have built over the years? If you’re like most companies, you have customized your SharePoint sites extensively, and you wonder how to move those customized sites to the cloud.<\/p>\n

\"Infograph
Figure 1. The Microsoft IT Office 365 migration journey. By fall 2015, Microsoft migrated 97 percent of its SharePoint sites and portals to the cloud. Today, employees have 191, 000 OneDrive for Business profiles and Microsoft has 76, 000 SharePoint sites, portals, and Office 365 groups.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Understanding our SharePoint situation<\/h2>\n

Microsoft employees rely on SharePoint, so we in Microsoft IT asked ourselves the same questions when it came time to move to the cloud. When we started our migration in 2011, employees were maintaining more than 70,000 SharePoint on-premises team and publishing sites, and 114,000 personal MySites. Divisions and groups within our company had built and were operating 240 custom portals handcrafted to do things like share news with employees, find information from groups like IT and Human Resources, and search for campus maps. So when it was time for us to migrate to the cloud, it was clear it wouldn’t be simple.<\/p>\n

Rather than tackle migration all at once, we took a measured approach, encouraging our SharePoint site owners to consider if they should migrate at all. If they wanted to migrate their sites, we asked them if they wanted to start fresh so they could build their site just the way they wanted. For larger sites and portals, we used migration techniques ranging from moving as-is (lift and shift) to starting from scratch in the cloud.<\/p>\n

This gradual approach worked. By fall 2015, we had moved 97 percent of our sites to the cloud. Even better, we were able to eliminate 50 percent of all the on-premises SharePoint sites on our company system, cutting costs as employees created new project and team spaces directly in the cloud. Along the way, employees could take advantage of new features and capabilities that came with the move to the cloud. And because SharePoint Online is more secure than typically managed, on-premises versions of SharePoint, we were able to make the way our employees and contingent staff store and save data safer\u2014without sacrificing productivity.<\/p>\n

These are the big migration challenges we faced:<\/p>\n