Thoughts about SharePoint migrations

The past days I have been looking into the different scenarios for migrating from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Microsoft shares a nice model detailing the 4 methods they support (and that work with the out of the box features). It's a bit technical, but it provides a nice overview of your options.

Besides these four scenarios there is (of course) a fifth: 3rd party software. Some of the well known vendors are already providing specifications of their products. The people over at Metavis even have a public beta available which I have been using the past couple of days. Cool fact: after noticing a bug, they had it fixed and working in a new version within 24 hours.

Basically, the four scenarios outlined by Microsoft help you migrate your entire SharePoint farm or specific Site Collections. While there are differences in advantages and disadvantages (like downtime), they all share a lack of flexibility when it comes to cleaning up the mess you (might have) created in the past.

I think most migration scenarios would benefit greatly from some form of filtering or cleanup. If you're lucky, some people have worked really hard on the (information) structure and architecture of the farm. If you're not so lucky, most sites are web-based versions of the file shares they used to represent. In both cases you would benefit from rethinking what gets stored where, how and why. Of course, time and budget must be available for this, but this should pay itself back in the long run.

In the next couple of days I will share some more information about the pros and cons of these four scenarios (mostly extracted from the model from Microsoft) and compare this with the fifth. Why would you choose to buy extra tools when you can migrate "for free" with the out of the box features? I'll try to put this into simple slides without paying too much attention to the technical details (read Technet for that, or perhaps I'll write about that later).