Best of 2021st : Digital Workplace Best Practices

DigitalWorkplace 2021 Best practices are quite important as the Remote Work age has made collaboration platforms such as SharePoint Intranet and Microsoft Teams the integral as well as essential parts of the business modernization of the organizations.

2021 Digital Workplace Best Practices

2021 is just a week away. So, it is the right time to align our professional and personal goals for the upcoming year. Whether the Goals of 2020 were a success or not, we need to focus upon the next year to make it a success.

With Remote work as the new trend that is here to stay, it is a good idea to make the experience as great as possible to keep the employees hooked to the Digital workplace in 2021 as well. To keep the interest alive, we need to make sure our SharePoint Intranet or other collaboration platforms remains an exciting place.

Here are some of the Digital Workplace 2021 best practices to help you out!

• Mobility

Work is no longer location constrained. People are working from literally anywhere. Thus, it has become vital to access information on the go. Therefore, choose a collaboration app or intranet provider that gives you either a mobile-responsive portal or mobile app support must be the prior preference. Digital Workplace needs to be mobile to be efficient.

• Ownership and Review

Everyone is far away from the old literal supervision. Thus, every employee must take ownership of their jobs in their hand. While it is important to keep reviewing frequently, but the responsibility now is majorly on the employees themselves rather than their reporting managers. The digital platform must be able enough to track that these responsibilities are taken care of while providing tools for reviews as well. Defining ownership and responsibilities as early as you deploy the digital workplace platform will ensure that everyone becomes more responsible and accountable. An effectively thought about digital workplace management will ensure higher productivity.

• Blended into your Company’s Culture

If you can make people feel belonging, they will stay loyal to your organization. And, to do so, let them feel as a part of your company culture even when they cannot be there in the office.
Let anyone put up a suggestion, ideas, and feedback on your company’s intranet portal. Make them feel heard and valued.
Successful and effective collaboration lets people open up by offering ways to contribute to overall organizational growth. Make it a place where everyone gets appropriate credit for their contributions. Organize virtual meetups and even parties. Do not leave a chance to knit the organization together and just see the magic unfold.

• Focus on connectivity and searchability

Gone are the days when you could visit a coworker’s desk if you need a file. But the digital workplace platform needs to ensure that your employees don’t feel this void. A digital workplace platform should provide everything readily available at their fingertips. The intranet repository should be as good as a Google search, if not more and the rest can be handled by collaboration apps where you can literally reach your colleague’s desk (this time at home). This level of a decent digital workplace can surely make 2021 awesome by helping in driving productivity and making a massive impact.

• Multi-lingual

With geography no longer a barrier, 2020 has opened the portal to global recruitment. Now you don’t need to be restricted to your particular city, state or even country. Thus, it is a good idea to be prepared with the lingual challenges that might surface soon. Being a Global organization and having diverse workforces comes with some pre-requisites. Working with colleagues from around the world can exciting but multiple languages can challenge as well. Your Digital workplace must be multi-lingual and should also offer translation features to ensure seamless communication flow.

Why is Digital Workplace 2021 crucial?

Remote work will stay popular. Upgrade yourself in the best ways to bridge the distances between the remote workers even after the pandemic is over. Make it smooth for remote workers and far-off offices to stay in touch and work together in the most fun and productive way.

These were our resolves to make Remote work tools like SharePoint Intranet Interesting. Let us know yours in the comments below.

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Strategies & Best Practices of SharePoint Migration

Strategies & Best Practices of SharePoint Migration

SharePoint Migration Best Practices

SharePoint is amongst the most widely used content management and collaboration tools developed by Microsoft. It offers rich intranet capabilities, better document management system, communities, blogs, news and discussions and many other useful features that brings

SharePoint is amongst the most widely used content management and collaboration tools developed by Microsoft.

SharePoint Migration Best Practices

It offers rich intranet capabilities, better document management system, communities, blogs, news and discussions and many other useful features that bring the entire organization together and enables them to work more efficiently and collaboratively. 

SharePoint comes in two varieties- Online and On-premise. On-premise versions of SharePoint include SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019.

With every new release, SharePoint adds tons of new features and improvements that meet modern business standards. With the addition of new features, Microsoft also depreciated many older features, for example, InfoPath forms and sandboxed solutions. This makes moving from an older version of SharePoint to newer one essential, in order to fully leverage all new functionalities and stay by today’s standards. 

Storing the data and managing them with in the same tenant might be an easy task but migrating them across tenants & SharePoint versions is a very tedious task. There are many 3rd party tools available in the market to support this kind of migrations. But, strategic planning and execution is required even with any one of them. Let’s review what strategies and practices will help us go with hassle-free SharePoint migrations.

Inventory Your Data 

This should be the first step of any migration plan. Preparing an inventory report of your data prior to migration enables you to review what data is important and what is not.  What can be migrated and where it is supposed to be migrated and what data can be archived. 

Analyze and remove the data, which is irrelevant to your organization. Existence of irrelevant data will mess up your work, occupies storage space, no more useful further.

If there is any sensitive data, you can plan accordingly based on your business compliance standards and migrate it to an appropriate location on the target. 

Inventory run provides a report of total assets of your SharePoint like how many sites, lists, libraries exists and their total size. You can use these reports to customize your migration behaviour by choosing the required data to be migrated, removing irrelevant files, unwanted metadata and decide how your data should be organized at the target and can plan the migration accordingly. 

Preparing Your SharePoint Migration Plan 

From the previous step, we identified what needs to be considered for migration and what can be ignored. Now we need to plan what to do with it. In this step, we need to identify where this content should be migrated and how it should be migrated and maintained. Plan an information architecture like Identify which users, permission levels, groups, documents, items & managed metadata need to be migrated to the required destination and how efficiently they can be maintained at the destination. 

Research the best practices for SharePoint Migration and prepare your plan for migration. 

As this is a very crucial step, migration must be taken care of by choosing the migration tool which best suits our requirement. Prefer migration tools which support on-premise to online migrations and vice versa with no restrictions. And, some other essential features include-

Pre-Migration Check 

Once the plan is completed and you are ready to start the migration, run a pre-migration analysis. 

Pre-migration analysis helps you to give the detail report of possible errors and warnings that might occur at the time of migration before even starting the migration itself. 

Using this report, you can analyze what items can fail at the time of migration and what is the reason for the failure.  This will enable you to fix all possible errors before even the start of the migration so that your actual migrations would run smoothly without any issues or fails. 

We will come across many interesting features while working with migration tools. Here is the one, it allows the users to pre-check the content, this feature helps users to get a glimpse on what all the issues are going to occur at the time of migration with a single button click. 

SharePoint Migration 

Migrate the prepared content to the required destination. Resolve if any issues occur during migration.

There are many third-party tools available in the market to perform migration tasks from one version of SharePoint to another. Give a trial for each one of these and pick the right one that perfectly suits for your needs. 

Post-Migration Check

Just because you performed migration with standard migration tools, don’t assume everything got migrated successfully. The important step after every migration is to perform a post-migration check to determine everything got migrated without any issues. 

Validate moved content in the target by comparing it with source and ensure everything got migrated as same as in source. This comparison should include actual content itself and metadata associated with it, permissions, users and groups, versions and everything that you want to be migrated to destination. 

Few migration tools even provide post-migration check feature which will help you to validate the migrated content. This will help you to not only ensure the success of the migration but also saves a lot of time by automating the manual validation process.

Still, after running a post-migration check with tools, you can perform a manual validation at a high level to ensure a successful SharePoint migration. 

Along with these strategies, you can consider the below best practices during the migration process. 

Best Practices Of SharePoint Migration 

Do not prefer lengthy URLs, the URLs exceeding maximum URL length are difficult to maintain. Names must be logical and short.
When the migration is in progress, do not make any changes either in source or destination. This disrupts the entire flow of the migration where source and destination don’t tend to be same after migration.
Avoid maintaining large lists and libraries as this causes list view threshold issue i.e. view to fail to render if items in the same level exceed 5000 items. Instead split the data into multiple lists, this helps to retrieve the data quickly.
Go for pre and post-migration check practices, pre-migration checks whether the content is good to go for migration & post check will make sure whether the content migrated is as same as in source.
Check whether user accounts are available in the required destination, unavailability of users at destination results in preserving incorrect authors and editors. You can perform the desired user and group mappings to use when there are orphan/dead accounts. 
Prefer to maintain flat structure for subsites instead of maintaining nested subsites. Maintaining subsites as site collections help you define the individual structure, permissions can be individually handled, URLs exceeding maximum limit issues will be sorted, no more dependencies on-site collection feature activations.

Saketa SharePoint Migrator 

Try Saketa SharePoint Migration tool which supports seamless and hassle-free migrations to SharePoint. This tool supports many essential migration features like pre- and post-migration options, inventory, turbo migrations, schedule migrations and PowerShell migrations and many more helpful features all in one place. 

Features

• SharePoint to SharePoint migrations (On-premises to Online & vice versa) 
• Import date from file system to SharePoint, Office 365 or one drive for business sites.  
• Import from Google Drive, DropBox, One Drive, Box to SharePoint.  
• Export data from SharePoint to File System 
• Bulk update: Update list & library metadata in bulk 
• Import excel data to SharePoint list 
• SharePoint Security manager – Manage your entire SharePoint security from one place.

Make a good plan for your SharePoint Migration and choose the tool that aptly fulfils your requirement and guarantees you a success rate of 100%.

Plan better, execute with perfection with the right tool.