Determine where your content should live 

Stakeholders may move from SharePoint 2016 on-premises sites to SharePoint Online sites, Microsoft Teams, or use other productivity tools, depending on stakeholder needs.  

• Review the “When to choose SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, or OneDrive” knowledge base article and consider where your current site content should go i.e., Teams, SharePoint Online, combination of both, decommission site. 

Migration Checklist

1. Permissions review and clean-up 

• Go to the root level of site collection to ensure you have access  
  (e.g. if your site is https://sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca/sites/IST/CS/CRS, go to https://sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca/sites/IST/ to see if you have access). 

• Are the permissions for yourself and others correct for the site and sub-sites?  

  • Remove orphaned users. 

  • Clean up items containing too many custom permissions. 

• Are you using Nexus groups for permissions? 

  • These groups *may* need to be recreated on the new site after migration. 

• Are the Site Collection Administrators accurate? 

• Are Site Owners (or others with FULL CONTROL) accurate?  

• Review the permission groups. 

  • The following group permissions must not be deleted: 

    • Style Resource Readers  

    • SharePoint Administrators 

  • The following group permissions can be deleted if empty: 

    • Approvers

    • Designers  

    • Excel Services Viewers  

    • Hierarchy Managers  

    • Quick Deploy Users  

    • Restricted Readers 

    • Translation Managers  

    • Groups named “Records Center Web Service…” 

2. Content review and clean-up 

• Ask users to check-in any documents currently checked out. 

• Remove duplicate content. 

• Remove unwanted versions from your version history. 

• Clean up folders in document libraries. 

  • As a best practice, create an Archive folder and place old versions of files there. 

  • Make the Archive directory view only. 

  • Clean out periodically. 

• Review navigation - are there menus that are empty and can be deleted? 

3. Review sub-sites 

• To view all sub-sites: 

  • Settings (gear icon) at top right 

  • Site Contents 

  • Scroll down to see all Sub-sites 

• Is there content here or can it be deleted?  

• Are there unique permissions on items that could be cleaned up?  

4. Review other features  

• Site Content Types - are there any Special Content Types that can be deleted? 

• Custom Site Columns - are there Custom Site Columns that can be deleted? 

• Calendar(s) - are they being used, or can they be deleted? 

• Lists - are they being used, or can they be deleted? 

• Do you use Custom Input forms? Are they being used, or can they be deleted? 

• Tasks - are they being used, or can they be deleted? 

5. Does your site use Reporting Services? 

• Are there Reports that are no longer needed and can be deleted?  

• If you use SharePoint Reporting Services for reporting, the reports will need to be rewritten using Power BI. 

6. Does your site use Workflows? 

• Are there Workflows that can be deleted? 

• Complete or stop running workflows about to be migrated. 

• Check the versions of the Workflows you have created. 

  • The recommendation is to rewrite them using Power Apps and Power Automate (2010 framework is not supported in O365, 2013 framework will eventually be removed) 

Ready to migrate? 

We are here to help! Let us know what questions you have. 

1. Submit a request via https://uwaterloo.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/group/52/create/1310 and include the name of your site.  

   1. Let us know where the content will be moving to or if the site or some content should be deleted.  

2. Inform your users before starting. 

   1. How much downtime is planned for the migration? 

   2. The reason for the change and the value. See Moving to SharePoint Online. 

   3. Possible changes to how they use the site (Workflows for example) 

   4. URL changes and bookmarks needing updating.  

Post-migration steps  

Before you swing open the doors and let everyone into your SharePoint, make sure everything is ready for them. 

1. Ensure everything migrated successfully. 

2. Review site content, features. 

3. Review permissions (Nexus groups *may* need to be recreated). 

4. Recreate Workflows if needed. 

5. Recreate Reports if needed. 

6. Site users will need to update their bookmark(s) to the site(s) 

   • Old SharePoint sites start with https://sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca 

   • New SharePoint sites will begin with https://uofwaterloo.sharepoint.com 

 Related articles

Related articles appear here based on the labels you select. Click to edit the macro and add or change labels.