Migrating SP2013 intranets

Migration Challenges

I’ve just completed a project migrating an intranet from SharePoint 2013 (SP2013) to SharePoint Online. Gotta say that working with modern web parts makes the content sizzle and improves how the content is consumed.

Migrations involve many different challenges, so for today, I’ll only pick a few items that spring to mind in case you are still trying to get off the SP2013 platform now that it is officially “end of life”.

Migrating Classic Pages is NOT the way to go.

The old-style classic pages need to be translated or recreated as modern pages. I find so many downsides to preserving classic mode settings that the baggage you keep is not worth the long-term pain.

So we decided to avoid using classic sites entirely. We focused on building Modern Communication sites and leveraging the capabilities that come with modern site pages. The result was a very cool-looking brand-new intranet with a lot of SharePoint Online goodness to leverage, without sacrificing our primary goal to be off the SP2013 platform under a tight schedule. 

This made the transfer of content more complicated, but the benefits were worth it. For starters, training was much easier, not having to explain how to tie one hand behind your back when working with Classic content. No legacy baggage also meant that we didn't have to develop additional navigation and content update strategies to get around the limitations of classic sites.

Keeping content up to date without doing anything

We found a lot of the content on SP2013 was out of date. Modern web parts can help here. I’m just going to highlight two web parts that help keep the intranet content automatically up to date compared to an all too common approach back with SP2013, where content creators used static images and handcrafted content indexes on pages.

The first example came as we encountered a variety of org chart diagrams that were out of date. Those images were static, and not always kept fresh. They included people who had since changed roles or left the company. On top of that, many pages had painstakingly outlined the contact details for the people on the org chart. That, too, could be out of date and created a wall of text that would make the average reader’s eyes glaze over.

Enter the Org Chart web part. Type in the name for that section head of department, and you get a nice org-chart display of the people directly reporting to that person from your Active Directory (AD). This is the one place things are likely to be kept current. Hover over the object for more info to get contact details and more. It just looked so good compared to the previous options. From a design perspective, this also made the display crisp and consistent, removing the variety of org chart designs between different departments or different eras in the life of the intranet.

The second example was finding pages serving as hand-crafted document links to many documents in a library, each with a summary. Whilst views on document libraries have always been available, intranet designers seem to have preferred to build their own indexes manually to help with presentation, at the cost of manual upkeep.

Modern web pages make content layouts much more flexible. A library or list web part can easily expose subsets of documents within a library. Throw in the right filters, group by, and display options, and you have active content nicely presented with options to jump to a full-page display and more controls. By moving summaries and keywords to document metadata you are also improving the findability of important documents. This can literally save hours of user time over a year, reducing clicks, improving search results, and ensuring the latest content is dynamically selected. 

Subsites galore no more

SP2013 features hierarchical site collections, resulting in many levels of subsites. In this case, going down 7 levels, and some of those levels have custom permissions over what might be very small document sets.

With the flatter design architecture being used by SharePoint Online, we could roll up many small subsites. We used Hub capabilities and Mega Menu Navigation to tune this further. We could also get rid of 10-plus years of individual permissions build-up by simplifying the site security and making better use of AD groups to control bulk assignments where they were needed. Remember – this is an intranet, and the default reader group is usually going to be “everyone except external users” so you can be off to a good start just deploying that convention. Content Creators and Contributors take a little more finesse, but now we have many more options for controlling this without resorting to custom and individual permissions right off the bat.    

Repurposing the intranet

Even as I write this out, my head is popping with heaps of other improvements we were able to make just by using out-of-the-box capabilities and being prepared to rethink “the way things were done”. Part of that process requires a good understanding of what you envisage the purpose of your intranet to be when also considering how you are using Teams, other SharePoint Sites, and various other content repositories that exist in your organization. Intranets are just as much gateways as content repositories, and the new intranet is going to make it easier for our users to connect themselves to the right information, wherever it lives.

Make history

Probably the single biggest success factor in this project was the one people don't tend to notice. We focused on active content and therefore managed to tag a high proportion of the content as ready for archiving. We then agreed on a different treatment plan for archiving content that satisfied various compliance, policy, and findability requirements. This reduced the amount of migration activity and allowed us to focus on content, navigation, and links. 

Use what you have

If technology is not making your life easier, something is wrong, yet you are probably not alone. Keep in mind that there are often capabilities built into your tech stack that are being under-utilized. Buying more products isn’t the answer until you’ve pushed your tools to do the work they were designed for. If you need some help with that, give us a call.