In our recent project to migrate all active collaboration sites of an organization, we interacted with a lot of site owners. We had anticipated several questions that the site owners would have and challenges that they would meet. But there were some moments when I got reactions that I had not expected at all.
We mailed about 700 site owners about 750 site collections. And it is a rather heterogeneous bunch: they come from all departments in the organisation. Some are very SharePoint savvy, while others turned out to have no clue. Some are incredibly proactive, while other could not be coaxed into any action. I have already told about the lessons learned in the migration as a whole in a previous post. Now let me elaborate on some of the surprises the owners and the sites had in store for us.
People listed as Main Site Owner who had no owner permissions
We had a migration list, detailing all collaboration site collections with two Main Site Owners who we would contact several times over the course of the migration project. We asked these people to confirm if they really were the site owners we should contact.
Interestingly enough, I got quite a few responses when I sent out the new URLs of the migrated sites, of Main Site Owners who could not access the migrated sites. At first I feared something had gone wrong with the security settings in the migration. But then it turned out that none of the people who complained about access had actually had permissions on the original site. So the migration was perfect: no permissions to no permissions. But the question is, why did these people confirm that they were Site Owners of a site where they were no kind of owner at all?
The people who gave me more details all thought that we were talking about some other site. The apparently had not clicked the prominent link visible in the migration list. They had seen the site name, and sometimes the name of their co-Main Site Owner (most sites had a deputy) and assumed they knew what site it was. They were mistaken.
Bottom line: people are only human, and very busy. So take into account that the response is not always accurate.
Mix-up between different kinds of SharePoint sites
I’ve talked several people who turned out to be confused about the different kinds of SharePoint sites we have in this organisation. There are different sites from the Local organisation: collaboration sites, intranet portal, sites with special applications (at a separate address). And there are also sites from the Global organisation. I have to admit, the environment also confused me when I got here, but that was mostly because I did not know how to get from one part to the other. But I can see the difference between the Local sites and the sites managed by the Global organisation: they not only have a different address but also a different colour.
We emphasized in our communication that we would only migrate Local sites from the collaboration address, which were branded as Group Sites. Nevertheless, I have had several questions about people asking about the migration of sites that turned out to be one managed by Global or subsites in the Portal.
Bottom line: for some users, all of those SharePoint environments are the same. Don’t assume that everybody understands the difference between intranet and extranet sites, portal sites and collaboration sites, regular sites and secure sites…
Some site owners voluntarily indicate that their sites does not have to be migrated
In previous migration projects we saw that Site Owners always said that everything had to be migrated. Unless they found out that they were the ones who had to migrate their own sites. In this project we told the people that the IT team would migrate their sites, but still 26% of the sites could be deleted, according to the Site Owners. We did tell them that they would have to take some actions along the course of the migration. Maybe that was enough to avoid unnecessary migrations. Or maybe these people are just very orderly and like to clean up, at least when prompted to do so…
Bottom line: Ask explicitly if sites should be migrated, because that may result in an unexpected clean-up.
Some site owners have set up exotic configurations
The site owners are in charge of their own sites. And some of them took the opportunity to rebuild their standard site into something exotic. And these exotics don’t always survive a migration. There were some spiffy calendar overlays ,workflows with manual links, strange things in Infopath forms, pages with weird styling, browsable reference guides in htm, non-Sharepoint pages in mht format,… Some of it we knew about, but some of it surprised us when we saw it. And most of it migrated smoothly, but some things broke.
Bottom line: Keep an eye on sites as part of your regular governance. Otherwise you may run into unexpected issues when you migrate or update, and when the unusual sites break down.
A migration is a nice occasion to meet your site owners and sites. Let’s not wait for the next migration to do it again, but keep in touch with the owners and keep an eye on their sites.
