10 Minute Guide to KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS. A publication of

Transcription

1 10 Minute Guide to KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS A publication of

2 1 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS CONTENTS Introduction 2-3 Migration Challenges 4-7 Why Analytics for Migration 8-10 Pre-Migration Metrics Mid-Migration Metrics Post-Migration Metrics Conclusion 29 Additional Resources 30-32

3 OLD NEW CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION -2-

4 3 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS Your organization has made the decision to migrate from one version of SharePoint to another. Perhaps you re even taking the big step to migrate to Office 365 (SharePoint Online). Although the migration process may seem daunting at first, there are many ways you can take control of your organization s migration process to manage it as efficiently as possible. Analytics can help ease your SharePoint migration by capturing critical data that can give you insights into your SharePoint portal, to help you track and analyze each step of the SharePoint migration process.

5 CHAPTER 2: MIGRATION CHALLENGES -4-

6 5 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS Identifying potential migration challenges is the first step to beginning a successful migration. By anticipating weak spots in the portal, you can begin to understand what path is best to take when planning your migration. BEFORE - Content Overload - Disorganized information - No migration plans (Implementing, Scheduling, Testing, Tools) DURING - Storage Challenges - Users still entering the old portal - Security permissions AFTER - Adoption of the new portal - Resistance to change - Technology learning curve - Lack of ability to communicate effectively with users on their experience

7 6 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS PLANNING The first step in any migration is planning. Before beginning a migration, you should be able to answer these questions: - Is there a clear plan or schedule of the migration process? - Has management approved the plan? - Are there steps in place to ensure that the migration is implemented in a step by step manner? Don t Forget your users in your migration planning! Because the platform is used (and depended upon) by end users, it s important to keep them in the loop on what you re planning, get their help on prioritizing and classifying content, and inform them of changes as the plan is being executed. Including users in the migration planning is a key to long-term adoption, because the more you involve people in the process the more likely they will support the outcome.

8 7 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS TESTING Have you run testing before your migration process has begun? By testing the migration of small areas of content, specific sites, or small web locations, you can assess the migration in those areas before doing it across an entire farm. This is a great way to understand how you can actually implement the migration on a grand scale. TOOLS There are many third party tools that can assist you in physically migrating your content from one version to the next. An analytics tool is advantageous in order to thoroughly assess the environment before these other migration tools take over.

9 CHAPTER 3: WHY ANALYTICS FOR MIGRATION? -8-

10 9 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS It s been said before, but we ll say it again. You can only manage what you can measure. It s very common that organizations don t have a concrete understanding of what s going on with their SharePoint environment, which makes the migration process much more challenging. There may be a feeling of what s going well and what s not, but factually it s not possible to say what exactly is happening. Do we know which content is most popular? Can we identify which content is not being accessed or updated? Is there specific content users are searching for in the current portal that we want to surface in the future one? There may be valuable opportunities to optimize homepages by detecting the most popular content that is not currently linked, or least popular content that your organization wants users to have easy access to. This is where analytics can assist in measuring migration throughout all of its steps.

11 10 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS WHY ANALYTICS FOR MIGRATION? Organizations may also have difficulty determining what is a successful migration. What are the right measurements that organizations should use? Determining the success of a migration is based upon the KPIs an organization sets out when they begin their migration process. An example of possible metric goals could be: - The migration of a target number of end users to the new platform. - A set number of sites have been migrated, with a specific amount of content (90% of the contentdatabases have been moved) - Another measurement may be the percentage of file shares that have been migrated. All of these metrics should be included in the success of an overall migration. However, breaking these metrics down makes analyzing successes and failures more actionable and measurable.

12 CHAPTER 4: PRE - MIGRATION -11-

13 12 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS PREPARATION IS EVERYTHING One of the most important steps to take before any migration initiative, is to prepare and clean up portal sites, lists, and documents. Archiving or deleting unused content from the portal will ease the migration process, allowing your organization to migrate only content that is needed. You can use analytics to detect which pieces of content are not being used, thus making your clean up and migration processes easier. Here's a list of items that should be considered when preparing for migration: - Detect unneeded content from large lists - Identify unmodified or unused content - Discard excessive numbers of document versions

14 13 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS MOST POPULAR CONTENT REPORTS The report presents a table listing the most popular content, ranked by the number of followers, likes, and comments. HOW TO USE Your organization wants to create new pages, for example a home page, for your new intranet. Will you use the same navigation bar that was used in the previous version? Perhaps there are links and buttons that people just aren t clicking on. Most popular content reports determine what aspects of the SharePoint page you should migrate, and which are no longer relevant to users. This ensures you can create more effective navigation tools within your new environment.

15 14 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS UNUSED CONTENT REPORT Displays the content that has not been viewed within a specific time period. HOW TO USE Unused content reports give you a clear understanding of what content in the portal is not being used. If the content is not relevant to business objectives, toss it! Delete or archive it to save portal space and decrease content overload. If the content is unused, but IS relevant for users, then it s possible that users don t know how to access it. Link this content from your homepage to other main pages to make it more accessible for your users.

16 15 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS UNMODIFIED CONTENT Shows documents or list items that were not modified or updated HOW TO USE Utilize this report to assess if these types of documents are irrelevant to users in the portal, or perhaps they re not easily accessible.

17 16 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS OPERATING SYSTEMS AND BROWSERS REPORTS Displays the different browsers people use to reach your site. HOW TO USE If specific mobile devices are popular, you may want to create a mobile app for your users. Recently, mobile is becoming a driving force. By understanding how your users are accessing the portal, you can make design changes in the new version to accommodate those needs. Empower your users in the new version by making their user experience seamless and functional. You can always monitor if your users are trying to access the portal by using an old browser version that no longer supports the new portal due to technical constraints.

18 17 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS GROUP USAGE REPORTS Shows the usage of AD user groups in SharePoint, ranked by page views and visits for a specific item or level of the portal hierarchy. HOW TO USE: If you know specific groups are not using your current intranet, they will probably need more focused training to make sure they start using the new intranet. UNIQUE USERS Displays the distinct users visiting your the portal HOW TO USE Leverage these top users by allocating specific roles to them as SharePoint leaders in each department, to help others who may not be as active or knowledgeable on SharePoint.

19 CHAPTER 5: MID - MIGRATION -18-

20 19 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS Analytics can also assist you in measuring your portal activity during the migration process. Are people adapting to the new portal, or still trying to access the old environment? You can find this out by using reports like Usage Trends and Unique Users.

21 20 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS USAGE REPORTSMULTIPLE FARMS HOW TO USE Creating analytics reports that allow us to compare the usage of each farm allows us to see the progress from the old environment to the new one. During the migration process, you can generate usage trends reports to go ahead and see the usage trends of farm a vs farm b. It is also possible to drill down within these reports to monitor activity at a more granular level. You can easily compare the trends for a site that you ve migrated, for example the HR site, and see if users from the HR department are still using the old version or have successfully migrated to the new version. By tracking multiple environments at the same time, you can monitor whether usage trends are starting to increase in the latter version of SharePoint, in order to ensure your migration is effective.

22 21 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS UNIQUE USERS REPORTS HOW TO USE Turn these unique users into evangelists in the new environment, because you know from your metrics that these are the most active individuals. Use this report to assist site owners in understanding who s using the old site vs the migrated site.

23 22 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS MESSAGE BAR ENGAGEMENT TOOL A Message Bar is a powerful tool that places a visible yet unobtrusive full-width bar at the top of your SharePoint site, allowing you to convey important information to your intranet users without the need to overhaul any of your main content. HELLO JOHN Once in place, you can easily communicate announcements, alerts, ads and links, all within a matter of minutes. The message bar is very useful during the migration process, allowing site administrators to broadcast important information or redirect users to the new portal.

24 CHAPTER 6: POST - MIGRATION -23-

25 24 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS ADOPTION OF THE NEW PORTAL The biggest challenge in any migration is making sure people are utilizing the new portal. A large amount of time, effort, and budget is dedicated to purchasing new licenses, migrating content, and training users. Now there is a need to show that users are leveraging the new portal and that there is a return on investment from the migration. Enhancing the user experience is also something that analytics can help achieve. By creating reports to measure adoption, you can easily make decisions to improve the new portal. Communicating with your users is also of utmost importance when encouraging interaction in the new portal. By using a surveying tool, you can ask your users what s working and what they d like to see in the portal.

26 25 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS ADOPTION METRICS AVERAGE PAGEVIEWS PER USER This report shows the average number of pageviews per unique visitor who visited a SharePoint page or site. A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser. Each view of the same SharePoint page by the same visitor is counted as an independent page view. A unique visitor is a single visitor to a SharePoint site as identified by login information, or by an anonymous cookie, or by IP address. AVERAGE PAGEVIEWS PER VISIT This report lets you see the average number of pages your visitors viewed during a visit to your site. A visit is defined as the activity of one visitor within a single browser session. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

27 26 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS UNIQUE USERS CHART CONTAINING THE FOLLOWING: USER: The user name, cookie identifier, or IP address VIEWS: The number of pageviews (requests) VISITS: The number of visits. A visit is a series of SharePoint page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request SEARCHES: The number of SharePoint search actions VISIT DURATION: The average duration of visits CUSTOM COLUMNS: This widget provides the ability to add additional user fields

28 27 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS SURVEYING TOOL DEFINITION A surveying tool collects real time feedback from users as they experience SharePoint. HOW TO USE A surveying tool is a great way to ask your users their challenges. Important questions to ask are: - What do they need from the portal? - What would they like to see in the new version? - What s difficult for them or confusing to them about the portal? Quick tip: surveys can also be used prior to migration to ask users what s missing for them in the older portal and what tools they would like to see in the new one.

29 28 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS COMMUNITIES ACTIVITY REPORT This report presents the top communities, with data that indicates the rank of these communities based on the number of posts, comments, questions, answers and likes each community has acquired. HOW TO USE A communities activity report gives you an idea of what groups are active and engaging with content and users, and which are not.

30 29 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS CONCLUSION A wealth of other types of reports can be utilized at this point to measure the success of new navigation, monitor new applications including search and my sites, and to track individual applications as well. Analytics are vital throughout all stages of the migration process. By becoming aware of the challenges within the migration process, you can take your SharePoint migration process by the reigns to ensure the new version is optimized for adoption, collaboration, and better engagement of your users. NOW JUMPSTART YOUR JOURNEY

31 30 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS CARDIOLOG ANALYTICS FOR SHAREPOINT PORTALS Over the course of a year, our customers were able to*... SAVE INFRASTRUCTURE RESOURCES Detected over Free over ,400 unused Terabytes of sites and sub sites hard disk space Detected 329,000 Prevented the unused lists and migration of 900 list items prior to Terabytes of unitilized migration data to the new INCREASE PORTAL COLLABORATION Identified 1,092 of Distributed IT the most influential knowledge between Intranet users site owners Located Classified documents 1,046,000 for greatly increased orphaned ease-of-use documents IMPROVE PORTAL USABILIT Located 3,043 Redesigned over 3,000 unused homepage homepages to better buttons serve end users Pinpointed Redesigned 15, ,083 unused pages to better serve page links end users DRIVE PORTAL OPTIMIZATION Identified Improved site relevance 150,099 outdated by identifying documents documents needing Improved site Pinpointed 56,866 outdated list item relevance by identifying old wikis, announcements, TRY CARDIOLOG ANALYTICS A Web Analytics Solution for SharePoint *The information herein was gathered through customer surveys.

32 31 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS ABOUT INTLOCK Intlock, developer of CardioLog Analytics, has been a leader in the field of SharePoint and Office 365 analytics and reporting since It s products - CardioLog Analytics and SharePoint Marketing Suite - provide web-analytics and online marketing solutions for enterprise-level intranet portals and websites. Intlock s products deliver deep insights into the performance of portal and web initiatives through testing, tracking and targeting, ultimately enabling organizations to optimize their portal s impact and maximize their return on investment. The solution is available for both On-Prem and SaaS deployments. Intlock is led by a team of experts in the fields of application development, knowledge management, web analytics, portal monitoring and control, and software engineering. Intlock's products and solutions are installed in organizations from various industries, including financial services, telecommunication, entertainment services and others.

33 32 KICKSTARTING YOUR SHAREPOINT MIGRATION WITH ANALYTICS Intlock firmly believes that partnerships are a beneficial way to help enhance the product as well as strengthen alliances within the SharePoint community. By working together, cost effectiveness and ease of implementation are greatly improved. Partner alliances shorten implementation times and enable the adaptation of the products to any technological environment a customer may have. Parties interested in a partnership with Intlock can contact the company with the contact information provided below. Phone: Twitter: Fax: Facebook: info@intlock.com Linkedin: Blog: Youtube:

34 GET STARTED WITH CARDIOLOG ANALYTICS TODAY! REQUEST A PERSONAL DEMO