SharePoint Migration Readiness
What a SharePoint migration readiness assessment should cover
A migration plan is only as reliable as the evidence behind it. A useful SharePoint readiness assessment should identify what exists, who owns it, what must change, and which decisions need to be made before production migration begins.
Organizations often begin with a technical inventory and assume that migration readiness is primarily a tooling question. The harder risks usually involve content quality, ownership, permissions, dependencies, governance, records obligations, user readiness, and unresolved decision rights.
1. A reliable current-state inventory
The assessment should document sites, libraries, lists, major content groupings, customizations, integrations, workflows, storage, activity, and business purpose. The inventory must be specific enough to support disposition, sequencing, and ownership decisions.
2. Confirmed business and technical ownership
Every site or workload should have an accountable business owner and an identified technical contact. Where ownership cannot be confirmed, that uncertainty should be treated as a readiness risk rather than hidden inside the inventory.
3. Content condition and disposition
Teams should identify obsolete, duplicate, abandoned, sensitive, high-risk, and high-value content. The assessment should distinguish content that will migrate, archive, remediate, consolidate, or remain temporarily in place.
4. Permissions and external sharing
Review broken inheritance, unique permissions, broad groups, guest access, anonymous links, former employees, nested groups, and unclear permission ownership. Migrating unmanaged access models can reproduce or amplify existing risk.
5. Dependencies and technical constraints
Document workflows, forms, integrations, custom code, unsupported features, links, authentication dependencies, records processes, and business applications that rely on the current environment.
6. Information architecture and metadata
Assess site structure, navigation, naming, content types, metadata, search behavior, retention labels, and whether the proposed destination supports how users actually find and manage information.
7. Governance and operating controls
Readiness includes the future operating model: provisioning, ownership reviews, lifecycle rules, external sharing, permission management, records coordination, escalation, support, and accountability after launch.
8. Testing, training, and acceptance
Define validation criteria, test owners, defect handling, user acceptance, training, communications, cutover support, and the evidence required for a go or no-go decision.
9. Risk, priority, and migration-wave decisions
The final output should rank risks, identify dependencies, group workloads into logical waves, assign owners, and state the decisions leadership must make before execution.
What the final deliverable should provide
- A validated inventory and ownership map
- Content and permission findings
- Dependency and customization risks
- Governance gaps and future-state controls
- Prioritized remediation actions
- Migration-wave recommendations
- Go/no-go criteria and unresolved decisions
- An implementation roadmap with owners and sequencing
For a structured example, review the illustrative SharePoint migration readiness snapshot or download the free SharePoint migration checklist.
Need an independent readiness assessment?
PPS reviews SharePoint content, ownership, permissions, dependencies, governance, and migration risks and delivers prioritized recommendations and a practical roadmap.