Traditional file servers have served businesses well for decades, but they weren't designed for today's cloud-based and hybrid workforce.
Employees increasingly need secure access to documents whether they're working from the office, home, another location, or on the road.
Microsoft SharePoint provides a centralized cloud platform where authorized employees can access, organize, share, and collaborate on business information.
Migrating to SharePoint can help your organization:
The challenge is getting your existing information into SharePoint without creating a disorganized collection of files that employees struggle to use.
That's where proper migration planning becomes important.
Many Delaware businesses still maintain traditional Windows file servers containing years—or decades—of company documents.
We can help migrate appropriate business data from existing file servers into SharePoint Online.
The process can include:
Moving appropriate workloads to SharePoint may also allow businesses to reduce their reliance on aging onsite server infrastructure.
Shared network drives such as S:, P:, H:, or company shared folders often become difficult to manage over time.
Folders get duplicated. Nobody knows who owns certain information. Permissions accumulate. Employees create different versions of the same document.
Simply copying that entire structure into SharePoint transfers the same problems into a new platform.
Before migration, we can review the existing environment and help determine how information should be organized in SharePoint.
This creates an opportunity to clean up years of accumulated data rather than recreating an outdated network drive in the cloud.
If your organization already uses Microsoft 365 for Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive, SharePoint can become a natural extension of your existing environment.
We can help configure SharePoint to work alongside:
Employees gain a more integrated Microsoft 365 experience instead of switching between unrelated platforms to access company information.
Businesses sometimes accumulate information across multiple cloud storage platforms.
We can help evaluate and migrate appropriate business files from supported cloud environments into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
Consolidating information can help reduce:
The result is a more centralized environment that's easier for employees and administrators to manage.
A successful SharePoint migration begins before the first file is moved.
We start by understanding your existing environment and how employees currently use it.
Questions we may evaluate include:
The answers help us develop a migration strategy tailored to your organization rather than forcing your business into a generic SharePoint configuration.
A migration is an excellent opportunity to clean up your information.
Many businesses have accumulated enormous amounts of outdated material, including former employee folders, duplicate documents, obsolete projects, old installers, temporary files, and information nobody has accessed in years.
Migrating everything blindly can increase migration time and make the new environment harder to navigate.
Before moving data, organizations should consider what should be:
Migrated — Archived — Consolidated — or Deleted
We can help develop a practical approach so your new SharePoint environment starts cleaner than the system it's replacing.
Good SharePoint design matters.
Creating one giant document library and dumping every company file into it usually doesn't provide the best user experience.
Depending on your organization, information may be separated by:
For example, an organization might have separate SharePoint sites or libraries for:
Accounting | Administration | Human Resources | Management | Projects | Shared Documents
The appropriate structure depends on how your employees work and who needs access to the information.
We help design a logical environment employees can understand and actually use.
Permissions are one of the most important parts of a SharePoint migration.
Not every employee should have access to every document.
We can help configure access based on your organization's requirements, including:
Whenever practical, permissions should be managed through logical groups rather than complicated individual user permissions.
This makes access easier to understand and maintain as employees join, leave, or change responsibilities.
Microsoft Teams and SharePoint are closely connected.
When configured properly, employees can collaborate through Teams while SharePoint provides the underlying document storage and management capabilities.
This can create a streamlined environment for:
Instead of emailing attachments back and forth, employees can work from shared Microsoft 365 files and maintain a centralized version of the document.
This is one of the most common questions businesses have during a Microsoft 365 migration.
A simple way to think about it is:
Generally best suited for files primarily associated with an individual user and their work.
Generally better suited for information that belongs to a department, team, project, or the organization itself.
For example, an employee's working documents may belong in OneDrive, while your company's accounting procedures, marketing materials, client templates, and shared operational documents may belong in SharePoint.
We help businesses determine the appropriate location rather than putting everything into one platform.
Employees still need to work while a migration is taking place.
Our migration approach is designed to minimize disruption by carefully planning how and when information is moved.
Depending on the environment, the project may involve:
The majority of data is transferred while employees continue working in the existing environment.
Migrated files, permissions, and SharePoint configuration are reviewed and tested.
Changes made since the initial migration are addressed before cutover where the migration approach supports it.
Employees begin working from the new SharePoint environment.
We address user questions, access problems, and other issues that arise after the transition.
Careful planning helps avoid the confusion that can occur when employees don't know which system contains the current version of a file.
Moving information to the cloud doesn't eliminate the need for cybersecurity.
Your SharePoint environment should be configured as part of your broader Microsoft 365 security strategy.
Depending on your requirements, we can help implement or review:
The objective is to make information accessible to the people who need it without unnecessarily exposing sensitive business data.
Cloud storage and backup aren't necessarily the same thing.
SharePoint includes features designed to protect and recover information, but businesses should still evaluate whether additional Microsoft 365 backup capabilities are appropriate for their recovery and retention requirements.
IT Services Delaware can help develop a broader Microsoft 365 data protection strategy covering:
Your recovery strategy should reflect how important the information is and how quickly your organization needs to recover it.
A SharePoint migration may make sense if:
In some environments, replacing an aging file server with SharePoint can eliminate the need to purchase another physical server entirely.
Law firms often maintain extensive collections of client, administrative, and legal documents.
We can help legal practices evaluate which information is appropriate for SharePoint, establish access controls, migrate shared documents, and integrate the environment with Microsoft 365.
Accounting firms rely heavily on organized document storage and secure access.
A properly planned SharePoint environment can improve internal collaboration while maintaining appropriate permissions around sensitive business and client information.
Healthcare organizations need to carefully evaluate how information is stored, accessed, and shared.
We can help plan SharePoint environments while considering the organization's security, privacy, access, and operational requirements.
Consulting companies, engineering firms, insurance agencies, and other professional organizations can use SharePoint to centralize documents and improve collaboration across employees, departments, and locations.
SharePoint can provide smaller organizations with sophisticated document collaboration capabilities without requiring a traditional onsite file server for every use case.
A SharePoint migration involves more than moving files.
It touches your network, Microsoft 365 tenant, user accounts, security, permissions, business processes, data protection, and employee workflows.
IT Services Delaware can manage these pieces as one coordinated technology project.
Businesses choose us for:
Most importantly, we don't disappear once the files have been transferred. We can continue supporting your Microsoft 365 and IT environment after the migration is complete.
If your business is still relying on an aging file server, complicated network drives, or scattered cloud storage, now may be the right time to modernize your document environment.
IT Services Delaware provides professional SharePoint Migration Services throughout Delaware, helping organizations plan, migrate, secure, and support Microsoft 365 SharePoint environments.
From the initial assessment and file cleanup through SharePoint configuration, data migration, permissions, testing, and final cutover, we'll help make the transition as straightforward as possible.
We serve businesses throughout Wilmington, Newark, New Castle, Middletown, Dover, Smyrna, Milford, and communities across Delaware.
Call (302) 351-2516 today to schedule a SharePoint migration consultation and discuss the best way to move your business files to Microsoft 365.
