Our own Julie Auletta ably facilitated the Birds of a Feather session on Migrating Data to SharePoint yesterday evening. This was a discussion topic that Bamboo had submitted for consideration and was approved for the popular Birds of a Feather sessions. These TechEd sessions take the form of a live forum for open discussion, with audience members sharing their knowledge, and with the discussion typically being facilitated by the person who proposed the topic.
As our Solutions Director at Bamboo, and as a regular speaker at SharePoint User Groups, Julie was the ideal choice to lead this discussion. With the members of the audience presenting a mixed bag of migration cases, and eager for discussion, it was a lively hour of SharePoint migration talk. Joining in the discussion at times were Bamboo's Lam Le and Jonas Nilsson with migration tips and suggestions.
The largest concern among the audience members as a whole (the majority of whom I'm guessing were systems administrators) centered around migrating massive amounts of files (of potentially massive size), but without those files having been pruned by their creators/owners to remove old/unnecessary items. End users took a few lumps here, being seen as largely "packrats" who never want to delete anything, and when it comes time to migrate data, are unwilling to prune their files and would like nothing more than to just "migrate everything." Needless to say, not only are there unnecessary expenditures involved in doing so, but this can present additional maintenance headaches for the administrator down the line. End users, please be kind to your systems administrators, and go through and clean up your files, removing any unnecessary ones prior to a migration.
Another concern in the room involved SharePoint itself being a "hard sell" to management, given the costs associated with MOSS. The most helpful recommendation came from one audience member, speaking from experience, who suggested that you start with WSS, and get ‘em hooked on that free version of SharePoint. Once you've got your organization on WSS, and the benefits of SharePoint are readily apparent to your users, select a few key members of different departments (BI, HR, etc.) to start dropping hints to their management about how much more they could accomplish with MOSS. If you play your cards right, before long, you'll have executives coming to you, asking "what's this MOSS that I keep hearing so much about?"
If you're attending TechEd and haven't yet taken in a Birds of a Feather session, I'd highly recommend the experience. Check your "local listings" for a topic of interest to you and take part in a communal session amongst your fellow IT Pros.
Posted
Jun 12 2008, 10:35 AM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.