SharePoint Migration Effort Estimation

Question

We are planning to migrate SharePoint 2013 content to 2016.As part of migration, we have to migrate huge amount of data. We got migration effort estimation from third party which is purely based on data size. They have considered data size migration/per day with X number of machines .For example, 5 machines x 1 day = 10 TB.

total effort = Total Data Size/ 1 Day output

I'm not convinced with this approach, here is my questions.

1. Is SharePoint content migration completely depends on size of data?
2. How about tools like metalogix plays role in migration?
3. Is there any tool/formula to estimate SharePoint migration?

Answer 1

IMHO calculating a migration based solely on data size is ridiculous. If your farm is vanilla SharePoint, i.e. zero customizations, migration is "trivial", you just install SP2016, restore your content and service app data DBs on the new DB Server and attach them to the new ShareePoint farm. Barring any use of functionality made obsolete in SP2016 you possibly have to disable pre migration (like Excel services), it's fairly painless (although time consuming).

If you have extensively customized your SP2013 sites (custom (server side) code, features, master pages, pagelayouts etc.) the task can grow exponentially ("use of custom functionality" x "number of customizations". Maybe even x data if you have custom DIPs, workflows etc.

Answer 2

The key in a SharePoint migration are the customs. When SharePoint does not have customs, migration is almost trivial and can take hours or days.

When you have customs, it may take weeks or months.

What kind of customs may exist?

• Branding (master page and CSS)
• Client side (client object model)
• SharePoint designer
• Server Side With Visual Studio (event receivers, web parts, application pages, etc)

You have to document each and estimate the effort of each.

Answer 3

Its depends on, Every company is different. if you ask 3rd party consultant company if they place their migration expert then they charge you per hour(they calculate the hours in advance as per the amount of Data). As per our recent experience, Metalogix charge you for the amount of data while ShareGate is charge you for the number of users(who will perform the migration).

So every company is different, but the basic thing is which company fulfill your requirement completely or maximum.

Other option, if you don't have extensive customization then one version migration( from SharePoint 2013 to 2016) will not be a big deal. you can use the Content Database Migration, you can run multiple database upgrade session at the same time.