SharePoint 2013 Migration Wave: Procrastinators 2.0?

If you’ve recently kicked your SharePoint migration plans up a notch, you’re in good company. A recent Metalogix poll revealed that more than 70 percent of respondents have plans to deploy SharePoint 2013 in the next 12 months.

The Next Great Wave

“It is clear that the great migration wave to SharePoint 2013 is underway,” said Metalogix CEO Steven Murphy.

Did Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2014 have something to do with it? It certainly helped that at SPC14, Microsoft clarified its roadmap and committed to an on-premises version of SharePoint, to come in 2015, Murphy said.

RELATED: Why Migrate to SharePoint 2013?

Not coincidentally, the Metalogix survey was conducted at SPC14.

“There is always a lag to upgrade to the most current version of SharePoint and this SharePoint 2013 wave has taken a bit longer than it did in past versions. We are seeing an increase in license key requests and downloads of our free SharePoint Migration Toolkit,” Murphy said.

Add to that the fact that 2003 is coming to end of support, which, said Tamir Orbach,
director of product management at Metalogix, “May have jogged people to move.”

Whatever the reason, and however great the hop--from 2010 to 2013, 2007 to 2013, or 2003 to 2013--migrating to SharePoint 2013 is a lot different than earlier SharePoint migrations. “A lot of customers have realized it’s not easy, especially compared to migrating to 2010. It’s more complex, more challenging,” said Metalogix CMO Jignesh Shah.

Migration Tools

Do-it-yourself migration to SharePoint 2013, while possible, isn’t very pretty without third-party solutions, the Metalogix guys will have you concluding. The dirty little secret, Murphy says, is that “Everyone thinks they can migrate themselves. Then they get about 20 percent in and things go wrong. Usually they’re in a big hurry, they can’t have a business outage. But their implementations have grown in mass and criticality.”

Enter Metalogix. The company is announcing the latest version of Content Matrix, Content Matrix 7.0. And it is announcing the completion of its free SharePoint Migration Toolkit.  

Metalogix Content Matrix 7.0 offers high-speed and high-fidelity content migrations from any previous version of SharePoint or other content sources to SharePoint 2013 on-premises or to Office 365, including those that require the Microsoft SharePoint Online Code Analysis Framework (MSOCAF) certification.

The free SharePoint Migration Toolkit addresses every step in the migration lifecycle and includes videos, guides and tools. The toolkit is available on the Metalogix website, as is Content Matrix 7.0.

Metalogix is also sharing the lessons learned from helping customers with migrations, in an upcoming webinar: Rescue Your SharePoint 2013 Migration.

Who's On What?

Metalogix believes that around 88,000 enterprises are on SharePoint, Murphy said. “Better than 50 percent use SharePoint for external apps, external-facing applications. It’s all mission critical.”

In Europe and Asia, he said, the company is seeing “a lot of moves from 2007 to 2013. And in the financial community, which has a higher penalty for outage, we’re seeing a lot of moves from 2007 to 2013.” Recently the company sold to a large customer moving from 2003 to 2013.  

“The wave for migrating to 2010 is not over—there will be a six- to twelve- month overlap where people want the improvements of 2010; then the wave to get on 2013 before 2015,” Murphy said.

“We’re seeing the procrastinators moving.”