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The Challenge

The legacy file server setup our client had presented several downsides:

• Harder to work from anywhere – Staff working remotely or out with clients had to connect through a VPN to access documents. This added extra steps and slowed things down, making everyday tasks more frustrating than they needed to be.

• Complex permissions – Access had to be granted to individuals rather than roles, making it difficult to manage over time. The result was “permission sprawl,” with unclear access levels and increased security risk.

• Heavy on physical infrastructure – Running servers on-site meant ongoing energy use, hands-on maintenance and backups, as well as ongoing equipment upgrades and disposals. As a firm dedicated to minimising its environmental impact, this last point was important.

The Migration Solution

We hand-held our client through a comprehensive transformation that had five distinct phases to ensure zero business disruption:

• Phase 1: Audit & Optimisation – Discovery and restructuring of the existing environment. 

• Phase 2: Environment Setup – Provisioning SharePoint sites and configuring security rules before data arrival.

• Phase 3: The Pilot – Moving a small, non-critical department (e.g., the IT team!) to test the workflow.

• Phase 4: The “Big Move” – Scheduling bulk transfers during off-hours, followed by an Incremental Sync to capture any final edits before going live.

• Phase 5: Go-Live & Adoption – Setting the old server to “Read-Only” and providing 30-minute training sessions on Co-authoring and Version History.ase where the emails have been archived to meet regulatory and compliance needs. 

If you’d like to find out more, book a chat with our experts, but here’s a key pre-migration checklist we recommend for any IT team looking to run a migration “in house”.

What to Do Before You Migrate File Shares to SharePoint (DIY Tips)

Whether you work with a partner like Essential or manage your own migration internally, bear in mind the 5 P’s (Proper Preparation Prevents P*** Poor Performance)! Here’s some tips on doing your best preparation:

1. ‘Have a Big Clean-Up’

Before moving any data, having a good tidy up is always a good idea, as there’s no point in moving data that isn’t needed and you may end up with a SharePoint overage charge before you’ve barely got going!  To help with your clean up you can:

• See if you should be deleting to meet compliance needs.  Can you safely and justifiably delete data that’s older than a certain age? Regulations like HMRC set minimum retention periods (such as 6 years for financial records) but don’t define a maximum retenton time, however the UK GDPR requires organisations to delete personal data once it is no longer needed.  With this in mind, it becomes defensible to remove older information that no longer serves a legal or business purpose.
• Identify and delete multiple versions & duplicates – Tools such as TreeSize, Varonis, Netwrix, or PowerShell hash analysis can help identify duplicate and versioned files across Windows file servers.
• Ask ‘file area owners’ to have a clear up – Go to the respective ‘file area owners’, for example, the marketing manager, sales managers, product owners and so on and ask them to have a purge of unwanted files.  They will know what’s hot and what’s not!

2. Re-work Your File Structure for SharePoint

The folder structures that are typical of file servers often cause problems in SharePoint. Be prepared to sort out these areas:

1. Deep, nested folders. Folder structures that are very deep or complicated might work fine on a file server, but in SharePoint they can slow things down, make files harder to find, and create problems with access and management.  Although SharePoint still uses folders, it doesn’t rely on them as the main way to organise information.

Instead, it uses ‘meta data’ – that is, information about a file that helps describe and organise it such as Year, Document Type, Project.

2. In SharePoint Online, the maximum full path length is 400 characters.  This includes the site URL, library name, folder, subfolder(s), and file name.  If the total length of what you want to migrate exceeds 400 characters, files mail fail to migrated.   So if a file’s path is 300 characters on the source, and the SharePoint site URL + library + target structure adds another 150, the final path becomes 450 and you’re into the danger zone. 

In order to flatten deep file structures in advance you can start by identifying the key problem areas by running a path length report (using PowerShell, migration tool, or a file analysis tool), and then work out ways to shorten them.  For example, by moving “structure” into the file name. 

For example, 2025\Customer X\Q1\Sales.xlsx might become 2025_Customer_Q1_Sales.xlsx

You can also use the ‘Year’ a file was created in as metadata and not part of the file name.

3. Think Libraries not Folders. Moving to SharePoint means getting your head around a new way of structuring files.  Instead of using logical drives and folders as on Windows file servers, SharePoint uses the concept of:

• Sites = Consider these as related to department or business area
• Document Libraries within sites = You might expect to have a library for each major function or document type
• Folders within libraries = and to re-iterate, you should aim to have a maximum of 3 folder levels – the rest of the slicing and dicing of your data should be achieved with meta data.

3. Spend Quality Time Planning your Governance and Security Strategy

In our migration projects we always puts a big emphasis on security, and recommend you do the same if you take a DIY approach. Here’s some key things to think about:

• Manage Access According to Groups – You’ll need to shift permissioning from individuals to Microsoft 365 Groups.  On the ‘up side’ this will make things a lot easier to manage going forward.
• Implement External Sharing Best Practices – We generally recommend you set your defaults to “Specific People” only and implement mandatory Expiration Dates for shared links.
• Have regular Guest Reviews – Make reviewing who has access externally a regular, quarterly exercise to keep on top of external sharing risk.

Check out our article on SharePoint security that digs deeper into SharePoint security.

4. Brief End Users!

Expect to have to do some communications and training content around this shift in how SharePoint works, and indeed the benefits they’ll experience using SharePoint – such as co-authoring.

I remember back when we did this migration within Essential – the new way of working was a bit of a hurdle at first for some folk. 

Instead of worrying about putting files in the perfect folder, post-migration your users will need to think about storing files in the right library and relying on search, filters, and ‘views’ in order to locate them.

Once they get used to it, they’ll be flying, but don’t expect this bit to be smooth sailing at first.

BONUS TIP: Using OneDrive synchronisation can really help ease the transition. It lets users access SharePoint libraries through File Explorer, providing a more familiar experience.

Over time, as users become more comfortable with browser access, search, co-authoring and version history, reliance on sync often reduces – but as a stepping stone, it makes the change feel far less disruptive.

When to Get Expert Help

Many of the preparation steps and the the migration itself can be done internally – but complexity often rears its head when you’re looking at:

• Designing the right SharePoint structure to migrate to in the first place
• Analysing large file environments
• Identifying and rationalising complex, hiar paths
• Looking a permissions
• Running migrations without disrupting anyone
• Driving user adoption.

That’s where a structured approach – and experience from previous SharePoint migrations – can make the difference between a smooth transition and a difficult one.