M365 services

Migrating Files to SharePoint

Planning to migrate files to Microsoft SharePoint Online?

Access our SharePoint expertise in one of two ways:

Deliver your project yourself with free ongoing expert advice

When you buy your Microsoft 365 Licences through Compete366, receive the added benefit of ongoing expert SharePoint advice – whenever you need, at no extra cost.

We help your in-house IT Team on your SharePoint journey – with everything from architecture through to deployment, migration, security, and look and feel advice.

Think of us as one of the team.

Book a free, no obligation call with one of our M365 consultants

Let us deliver your SharePoint project for you for a one-off project fee

Want to migrate your file content into Microsoft SharePoint, but don’t have capacity or the skill-set in-house?

For a one-off fee ourSharePoint experts can deliver the SharePoint migration project for you, end to end.

Leaving you free to do what you do best.

Book a free, no obligation call with one of our M365 consultants

What is SharePoint Online?

SharePoint Online is Microsoft’s file and content sharing platform for organisations. It is included in nearly all the M365 Plans. It has many uses, but the primary ones are as a Document Management System and as an Intranet.

Your SharePoint migration partner

If you’re migrating large volumes of data from your file server or file shares to SharePoint, our experts will ensure a smooth, incident-free migration process.

If you have compliance requirements or reputational considerations such as data access across multiple clients, we’re the safe pair of hands you’ll need.

Our team of SharePoint technical consultants have successfully delivered over 40 file migration projects into SharePoint Online from source systems ranging from on-premise file servers to Google Workspace, Box and other Microsoft 365 tenants.

Microsoft has recognised our expertise through our Microsoft technical certifications and customer experience with the Solutions Partner Designation for Modern Work

Read more about SharePoint migration on our blog

We regularly share our insights about Microsoft SharePoint solutions on our blog, which IT decision-makers will find useful:

Your seamless migration to SharePoint

We deliver a seamless and low-risk migration to SharePoint.

We create the new SharePoint environment in parallel with your existing file share environment. We copy, rather than move your file data over, so your source system and files are never changed. After due testing of the SharePoint environment and admin and user education, the final copy is done at cut-over time.

With no interruption to your users and a low-risk project, we’ll have you up and running in SharePoint.

High-level project tasks are:

This includes analysing:

  • The depth of the folder structure
  • Invalid file types that cannot be migrated
  • File URL length (there is a limit of 256 characters for the entire document URL in SharePoint, and this includes site name, sub site name, folder name and
  • Document name – hence some document names might have to be shortened
  • File names with special characters, large files etc.

This includes setting up of the detailed site structure, including:

  • site collections
  • subsites
  • document libraries
  • site navigation
  • related security infrastructure.

While we can theoretically store an unlimited amount of data on SharePoint Online, it’s crucial to design your SharePoint site structure correctly so that we distribute the load across the backend databases and services. As part of the design phase, folders at source often need to be split into multiple document libraries at the destination.

SharePoint security works similarly to Active Directory security. It can be configured to provide fine-grained access control at various levels in the SharePoint hierarchy. At its simplest, it involves creation of Security Groups:

  • assigning permission levels like Full Control / Edit/ Contribute / Read-Only etc. to these Groups
  • adding users to these Security Groups
  • modifying default security on entities like Sites, Libraries, Folders and Files so that the Security Groups (and by extension the users who are part of these groups) have the desired amount of access on these entities.

We use a specialist SharePoint migration tool (typically AvePoint Fly or ShareGate) and this will be installed on the migration PC / Server. We are AvePoint and Sharegate partners, and the cost of the tool is included in the project. We run a series of migration jobs to migrate source content into the relevant SharePoint folders and libraries. This is the initial data migration.

After we’ve tested the security matrix and the initial copy of the data, we ask you to test these for yourself to make sure that everything is configured the way you want it. We can train administrators and your users on how to work with SharePoint.

This stage involves getting a count of documents on SharePoint and matching them with the count of documents on the source machine. Even though we do a pre-migration analysis as part of Step 1 to identify potential issues, some files are usually left over after the migration. At this stage, we extract a list of leftover files and discuss these with you to work around limitations and try a re-upload.

Once everything is in place, we ask you for a preferred date for switchover, usually across a weekend. Since the initial data migration and verification stages detailed above could take a few weeks, the source data may have undergone some changes during this period. The objective of the final migration is to sync these changes across to SharePoint just prior to the switchover.

Our SharePoint experts are on hand for a given time after migration if you need support.

What our customers say

“We had one of the Compete366 engineers work with us on the project. He was exceptional and even assisted on some issues caused by the migration which were outside of the 365 domain. Running Office 365 and Sharepoint via an Azure domain gives us a high level of control including user access and data sharing without needing an in-house server to maintain.”

Ed Birks, Managing Director, Langstaff Ellis

Read our case studies

Discover how we’ve successfully helped small and medium-sized businesses across the UK to make the most of SharePoint for their business.

Book a free, no obligation call with one of our SharePoint Consultants

Contact us to set up SharePoint in your organisation

Access our SharePoint migration expertise in one of two ways:

We help you deliver

Let us help you deliver your SharePoint project and get free ongoing expert advice

– OR –

We deliver for you

We’ll take the strain and deliver your SharePoint project for you

Contact our Microsoft specialists

Phone or email us to find out more – or book a free, no-obligation call with our technical consultants using the contact form.

“It’s great to work with the Compete366 team, the team members are really knowledgeable, helpful and responsive. No question is too difficult for them. They have really helped us to manage our Azure costs and ensure we have the right environment. When we bring a new customer on-board we can scale up immediately via the Azure portal and quickly make environments available to our customers.”

“We also find that there’s never a heavy sales pitch from them – they are technically focused and recommend what’s right for us.”

Paul Coyne, Rusada

“We had great support from the Compete366 AVD expert, who was really helpful, and guided me through options to tackle issues that arose.”

“The great thing about our AVD set up is that we have a custom set up for each project which Compete366 showed me how to do. And with the scalability and flexibility of AVD – we can meet clients’ expectations and get project users up and running more quickly.”

Amir Dangol, Senior IT Manager, Integrity

“We were immediately impressed with the advice that the Compete366 specialists in Azure Architecture were able to provide. This was all new to us and we really needed some external expertise that we could use to get our questions answered. The beauty of working with Compete366 is that we transferred our Azure consumption to them, and at the same time received all of their advice and guidance free of charge.”

Tim Entwistle, Head of Software Development, Herrco

“Working with Compete366 has been like extending our own team – they are extremely and easy to work with. Right from the outset, it was clear what was on offer – everything was presented to us in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. They also provided just the right level of challenge to our developers and saved us time and money by suggesting better ways to implement our infrastructure.”

Oliver Mackereth, Project Director, Hanse

“Compete366 were able to help us leverage some useful contacts in Microsoft. We really value the expert advice and guidance that they have offered us in setting up a highly scalable infrastructure. We are also setting in place a regular monthly meeting which will allow us to further refine our architecture and ensure we keep on track as our requirements grow and change.”

Matt Brocklehurst, Technical Director - AWOL Adventure

“I have been delighted with the migration, where my team worked very hard, supported by expert advice from Compete366, and achieved everything in the timescale we had set out. Compete 366 made sure that we didn’t make any expensive mistakes, and guided us through the process”

Darrell Cann, Managing Director, APEX
Jon Milward
Director
Thank you for your message. It has been sent.
There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later.

By submitting your details, you agree to be contacted.