 Ed says, we're in the process of migrating from an outdated document management system to SharePoint. The challenge is transferring large volumes of sensitive data securely and organizing it effectively in SharePoint. What are the best practices for a smooth migration, and how should we approach data organization and security in SharePoint? This is a quick answer. This is one of those, it depends, right? Hold the chair also. Can we talk? Yeah, let's talk. This is one of my passions because I've been using SharePoints before, it was called SharePoint, and it was a document dump and people can't find anything. Then you see people take their shared drives or N drive, DRA drive, S drive, whatever that is, and dump it all into a SharePoint site and think it's going to work any better, or worse, even worse, they dump it into the one document library in Microsoft Teams, that in SharePoint behind the scenes is one document library, and they've got tens of thousands of documents. I worked on a big migration project last year, and saw this over and over and over again, and the biggest thing is to get things organized, but the number one thing you need to do is clean your things out. People are so, they're digital hoarders, they want all this stuff and I'll ask them, do you really need all of this or can we get rid of some of it? Because you're paying me to move it. You can pay me to move a little bit, but you can pay me to move a lot. How many of you, I always think of when you move in your house, you have those boxes that are in your garage that you've never looked at. Looked at. Since you moved in. Why are you even worried about that? Because you don't even know what's in those boxes. The same thing here, going through, getting rid of what you don't need and start, I have a whole session about how to manage your document strategy, and part of it is figure out what you need to keep, and get rid of the rot, the redundant, the outdated. No, you don't need that sign-up sheet for the potluck from 1995. You don't need that. But people are like, we need everything. It's like, really, you need that? I don't think so. And then start looking at it as if it were a paper world, because folders upon folders upon folders upon folders don't work in a web-based environment. Eventually, that beautiful connection between Office and the SharePoint libraries breaks because the URL is too long. And start looking at it as if this were a paper world. Your limitations are, the physical limitations are, this is a file drawer. There's a hanging file. There is a Manila folder, and then there are papers. And in the web world, you wanna be within three clicks. So there's your three clicks. If I had to reorganize this, how would I put it in a drawer, a hanging file, a Manila folder? And start breaking those out. And then if they're talking about security, well, you can create multiple file cabinets. That one that sits behind the scenes in Teams, everybody has the exact same permissions to. And if you've been working on the budget for this year and you finalize it, do you really want people to go in there and start editing those or deleting them? So create additional file cabinets. So which in the SharePoint world is another document library. And decide who needs this and who should control it. And then how long should it live? How long should we be keeping things around? Because you can set up content management strategies using content types that automatically alert you or just clean things out and say, after seven years delete this because we don't need it anymore. So all of that. That's an important part of all that is, is obviously with that structure, I think that's great best practice. I mean, it just points to the importance of having clarity of thought around your information architecture. How are we gonna structure this in the new environment? I said that actually moving the content and having centralized admin team going through and doing all the migration and sorting through that is just not realistic for most organizations. It's why, again, look, there's so much that it depends on. But the more that you can put that, put the structure in place, have the guardrails in place. That includes the sensitivity labels, all the labeling, the categorization in place there and then require end users, the owners of that content to go and do the sorting and move the content where possible. Again, it's not always possible to do that. There's large, anything leftover that just needs to be flagged as, do we archive this or does this go in? How is it gonna be flagged? Where is it gonna go around that? But as much as possible that you can put control of that process in the hands of the people that own it, the better and then it's gonna be more accurate because that's where you find out at the end, kind of like where you're moving if you're actually going through and saying, look, we found that we had 10 boxes and six of those boxes are full of stuff that we don't need. Great, you've got create your donate or the garbage pile of stuff. Migration is an opportunity to clean up and going back with the moving analogy, like I've moved a couple of people in my lifetime where the truck showed up, like they're moving their stuff on a schedule, they hadn't started packing. So we, I literally put dirty dishes from the sink into a box and got it onto a truck for them to get them out of there. Yeah. You don't wanna do that with SharePoint. You want to have things organized because you pack up garbage, you have to unpack garbage. You're gonna have to clean up at some point. At some point, and then who's gonna actually do that? And I think the other kind of flattening that file structure too, that using metadata instead of folders, I can look at anybody's file structure and tell them, here's the metadata you should have been using and using that to organize content instead of using folders upon folders upon folders. It's gonna make things more consumable and flexible. And, you know, trying to figure out what those might be. People are like, I don't know what it'd be. I'm like, I can look at your file structure and tell you right now because you've already figured out your categories. They're there in the names of your folders that you see over and over and over again. Well, one other thing I would add to, Dan, sorry, I don't know if you had an idea there, but part of it's Ed's question about transferring large volumes of sensitive data. I said, look, Microsoft went a couple of years back and acquired a small migration vendor. I mean, honestly, like cause I come from that space. So the ISV is the migration software. We're like, we never ran into that partner. I mean, it was not a robust, it was not the top tier product within the field because of the solutions that are out there. And it still isn't. It can do some basic things. It's a band-aid, it's a band-aid. Yeah. Right. And so, I mean, the last company I worked for, AppPoint, said that they talk with their services team. I said, what percentage of your migration projects, services and product sales, come from failed mover, which is the Microsoft acquired tool, migrations. They're like 80, 90% of our work comes from it. Tried it, it didn't work. And so, this is a very mature category for third-party tools. And there's a lot of things that you can do if you know what you're doing and you can make sure it's secure and kind of all those things. But that's what these tools were built to do in a en-mass large volumes, highly secure to help you, especially if you got your information architecture designed or not can help make sure that everything get moved over by default, is secure until you go in and confirm that it shouldn't be sensitive, secure, and you can decommission it, move it wherever later. But that's what they were built to do. And they're actually through Microsoft APIs. It will move faster than you trying to do it yourself manually. Because they've basically got within their code kind of a passcode from Microsoft that identifies as a trusted third-party product and it actually allows for a higher volume or speed of gigs of content through into or across environments in Microsoft 365. So, yeah, definitely go look at the third-party migration solutions out there. Sharegate. And we can make suggestions about that. There's tons out there, depending on what you're doing, what kind of content that there's tons that are out there. And the main thing I want to make people to know about that is that maintaining the integrity of the original documentation is crucial. Because if you have to keep your financial documents for seven to 10 years, and I download and then upload files from one place to another, then it timestamps it, me on this date. And therefore you lose all that integrity. So being able to control the data that comes over with the files, all that metadata, whether it's the built-in metadata like the timestamps or the versioning that you have, not just the latest version, but all the versions that were there and or who created it when, that's the biggest reason. And especially if it's sensitive documentation and whatever your government retention policies, and you have to do it legally or because it's archival for your company or just for the integrity of things. And Sherry, I loved your analogy of the file cabinets because even if you know there's a file cabinet with more sensitive information, just like you can link in teams to other SharePoint locations and sites, that doesn't mean that I have access to that. Just knowing where something is, it can be secured differently. And if it's for managers only or for certain people within the team, that's one way to control and make sure people that do have access or should have access can get to it easily, but those that don't have access, know where the file cabinet is, they just don't have the keys to open it.