My suggestions before migrating content from your file server, into SharePoint

I find a big piece of migration that is often overlooked is the fact that ‘we don’t need to migrate everything’. While it probably seems painfully obvious, I like common sense solutions so I’ll state it anyways.

Before migrating, or during migration, there should be a step for ‘vetting’ whether a document should even be imported. If a document is ‘dead, tombstoned, unnecessary’, whatever, it should either then be:

1. Destroyed
2. Archived somewhere other than SharePoint
3. Leave it in the original location (say the file server h:) but mark it as read only – if they need the document later, they move it to the writable SharePoint library at that time
4. Archived in a different library in SharePoint

All 4 of the above, if applied against X number of documents, will also help trim the size of the stuff we need to index and view (performance gains) and backup (availability restore window requirements). Typically, 3 or 4 seems to be the best choice for documents that are no longer relevant as it can be backed up on a less frequent timetable, is still searchable via the overall search functionality, etc.

I just think it’s important to state this expectation clearly. It’s a win/win and if not stated, there is a strong possibility they’ll just shove every document into this library, impacting performance and bloating it unnecessarily.