How to read it
The chapters are a sequence, not a set of subjects: each one ends where the next begins. Every chapter is also a PDF, and the two carry the same editorial work: the same text, the same tables and the same sources. Neither is a summary of the other.
From SharePoint Server 2016 or 2019 to Subscription Edition
The chapters, analyses and tools for that move, in the order of the work, from whichever of its five steps the farm is at: the path to Subscription Edition.
Part I. Deciding
- 01Migration does not start with a tool
A migration tool moves content. It does not decide what deserves to move, who says so, or what "it worked" means. Those three answers are the project.
Chapter 1 as PDF - 02Know your estate before you choose its future
You cannot plan what you have not counted. Every destination question in this book has a number behind it, and the numbers come from the farm, not from the people who run it.
Chapter 2 as PDF - 03What decides the destination
A destination is chosen by constraints, not by fashion. Size rarely decides; dependencies almost always do.
Chapter 3 as PDF - 04Making and defending a recommendation
A recommendation should survive a product update. A feature comparison does not.
Chapter 4 as PDF - 05
- 06Governance before technology
A migration copies your governance whether you wrote it down or not.
Chapter 6 as PDF
Part II. What is there
- 07
- 08Verify what actually moved
A migration report is the producer's account of its own work.
Chapter 8 as PDF - 09Cut over without losing the truth
The source keeps changing until the day you stop it, and that day is later than you think.
Chapter 9 as PDF - 10Decide every service application before the farm is built
No service application crosses to the new farm. A new one is built there, and the only question is whether it is built around the old one's database.
Chapter 10 as PDF - 11Decide every search dependency before the destination is built
The index never moves. Everything people relied on it for is either rebuilt on purpose or missed in silence.
Chapter 11 as PDF - 12Decide what the structure becomes before the tooling is chosen
An attach moves the structure as it is, faults included. A copy into SharePoint Online moves the content and leaves the structure to be decided again.
Chapter 12 as PDF - 13
- 14Classify every site by its evidence of use before it joins a wave
A farm remembers who last wrote and forgets who read. Silence in its records is a fact about the records before it is a fact about the site.
Chapter 14 as PDF
Part III. What does not cross as it is
- 15Inventory and decide every customisation
What the farm has installed and what the sites use are two lists. The work is in the difference.
Chapter 15 as PDF - 16Decide every SPFx package before its sites move
The catalogue holds the package, never its source. A package nobody can rebuild can be kept or replaced, never changed.
Chapter 16 as PDF - 17Farm solutions that run with elevated privileges
Elevation decides which account acts, never who may ask.
Chapter 17 as PDF - 18Decide every add-in before its model is retired
An add-in is installed in a site, trusted by a farm and often hosted somewhere else. A migration moves the site; everything else is a decision.
Chapter 18 as PDF - 19Decide every workflow before the attach
Every workflow arrives with its content. Whether anything still runs it was decided before the attach, or not at all.
Chapter 19 as PDF - 20Decide every InfoPath form before it loses its host
End of support stopped the fixes, not the forms. A form stops on the day its host goes, and in a migration that day is on your own plan.
Chapter 20 as PDF - 21Choose the sign-in the new farm will accept
To SharePoint, one person who signs in two ways is two people, and the content knows only one of them.
Chapter 21 as PDF - 22Know every integration before it moves
A migration moves one end of every integration. The other end finds out when it fails.
Chapter 22 as PDF
Part IV. The destination
- 23Upgrade to Subscription Edition by database attach
A database attach moves the content. Everything that made the old farm work is built again, by hand, before the content arrives.
Chapter 23 as PDF - 24Choose SharePoint Online site by site, with every blocker answered
SharePoint Online takes a site's content and none of its farm. A site is ready when everything the farm did for it has an answer.
Chapter 24 as PDF - 25Keep hybrid only for named features, each with an owner and an exit date
Hybrid is not a third place for content. It is a list of features, and each one keeps a farm, a trust and a certificate running until somebody switches it off.
Chapter 25 as PDF - 26When not to migrate
Not migrating is a destination. It needs a reason, an owner and an end date, like every other.
Chapter 26 as PDF - 27Archive before the first wave, somewhere that outlives the farm
An archive is kept for a question nobody has asked yet. It has to outlive the farm, the project and everyone who remembers where it went.
Chapter 27 as PDF - 28Decide when each classic site becomes modern, or why it stays classic
Online, Microsoft has dated the end of editing classic pages. On a farm, you date it yourself, or a later migration dates it for you.
Chapter 28 as PDF - 29Choose a route for each group of sites, and accept what it leaves behind
Every route leaves something behind. The choice is whether you list it before the first wave, or hear about it from the people who open the sites.
Chapter 29 as PDF
Part V. Delivery
- 30Start the waves only on a readiness record that names what is not yet true
Every project feels ready the week before it starts. The record is how you find out which parts of that feeling are true.
Chapter 30 as PDF - 31Choose a pilot that can fail, and let what it measures change the plan
The easiest site in the estate always moves. A pilot is chosen from the sites that might not.
Chapter 31 as PDF - 33Size each wave to the people who accept it, and write down what stops the next
The platform decides how fast content moves. The people who must say it arrived decide how fast the project does.
Chapter 33 as PDF - 34Accept each wave on criteria written before it, signed by the people who use it
"The file arrived" is not validation. A migration has finished when the tool stops; it has worked when the people who use each site say so, on evidence somebody else can read.
Chapter 34 as PDF
Part VI. Operating
- 38Switch off the old farm in an order you can stop at every step but the last
A farm outlives its servers in every system that was told to trust it.
Chapter 38 as PDF - 39Hand over every control with an owner, a reading and a review date
The project sets every control once. Everybody who changes one afterwards was never in the project.
Chapter 39 as PDF - 40Measure what changed, one fact at a time, before the project closes
Switching off the farm proves one thing: that the farm is off. Everything else the project promised is a separate fact, with its own evidence and its own owner.
Chapter 40 as PDF - 41Write each lesson into what it changes, before the team disperses
A team remembers until it disperses. A project remembers only what it changed in the documents the next team has to open.
Chapter 41 as PDF - 42Keep Subscription Edition supported, one update at a time
Subscription Edition has no end date. Every build of it has one.
Chapter 42 as PDF
What the Field Guide is, and is not
Field Guide owns the ordered method for executing a SharePoint migration, read in sequence. It is the only place on this site that does.
What does not belong here, and where each lives instead:
- The product itself Microsoft 365 Governance as Code · Product
- How the product works Documentation · Product
- Microsoft 365 facts Knowledge · Knowledge
- Engineering arguments and lessons Analysis · Practice
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