Moving to SharePoint Online

Are you creating a new hub with a number of associated sites, for example for a department or college? Or are you creating a new site that may or may be associated with an existing hub, for example for a research project within a department or an admin team in a college?

Planning a new hub with a network of sites

Before moving to SharePoint Online, we strongly recommend that you design a strategy for how your new SharePoint Online network will be structured. We suggest you consider the following steps before you move to SharePoint Online:

1. Review your current site collection - try to avoid taking everything from your SharePoint on-premise site collection over to SharePoint Online. There’s advice on using the 6S method for cleaning up existing sites from the Focus team
2. Decide on your SharePoint Online network structure - remember that, in SharePoint Online, "flat is best", so avoid creating a hierarchy of sites. You might want to create a network diagram a bit like this:
   
   
   

   A diagram of generic hub network for SharePoint Online

3. Decide on your strategy and the combination you want of hubs and sites
4. Decide which type of sites you want - there are two site types available in SharePoint Online:
   1. team sites, which are best for collaborating on documents
   2. communication sites, which are best for intranets and when you want to broadcast messages to your users

Take a look at this Quick Reference Guide about Developing a strategy for moving to SharePoint Online.

Each department, college or part of the University that wants to have presence in SharePoint Online needs to go through an onboarding process before any sites or hubs can be created.

Planning a new site

1. Review your each current site (if you have one) - try to avoid taking everything from your SharePoint on-premise site over to SharePoint Online. There’s advice on using the 6S method for cleaning up existing sites from the Focus team
2. Consider if Microsoft Teams would be a better place for this content than SharePoint Online - both are used for collaboration and they are both products within Nexus365
   • Teams comes with additional collaboration features such as chat and virtual meetings and is ideal for working documents
   • SharePoint Online should be a repository for sharing final versions of documents
3. Decide which type of site you want - there are two site types available in SharePoint Online:
   • team sites, which are best for collaborating on documents
   • communication sites, which are best for intranets and other sites where you want to broadcast messages with your users
4. Discuss with your Site Network Administrator (SNA) (or current Site Collection Administrator (SCA), if you have not yet moved any sites to SharePoint Online) how your new site will fit into the existing network for your part area of the University
   If you don't know who your current SCA is for SharePoint on-premise, they should be listed in this Site Listing.
5. Delete or archive your old SharePoint on-premise site, if appropriate
   Take a look at this Quick Reference Guide to Decommissioning old SharePoint sites.

Site Provisioning

Now that SharePoint Online has been launched, information about site provisioning is available on the Get SharePoint Online page on the Help website.