Plan for SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365
This article and the other articles in this section include the core planning considerations for rolling out OneDrive and SharePoint in a medium to large organization.
SharePoint is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams. As part of your SharePoint and OneDrive rollout, we recommend that you review Microsoft Teams deployment overview.
As you plan your rollout, in addition to the technical planning considerations provided here, consider these questions:
- What are your high-level goals for rolling out OneDrive and SharePoint?
- What are the file storage and collaboration needs of your organization?
- How do you want to transition from your current tools to OneDrive and SharePoint?
- How important is migration of content as part of your rollout?
- Should your administrators specialize in a particular area of OneDrive or SharePoint or should they work from a shared queue of tasks?
After you review this article, see these articles for additional planning information:
Plan sharing and collaboration options in SharePoint and OneDrive
Training and change management for rolling out SharePoint and OneDrive
Migrate content
An important part of rolling out SharePoint and OneDrive is migrating content from your existing storage locations. This may include gradual migration of content over time as you roll SharePoint and OneDrive out to different groups in your organization. You can find complete information about migration at Migrate your content to Microsoft 365.
Migrate with FastTrack
FastTrack is a Microsoft benefit that is included in your subscription. FastTrack provides you with a set of best practices, tools, resources, and experts committed to helping you deploy Microsoft 365. Guidance around SharePoint and OneDrive onboarding, migration, and adoption are included in the benefit offering. This guidance includes: help to discover what's possible, creating a plan for success, and onboarding new users, providing guidance on migrating content, and introducing capabilities at a flexible pace.
FastTrack guidance provides enablement of both SharePoint and OneDrive as well as getting the source environment ready for your transition. For more details, see FastTrack Center Benefit Overview. Interested in getting started? Visit the FastTrack web site, review resources, and submit a Request for Assistance.
Sites, hubs and architecture
You can let your users create and administer their own SharePoint sites, choose what kind of sites they can create, and specify the location of the sites. By default, users can create communication sites and Microsoft 365 group-connected team sites. You can restrict this if you want to manage this through IT or a business process. Plan sharing and collaboration options in SharePoint and OneDrive for more information.
SharePoint uses hub sites to help you organize sites in a hierarchy that matches your organization or business processes. While it's not critical to plan your hub site layout as part of your SharePoint rollout, we recommend reviewing Planning your SharePoint hub sites to understand how hub sites work.
We recommend including planning for hub sites as part of your process for rolling out an intelligent intranet.
Network utilization
Various factors can impact the amount of network bandwidth used by SharePoint and OneDrive. For the best experience, we recommend that you assess this impact before you start your rollout. The article Network utilization planning for the OneDrive sync app includes the recommended process for determining your network bandwidth needs for OneDrive. Be sure to include this as part of your deployment plan.
These references can also help with planning your rollout:
Change management
Rolling out SharePoint and OneDrive means new processes and procedures for the users in your organization. An important part of the rollout is making sure users are trained in the new ways of doing tasks as well as entirely new tasks that SharePoint and OneDrive enable. See Training and change management for rolling out SharePoint and OneDrive for considerations around change management and resources that you can share with your users on how to work with SharePoint and OneDrive.
Customizing SharePoint
SharePoint offers many customization options, including:
- Branding SharePoint sites
- Navigation between sites
- Custom page layouts
- Custom apps
- Workflows
We recommend that you review Customizing SharePoint to determine if you want to include any of these customizations as part of your SharePoint rollout.