Five tips for migrating Jive to SharePoint Online

Jive has been a leading social platform for many years that also has the advantage of being able to present content in an integrated way, leading to strong social intranets and collaboration platforms. However, in recent years there is a feeling that Jive has had less investment than other platforms like Microsoft 365, and that it can be expensive.

With many organisations now fully wanting to leverage their investment in Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Azure, some teams are considering retiring Jive and migrating the content and capabilities to the Microsoft 365 platform. The driver for this is not to just reduce costs, but also to  consolidate communication and collaboration channels to drive a better employee experience.

However, migrating Jive to SharePoint or SharePoint Online is neither straightforward or easy and some thought and planning needs to be done to mitigate risk and plan for a smooth project.

Here at Content Formula we recently helped on a Jive migration project with TTEC, a US-based global provider of customer experience solutions with 50,000 employees. Previously we worked with TTEC on the roll-out of a new intranet based on Wizdom and SharePoint Online.

Here are five tips for migrating Jive to SharePoint:

1. Define the migration that works for you

No two instances of Jive are the same and neither is a roll-out of SharePoint Online or Microsoft 365. Because Jive can be used for social collaboration, team-orientated workspaces and for content, Jive implementations can differ from organisation to organisation. For example, TTEC has tended to use Jive for presenting content, but other clients use it more for community spaces.

Similarly, organisations use Microsoft 365 and SharePoint in different ways: t in terms of collaboration (team sites, Microsoft Teams, Yammer), content (SharePoint modern and classic) and cloud (some elements of the digital workplace may still be on-premises.)

For this reason you simply cannot take a cookie-cutter approach to a Jive migration, and you need to consider usage of your existing Jive platform, how Microsoft 365 is being used and the future value you want to drive from the platform. Take time to define the migration that works for you; there is no such thing as a like-for-like migration here.

2. Consider this a Microsoft 365 migration, not just SharePoint

Because Jive is a social platform, your migration  may be leaning on the use of the wider tools across the Microsoft 365 platform such as Yammer and Microsoft Teams. For example, a community space on Jive may well likely better leverage the power of Yammer.  For this reason, it is best to consider your migration in terms of all Microsoft 365 tools rather than just SharePoint.

However, for TTEC because the focus was on content and workspaces, the migration principally involved SharePoint team sites, although this is unlikely to be the case for every migration.

3. Don’t lift and shift, take a content and community-led approach

Often the migration to a new platform is often the perfect time to review what is really necessary to take over, both in terms of content and sites. More often than not the majority of content on a legacy platform can be deleted or needs to be rewritten; similarly, sites for teams and groups often need to be restructured and refreshed.  Teams should avoid  lift and shift, simply dumping the content from an old site to the new; instead they should take a more content and community-centric view of which content should be taken over to create a compelling new platform.

The team at TTEC decided to avoid this lift and shift. They encouraged all site owners to review their existing Jive content by exporting a view of it into a CSV file, and from this consider the structure and content of their new site. Site owners were then encouraged to create and build their new team site using this as a reference. While this approach sounds more time-consuming it has resulted in high quality team sites that are critical for adoption, and that have significantly cut out noise, making sites more relevant for users.

4. Automate where it makes sense to

Although avoiding lift and shift involves more manual processes in reviewing and rebuilding sites, it  still makes sense to automate as much of the migration as possible. For example, at TTEC the IT function ensured that documents and images from existing sites could easily be migrated into SharePoint team sites by content owners through a drag and drop exercise. This saved considerable time but still encouraged site owners to think about the documents that did not need to come over. Automation and related scripts can obviously help with more complex aspects of a migration such as discussion threads.

5. Empower your site owners

If you are asking your site owners to play a prominent role in the migration then it is absolutely critical that they are engaged and empowered, viewing the migration as an opportunity to improve their site and drive more value.

For example, we supported TTEC by running numerous online training sessions with site owners all around the world covering how to set up a site, the web parts to include and creating content. We also included tips and tricks and created model page and site templates to guide content owners to get the best out of SharePoint team sites.

Need help with your Jive migration?

The TTEC Jive migration has proved very successful. There was less push back from site owners than might be expected and employees are starting to use the team sites that are fully embedded within the SharePoint Online intranet environment.

If you are planning a Jive to Microsoft 365 implementation it is important to find an implementation partner with the necessary experience. If you need help with your Jive to SharePoint or Microsoft 365 implementation then get in touch.