11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations

Christian Buckley

cbuck@axceler.com @buckleyPLANET

My Background Christian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler • Most recently at Microsoft

• Microsoft Managed Services (now BPOS-Dedicated)

• Advertising Operations, ad platform API program

• Prior to Microsoft, was a senior consultant, working in the software, supply chain, and grid technology spaces focusing on collaboration

• Co-founded and sold a collaboration software company to Rational Software. Also co-authored 3 books on software configuration management and defect tracking for Rational and IBM

• At another startup (E2open), helped design, build, and deploy a SharePoint-like collaboration platform (Collaboration Manager), managing deployment teams to onboard numerous high-tech manufacturing companies, including Hitachi, Matsushita, Seagate, Nortel, Sony, and Cisco

• I live in a small town just east of Seattle, have a daughter in college and 3 boys at home

Axceler Overview • Improving Collaboration for 16+ Years

– Mission: To enable enterprises to simplify, optimize, and secure their collaborative platforms

– Delivered award-winning administration and migration software since 1994

– Over 2,000 global customers

• Dramatically improve the management of SharePoint

– Innovative products that improve security, scalability, reliability, “deployability”

– Making IT more effective and efficient and lower the total cost of ownership

• Focus on solving specific SharePoint problems (Administration & Migration)

– Coach enterprises on SharePoint best practices – Give administrators the most innovative tools available – Anticipate customers’ needs – Deliver best of breed offerings – Stay in lock step with SharePoint development and market trends

Why is this presentation important?

• Most content focused on the technical aspects of migration

• Migrations are not so much about the technical act of moving the data (although very important), but more about the planning that goes into preparing for the migration

Email Cell Twitter Blog cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

This is your technical migration, i.e. the physical move of content and “bits”

10/5/2011 6

This is the bulk of your migration – the planning,

reorganization, and transformation of your

legacy SharePoint environment

• Microsoft defines migration as three separate activities:

• The reality is that a single migration may include all three concepts

What is migration? Move

•Use the procedures for moving a farm or components when you are changing to different hardware. For example, use these procedures if you move to computers that have faster processors or larger hard disks.

Migrate

•Use the procedures for migrating a farm or components when you are changing to a different platform or operating system. For example, use these procedures if you change from Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008.

Upgrade

•Use the procedures for upgrading a farm or components when you are changing to a different version of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

What is migration?

Why migrations are difficult: Migrations are phased

• How and what you migrate should not be determined by the technology you use – it’s about matching the needs and timing of your content owners and teams. A migration should be flexible, moving sites and content based on end user needs, not the limitations of the technology.

Migrations are iterative

• Your planning should not be limited by the number of migration attempts you make, or by the volume of content being moved. A healthy migration recognizes the need to test the waters, to move sites, content and customizations in waves, allowing users to test and provide feedback.

Migrations are error prone

• There is no “easy” button for migration. You can run a dozen pre-migration checks and still run into problems. Admins and end users do things that are not “by the book.” Customizations. Third party tools. Line of business applications that run under the radar.

Migrations are not the end goal

• Proper planning and change management policies will help you to be successful with your current and future migrations. The goals should be a stable environment, relevant metadata, discoverable content, and happy end users.

What are the Microsoft options?

Email Cell Twitter Blog cbuck@echotechnology.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

1. Understand the as-is and to-be environments 2. Conduct proper capacity planning 3. Understand the customizations on your source system 4. Understand the migration schedule 5. Plan for the right kind of migration 6. Plan for file shares 7. Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy 8. Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments 9. Stage your platform for migration 10. Decide where and when to involve the users 11. Determine that your migration is successful

11 strategies you should consider as part of your migration planning

A migration is an extensive business analyst activity • Prior to any system redesign, understand your

environment goals and purpose:

• Based on these requirements, you need to model out

the “to be” environment

Strategy #1: Understand as-is and to-be environments

• What works • What doesn’t work

• What are the organizational “must have” requirements

• What are the “nice to have” features

• Migration is about transforming your existing system to meet operational needs.

• It’s as much about retooling current sites and content as it is about deploying new technology

• Don’t just tear down and rebuild if there’s something to be saved. Understand what you have to work with, have a vision for what it should look like, and move the pieces that should be moved

Strategy #1: Understand as-is and to-be environments

• Understand your current environment: • Number of users • Number of sites • Number of site collections • Database size • Geographical needs of your organization

(how many sites, what are their usage patterns) • Line of business application integration

Strategy #2: Conduct proper capacity planning

• Think about your future needs: • User growth

• Estimates on site creation

• Estimates on database growth

• Security and Search needs

Strategy #2: Conduct proper capacity planning

• Map out your: • Hardware • Topology • Performance requirements • Security requirements • Scalability • Disaster recovery • Business continuity

Strategy #2: Conduct proper capacity planning

• Pre-Upgrade Check provides some of the analysis: • Searches content sources and start addresses • Outlines Office Server topology • Identifies servers in the current farm • Lists SharePoint version and list of components running in the farm • Outlines supported upgrade types • Provides Site Definition and Feature information • Details language pack information • Identifies Alternate Access Mappings that will need to be recreated • Outlines Customized List Views (these will not be upgraded) • Outlines Customized Field Types (these will not be upgraded) • Identifies WSS Search topology • Provides list of Content Databases and SQL server location

Strategy #3: Understand the customizations on your source system

Joel Oleson, SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate

• What kinds of customizations are on your source system? • UI design • Web parts • Workflows • Line of business applications • 3rd party tools • Custom features • Site definitions • Field types • Custom SharePoint solutions • Any changes to the file system on your SharePoint servers

• Pre-Upgrade Check provides some of the analysis • How many of those customizations are

outside of the SharePoint framework? • Are there any customizations which can

be replaced by out-of-the-box functionality?

Strategy #3: Understand the customizations on your source system

• What are the business drivers, not just the technology drivers?

• Cost • Time • Resources/People

• Do you have a defined project methodology?

• How long per phase, what is moved, what are the priorities?

• The schedule should be defined only after you understand the future state, set priorities, and get management buy-in.

• In short, what is the scope?

Strategy #4: Understand the migration schedule

• Does the migration plan include content, sites, metadata, and/or solutions?

• Each one brings with it a set of requirements and decisions

• What is the end goal? Is it a straight dump of everything, and you’ll clean up later, or do you need to restructure?

• Is your strategy the same for various organizations, different site collections, or farms?

Strategy #5: Plan for the right kind of migration

• Most file shares have become a dumping ground.

• Is the plan to move as-is and decommission old systems, or is this a clean up process?

• Are users driving, or is it an administrative effort?

• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy?

Strategy #6: Plan for file shares

• Understand what is out there

• Who owns the content?

• Does it need to be moved?

• Does it need to be indexed/searchable?

• Is the folder structure important?

• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?

Strategy #6: Plan for file shares

• Users generally have three options: • Move content, as-is, into SharePoint and clean up there

• Clean and organize content first, then move to a new structure in SharePoint

• Migrate content in waves, using the iterations to sort through and organize your content

while in transit, moving some content as-is, reorganizing and transforming others

• To be honest, option 3 is very difficult to manage in SharePoint, but 3rd party tools do a great job here

Strategy #6: Plan for file shares

Common Migraines • Ad-hoc content migration leads to junk in portal • Legacy content gets migrated slowly, if at all • Inconsistent taxonomy across farms and site collections • People author locally - multiplies problems globally • Authors don’t apply metadata= “shotgun” approach to search OR Authors

apply metadata without common classification = better search, but worse authoring experience

• Portal lacks high fidelity search • User can’t find the right content • As a result, poor portal adoption and low user satisfaction

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

• What is your broader strategy for tagging, metadata and taxonomy?

• Map out your high level taxonomy (web applications and site collections) and schemas (Content Types)

• Understand the as-is and to-be, and how it relates to your metadata

Managed

Metadata

Service

Term Stores

Improved Governanc

e

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

• Map out your high level taxonomy (web applications and site collections) and schemas (Content Types)

• Understand the as-is and to-be, and how it relates to your metadata

• With Managed Metadata Service in 2010, it is critical that you set up a governance model to guide this process, or it will quickly get out of hand

Strategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

Strategy #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

CENTRALIZED

• PROS • Improves consistency • Reduces metadata duplication • Easy to update • Easy to support and train on • Allows document-level DIP, Workflow,

Information Policies, and document templates • CONS • Requires planning • Requires upfront work • Hard to manage across site collections and

portals

DECENTRALIZED

• PROS • Requires no planning • Requires little upfront effort • Works across site collections and portals

• CONS • Decreases consistency • Increases metadata duplication • Hard to update • Hard to support and train on • Only allows list-level Workflow, Information

Policies and document templates • Difficult to reverse

• Use of services greatly improves concerns over the decentralized model:

• Services can be centrally managed • Sites and Site Collections can consume these services, within certain

boundaries

• You still need to understand the administrative impacts

• You need to clearly define roles and service owners

• Define your governance model / change control board

Strategy #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

• Understanding your requirements: • Hardware / software • Network • Virtual environments • Hosting / datacenter • Downtime / end user impacts • Communication • Location of your teams • Backup/recovery

• Coordinate your planning with the operations team

Strategy #9: Stage your platform for migration

• This is the most fluid of the strategic considerations, as it really just depends

• At a high-level, end users who participate in the creation of a system are more likely to accept / support that system once deployed

Strategy #10: Decide where and when to involve users

• Where end users should be involved: • Creation of use cases • Creation of as-is documentation • Prioritization of requirements for to-be environment • They know their content – let them drive

• File share migrations, or organization • Taxonomy development • Metadata assignment • Signoff on overall project plan

Strategy #10: Decide where and when to involve users

• Possible success metrics:

• Target number of end users migrated

• Target number of sites migrated

• Databases migrated

• File shares migrated and decommissioned

• 2010 live, users able to manually migrate their content

Strategy #11: Define what success looks like

Words of Wisdom:

If you fail to plan, then plan to fail.

Then again…

There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you put the bar low enough

Strategy #11: Define what success looks like

Online and offline resources • 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations (Buckley), http://slidesha.re/d3RHNH

• Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 (Anders Rask), http://bit.ly/bjWXMS

• Migrating to SharePoint 2010 (Randy Williams), http://bit.ly/bNgX0U

• Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/dm2kDO

• Hardware and software requirements for 2010 (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/bTGe2b

• Capacity Planning and Sizing for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, http://bit.ly/eXf0Cy

• SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate (O’Reilly, Safari), http://oreil.ly/chSHli

• Migrating to MOSS 2007 (Stephen Cummins), http://bit.ly/9Ismfp

• Planning to Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 (Joel Oleson), http://slidesha.re/16iiUX

• What’s New in SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning (Joel Oleson), http://bit.ly/9cT9aa

• ReadyPoint migration planning tool for 2007 to 2010 migrations (Axceler), http://bit.ly/9GgDuY

• PreUpgradeCheck (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/cIHIlA

• SharePoint 2010 Products Upgrade Approaches (Microsoft), http://bit.ly/dphQ2W

For more information • Contact me at

– Christian Buckley, cbuck@axceler.com, 425-246-2823 – On Twitter at @buckleyplanet

• Additional Resources available

– White papers • The Insider’s Guide to Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 • What to Look for in a SharePoint Management Tool • The Five Secrets to Controlling Your

SharePoint Environment – Tools

• ReadyPoint (free) • Davinci Migrator • echo for SharePoint 2007