Category: Migration

Planning an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to 2007

Robert Everatt / / Migration, Office 365

From research, it has become clear that the most common way to upgrade from SharePoint Server 2003 to Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint Online), is to first upgrade to MOSS 2007. However there are some third party tools available to facilitate the migration, this will be discussed in another post.

Good planning in advance seems to be the key thing when upgrading a large portal and there are a handful of analyses that should be conducted which are detailed below..

Type of Analysis Measure Description
Logical Implementation Number and Type of existing sites Understanding this will enable the orgaisation to determine usage and whether or not the sites are used etc.
Logical Implementation Audiences for existing sites Understanding the audiences will help to determine the configuration to support the security and access structure.
Logical Implementation Site access methods and requirements Understanding methods of access, both current and future desired state enables requirements to be met with MOSS.
Logical Implementation Site feature usage and requirements A list of utilized features should collated to ensure that the current site templates are appropriate and satisfy requirements.
Physical Implementation Size of existing sites content database organisation Once numbers and types of sites has been established, a primary input to the planning of migration and organistion for MOSS will be how the physical structure of SPS exists.
Physical Implementation Size and placement of existing server farm infrastructure Both the physical layout of the servers within the farm as well as the physical implementation of sites within the virtual servers inside SPS Virtual Servers to newly design MOSS Web Applications.

In a further blog post we will be looking at the next steps required when migrating.

Sharepoint Migration 2003 to 2010 online

Robert Everatt / / Migration, Office 365, SharePoint 2003

Many people have said that to upgrade to Microsoft office 365 from Sharepoint 2003, you would have to first, upgrade from 2003 to 2007, then 2007 to 2010 and finally 2010 to 2010 online. To me, this seamed like an extremely long winded and annoying way of accomplishing this.

After some searching I found that there were several tools to help with the migration process, the most notable being MetaVis migrator, a program that claims it can migrate all content & data from Sharepoint 2003 to Microsoft Office 365. I was a little sceptical of this knowing that there would probably be many compatibility issues from doing a straight transfer. MetaVis did however offer a free trial, a transfer of 1gb worth of data for free, I decided to give this a try using a section of the office 365 site and the universities preview portal.

Connection to both sites using the MetaVis client was easy and from there I could browse the structure of both sites, I was able to views lists, documents and even links, this seemed quite promising. After browsing through both the sites using the client, I transferred a very small portion of the preview portal over to 365. This took around 4 hours to complete but after it had, I located the new site on the 365 browser to check that it had done it successfully.  Unfortunately it appeared that the transfer was incomplete, despite it saying no errors, there was not content in any of the sites and only SOME of the data had transferred, some site pages didn’t even get transferred. This put me off a little, however I do have an opportunity to speak with a technician at MetaVis to discuss the client and how best we could use it for the university, if it does work as it is suppose to.

Until I have learnt more about MetaVis I still believe that the transfer to SP07 then to SP10 is the best/safest option.

RE

Sharepoint Online Migration – Part One: Planning

Robert Everatt / / Migration, Office 365

I have decided to look into Migrating from the universities current system, sharepoint 2003 into sharepoint online (office365). After browsing the Internet for a couple of minutes it appears that the MetaVis migration tool is quite popular, it supports migration from:

  • SharePoint 2010, 2007, WSS 3.0, 2003, WSS 2.0
  • Office 365, BPOS and hosted SharePoint
  • Local or Network File Shares to SharePoint 2010 migration
  • Microsoft Exchange Public Folders and Microsoft Outlook
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure (FCI)

This appears to be quite a simple way of doing things however this is also a paid service. Microsoft also have documentation for planning, preparing and implementing the Migration process for enterprises. This document goes into detail even suggesting meetings and backup methods. I will attempt to summarise some of this document and post into this blog.

Microsoft recommends that we expedite our Office 365 deployment by proceeding in three distinct phases: Plan, Prepare, and Migrate. Organizing our deployment according to these phases provides our project team with high-level time frames that control the pace of the deployment while keeping individual tasks serialized. It is common for tasks outlined in the Plan phase and Prepare phase to occur simultaneously and for tasks in the Prepare phase and Migrate phase to overlap.

Planning

The planning consists of several stages, the most Important being

  • The kickoff meeting
  • Customer environment discovery
  • Key planning considerations
    • Long lead time items
    • Client hardware and software requirements
  • Sharepoint Online planning

I will summarise these next week

RE