Tag: 2003

Migration With Penguins

Robert Everatt / / Development, Migration, Office 365, Testing

In the last few days, Michael and I have been given access to a small area of the current University Portal to work with,originally we used it to test Microsoft InfoPath (see previous InfoPath post), however, after that failed I decided to use the area to test migration for a second time. I was confident that this time it would work as our site was much smaller than the one we tried previously. We used MetaVis again to carry out the migration and did it pretty much the same way we did the previous migration.

To test migration I first populated our page with test data and nonsense, adding a few lists, document libraries and images, this would help me tell whether or not the migration was successful.

We connected to https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C10/C6/PortalDelevopment and  http://adp.sharepoint.com/TeamSite/office365dev/migration/, again I found that it did not have to input my username and password to connect to our portal site. I then simply simply dragged the Lincoln portal site to the 365 portal site and the migration began. I was surprised to find that the migration process still took up to about 10 minutes, which I thought was odd considering there was very little on the page.

The migration completed successfully, with only a few minor errors, which consisted of these:

Copy group “Guest” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Reader” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Contributor” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Web Designer” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Administrator” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “anon” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Content Manager” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Member” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “ReadOnly” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

Copy group “Role Analysis Group” – The server sent HTTP status code 401: Unauthorized

However, this was unimportant for this migration and was not needed, I also believe that this could easily be fixed when both portals are set up for migration.

Once it had completed I went to both portal pages to compare them. From what I saw, the migration was mostly successful.

 

Penguins

As you can see, everything was transferred correctly, the only two problems were the navigation (although I am not sure if this is because it isn’t the entire portal that has been transferred) and the layout of the page. I believe that this has happened because office 365 has multiple layout styles, where as SharePoint 2003 only has a few. This is easily fixed by dragging the ‘Content Editor’ web part over the the left of the screen.

penguins 2

So we finally have a successful migration using MetaVis, I will continue to test other migration methods and software and to research the migration of other areas including emails and users. for now it is just nice to directly compare Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 to SharePoint online, it’s clear which looks better.

RE

Office 365 Small Business and Enterprise

Robert Everatt / / Limitations, Office 365

I have been working with Microsoft Office 365 Small Business version for 2 months now and I believe we have pretty much reached its limits.

As we are currently leaving migration until we are both back from our holiday we have been looking into more features of Microsoft office 365 that we might have previously missed, features such as RSS feeds, target audiences, info path lists, complex workflows and more. None of these appear to work in the small business edition, there appear to be a huge amount of restrictions that only allow us to do the simplest of task (no IT pro required). For us to continue with Microsoft Office 365 I believe we need to upgrade to the Enterprise edition, this will allow us to test features that may actually be useful to the University, it will also allow us to use features that even SharePoint 2003 currently use, such as target audience. To me, I believe that even Office 365 Small Business should be an improvement on SharePoint 2003 and not hold features back that would put 2003 ahead of small business.

So after we have looking into migration more closely and tested some of this, I believe we have no choice but to move up to Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise edition, so we can test these useful features.

RE

Quest Software

Michael Bratley / / Migration

Quest Software offer a SharePoint migration tool, which can migrate SharePoint 2003 to 2007 and 2007 to 2010.

Quest enables remote migration by offering a web based console that can be accessed from any web browser. It also helps you to easily manage your migration project with the use of, pre-migration assessments, migration job controls, real time progress reporting and scheduling.

Quest will migrate SharePoint sites including content and security settings directly to the new platform. It also enables you to reorganise your site structure during the migration process. Once the migration is complete you can also update any changes to the original sites on the target sites. Quest can even migrate any customisation you may have on your sites including web parts.

Quest also offer a tool that states it can migrate SharePoint 2003 to 2010 directly without the need to migrate to the interim 2007 version. This can be seen in this video “Migrating SharePoint 2003 to 2010“.

More on this can be found at: Quest.

AvePoint

Michael Bratley / / Migration

AvePoint is a third party tool that enables the final stage of migration from SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Online and Office 365.

The AvePoint tool offers the following advantages:

  • Seamlessly migrate existing enterprise content from more than 14 legacy systems to SharePoint Online with a single install.
  • Minimize business disruptions caused by the migration or the deployment of change to sites, content, configuration, and solutions by maintaining co-existance of on-premise and online SharePoint deployments.
  • Reduce risks associated with migration from various disparate repositories or managing hybrid SharePoint environments.
  • Simplify testing, course correction and rollback during migration, deployment or publishing processes.
  • Publish content from the on-premise staging farms to the cloud for global scalability and seamless hybrid management.
  • Staged approach for migrating and publishing enterprise content reduces the number of connection paths required, helping to control bandwidth utilization and ensuring all network resources stay fully optimized.

More details can be found at: http://www.avepoint.com/sharepoint-online-migration-docave/

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.