Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

Part I. Planning

Chapter 10. Planning Your Upgrade

The key challenges in moving to SharePoint 2013 from previous versions are twofold. First, you must decide what to do with your existing content (and the organization of that content) that is currently in SharePoint 2007 and/or SharePoint 2010. Second, you must decide whether to move to an on-premises SharePoint farm or to a cloud-hosted instance of Office 365.

In this chapter, we help you decide how best to prepare to move your current SharePoint environment(s) to SharePoint 2013. Then we cover the two primary options for upgrading to SharePoint Server 2013: database-attach and content migration. In either case, you’ll want to build a new SharePoint 2013 farm and then move your data to it.

Before we even get into upgrade and migration, the key question is “Should you upgrade to SharePoint 2013?” As we’ve mentioned in earlier chapters, SharePoint has been widely accepted and deployed across many organizations of all sizes and vertical markets. The success of SharePoint has primarily been centered on the ease of use and administration around building collaboration and communication forums for employees, partners, and clients. With SharePoint 2013, Microsoft looks to extend the success of its SharePoint technologies by introducing new features like enhanced social computing—mainly via Yammer. Additionally, improved search and advanced browser and device support make the argument for upgrading to the newest version very compelling. We assume that since you’ve got a copy of this book in your hands, you’re ready to move to SharePoint 2013.

What do you do if you already have an intranet or extranet or virtual team space using an earlier version of SharePoint and you want to move to SharePoint 2013? Should you upgrade some of your existing environments or all of them? Or should you build an entirely new infrastructure and move all of your data, which could help you to take better advantage of some of the new functionality offered—and perhaps reorganize and consolidate some of your content? In this chapter, we take a look at these questions and help you plan your upgrade.

Before we begin, however, it is important to emphasize that natively, SharePoint 2013 only supports migrating directly from SharePoint 2010. For those users who are still using SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 and are considering a jump to SharePoint 2013, there are two options: (1) upgrade to SharePoint 2010 as an interim step by using the content database-attach method, and follow the guidelines offered in this chapter; or (2) use third-party tools (AvePoint, Axceler, Metalogix, or Quest, for example) to migrate your old content directly into a new SharePoint 2013 environment. In any case, the planning advice offered in this chapter is critical to a seamless and smooth transition.

What’s New in SharePoint 2013?

SharePoint 2013 presents a number of changes from previous versions of SharePoint with respect to upgrade. The following upgrade features are of particular note:

In-place upgrade is no longer supported

Site collection upgrades can be deferred

The default authentication mode has changed to claims

Master page customizations have changed

Search is now a single, consolidated offering

SharePoint 2013 can host sites in both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 modes, enabling a “true” SharePoint 2010 mode

Database-attach upgrade, which is the preferred solution for content databases, is now available for some service application databases

Let’s review each of these features in a bit more detail.

In-Place Upgrade Is No Longer Supported

The hard truth about in-place upgrade in SharePoint 2010 is that it rarely ever worked. In light of that, Microsoft has made the decision to drop support for in-place upgrades of an existing environment. And since there is no more gradual upgrade—a feature introduced in SharePoint 2007—the database-attach upgrade method is the only upgrade option left for directly upgrading your databases via the product itself to a new environment that is based on SharePoint 2013.

Site Collection Upgrades Can Be Deferred

In SharePoint 2013, when a farm administrator upgrades a content database, he or she can elect to either upgrade the user interface on every site collection or to defer the user interface upgrade. If user interface upgrades are deferred, the site collection owners are able to upgrade their sites to the new SharePoint 2013 user interface on their own timeline. Commands for upgrading a site collection are available on the Site Settings page in the site collection administration section. In addition, there are also Windows PowerShell cmdlets to upgrade site collections to the new user interface if the farm administrator wishes to selectively upgrade the UI in bulk.

The Default Authentication Mode Has Changed to Claims

In SharePoint 2010, you could configure your Web application to support either Windows authentication or claims authentication. In SharePoint 2013, the default mode for new Web applications is claims. In addition, future versions of SharePoint will support only claims mode. Thus, you’ll need to consider any sites or custom applications that might be impacted by moving to claims. If you do switch from Windows Classic mode to claims, you may have to rewrite custom applications.

Master Page Customizations Have Changed

If you’ve done any major branding customization in previous versions of SharePoint, you could be in a situation where you need to make some changes to your branding when moving to SharePoint 2013. SharePoint 2013 introduces a new way of creating and managing master pages, so even the smallest amount of branding or styling demands at least a basic understanding of how the new master page model works. We recommend creating an inventory of the server-side customizations in your environment (branding features, Web Parts, master pages, page layouts, CSS files, etc.). That way, you’ll have a list of items that you can verify still work, or a list of items you’ll need to update.

Search Is Now a Single, Consolidated Offering

In SharePoint 2013, a number of changes have been made to search to accommodate the consolidation of the two previous search engines (SharePoint and FAST) into a single search platform. This will change the way you approach your upgrade, since you’ll need to determine whether to reconfigure search or let SharePoint upgrade your settings directly. In many cases, you might consider a search-first migration, where you build a new SharePoint 2013 server farm, enable search, and crawl your SharePoint 2010 environment from there. This allows you to create a new environment and immediately get benefit from your new farm; you can then migrate your content databases over time to the new farm.

SharePoint 2013 Can Host Sites in Both 2010 and 2013 Modes

The SharePoint 2010 visual upgrade feature enabled site owners and administrators to see how their sites would look and behave in the new user interface. In reality, the feature didn’t provide a “true” preview because the site had already been upgraded to the new functionality!

In SharePoint 2013, the farm can host sites in both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 modes simultaneously, mainly since the farm code contains both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 versions of features, site templates, site definitions, Web Parts, the “14” and “15” SharePoint paths, and two parallel IIS support directories under /Layouts. This means that existing SharePoint 2010 solutions can often be deployed to SharePoint 2013 and continue to run within a SharePoint 2010–mode site without changes.

In SharePoint 2013, the upgrade of the software and database has been separated from the upgrade of the site. This means that a site can remain running in SharePoint 2010 mode until a site owner or administrator explicitly upgrades it to the new user interface. Site collection owners can also request an evaluation site, which is a separate, temporary copy of the site, to review the new interface and functionality. This enables site administrators to review the new site, make updates in their original site, and then upgrade their site to the new version.

Database-Attach Is Now Available for Some Service Application Databases

To make the upgrade easier for a new SharePoint 2013 farm, the most common service application databases are available for database-attach. The method for upgrade is the same: create a new SharePoint 2013 farm, copy the existing content databases and/or service application databases to the new farm, and execute a database-attach.

For SharePoint 2013, you can use the database-attach upgrade method to upgrade the following service application databases:

Managed metadata

User profile

Search administration

PerformancePoint

Business data connectivity

Secure store

Planning for Upgrade or Migration

With SharePoint 2013 you can upgrade the database schema of existing SharePoint 2010 environments automatically for all of your content databases and site collections. Current SharePoint applications will be fully functional with the new dual-mode capability, so all existing capabilities will still be enabled, and all existing custom and third-party Web Parts will continue to execute. Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s probably not. Although SharePoint 2013 does provide a better migration experience, don’t expect your upgrade to be that simple. Things will likely break.

The reality is that upgrading to the new version of SharePoint, if done right, could be very hard. This statement is not meant to scare or deter, but rather to inspire and motivate. Really. The most critical task in the upgrade process is planning. One possible scenario is to upgrade the software and leave the content and associated taxonomy alone; another choice might be that you choose not to upgrade but rather completely redesign and rebuild from scratch—including which content goes and which content stays. Technology can update the available functionality and introduce new database tables, but it cannot fix poorly designed taxonomies or appease overwhelmed users. SharePoint 2013 upgrade planning involves the evaluation of new technical features, validation of the usefulness of those features in your environment, and integration of those features into your existing SharePoint framework. It will take time to do these steps properly, but it will pay off in the long run.

Upgrades are a good time for introspection and analysis. How has your current environment evolved over time since your initial deployment? Has your organization shifted strategically? Are you capturing and leveraging your organizational content effectively? There is a lot to evaluate. Take a look at your organization’s use of SharePoint and consider the following questions. For questions to which you answer yes, think about how functionality, processes, and support will change in SharePoint 2013. For questions to which you answer no, will you introduce this functionality with SharePoint 2013 or continue to avoid it? Your answers will influence the means of your upgrade. And as we show later, your answers also impact the timing of your upgrade.

Do you have business processes that are driven by (or enabled within) SharePoint?

Are you currently taking advantage of SharePoint-based work-flows?

Do you have a culture of e-mailing document attachments as a means of workflow, review, and collaboration? Do you want to change this?

Do users require offline or remote access?

Are your content contributors responsible for tagging your documents? Are they diligent in this effort?

Are your navigation, search, and document-tagging taxonomies in good shape? Do your users agree?

Do you have a well-defined list of compelling reasons that is driving your decision to upgrade to SharePoint 2013? Or is it simply to “do the newest thing”?

Are users ready for the move to Office 2013 and the new features of SharePoint 2013? How will you train and support them?

Did you heavily customize your SharePoint 2007/2010 environment? Are you invested in third-party or custom solutions?

Do you have additional infrastructure (over and above your current farm infrastructure) available to you that complies with the SharePoint 2013 technical requirements (this includes 64-bit technology, increased RAM requirements, new operating systems, and so on) for a new farm?

After your upgrade, will you present the new SharePoint 2013 interface, or will you wait to alter your user interface in a subsequent phase?

Are you using Internet Explorer 8 or above? Or a browser that supports HTML5?

As this list shows, there is a lot to think about when moving a well-established environment to the next version of the associated technology. Many of these issues are connected directly with business users and processes. We look at some of them in more detail in the next sections.

Governance Considerations

As we have mentioned, one of the biggest challenges with a SharePoint 2013 upgrade is executing a well-thought-out plan. You’ll need a plan not just for the technical component of applying new software, but more important, for two other elements: (1) the details of what you will (or won’t) do with the software product after it is enabled, and (2) communication with your user community. That’s where governance comes in. As mentioned in Chapter 4, “Planning for Business Governance,” governance implies having a documented strategy for managing content (among other things). If you have a governance strategy in place for a current SharePoint 2010 environment, modifying or adapting it to SharePoint 2013 is evolutionary. If you don’t have a governance policy today, consider developing one prior to the upgrade. This will establish clear rules on the use of native or customized SharePoint functionality. With this control and guidance in place, you will feel more comfortable with having some of the additional features of SharePoint 2013, such as the social computing components, more widely used and in a consistent manner. A governance plan is not a requirement for the upgrade but is critical to the ultimate success of post-upgrade usage.

SharePoint-Driven Business Processes

SharePoint 2013 is a great tool that you can use to build more efficient business processes. With SharePoint 2010, many of these business processes (organizational workflow, e-mail-driven discussion threads, and lightweight project management, for example) became more widely used.

SharePoint 2013 not only builds on previous business process capabilities, but it also integrates business processes deeper into the SharePoint environment by supporting additional features through the use of enhanced forms, workflow, Excel, Visio, and Access-based business applications and by incorporating LOB data into your portal with greater simplicity, resulting in an enhanced user experience. In addition, with the introduction of stronger social computing capabilities through tools like Yammer, SharePoint users can be consumers, producers, and influencers of content more than ever before.

When planning for SharePoint 2013, it is important to identify and resolve barriers to business process adoption. Consider the following questions and associated recommendations:

Is your organization ready for the upgrade? User adoption and education are critical to introducing and leveraging change. Make sure everyone understands when the upgrade is happening and why.

Does your current SharePoint content organization support an upgrade to this new technology, or does it limit it? If users currently complain about the “findability” of content or the overall organization of intranet sites, an upgrade is a good time to make the necessary changes to increase ease of use. You might even consider a “search-first” upgrade, whereby you build a new SharePoint 2013 farm, enable search functionality that provides indexing of existing SharePoint 2010 content, and then slowly migrate your content to SharePoint 2013 over time. Just remember that if your content metadata is of poor quality (such as a bevy of incorrect titles), simply upgrading to a new version won’t correct your findability woes.

Are there technology limitations that would prevent adoption? Are you still using Office 2003 or 2007? If yes, you will need to consider moving to Office 2013 (or at least Office 2010) before upgrading to SharePoint 2013.

Is sufficient user training available? Especially in an organization that is still getting used to the ribbon user interface and browser-based document access, user training (for both content owners and administrators alike) is critical in advance of an interface change.

Are the users and site collection administrators comfortable with the change? Communicate the changes and associated features of SharePoint 2013 well in advance of an upgrade so users can process and embrace these changes, and so site collection administrators can start planning their move to SharePoint 2013 for the site collections they own.

Is there adequate IT support? Ensure that IT staff is properly trained and prepared for supporting the new features in SharePoint 2013; this includes direct (SharePoint administrators) and indirect (infrastructure personnel) resources. You might want to consider a SharePoint center of excellence to assist users and site owners through the upgrade.

Electronic Forms and Document Workflow

Does your organization still use paper-based forms? Or are you using an electronic forms–based tool like InfoPath? Or can you take advantage of new flexibility with designing and customizing HTML5 forms in SharePoint? Have you invested in data collection capabilities in SharePoint 2010, and how can these be enhanced?

How is workflow managed in your current SharePoint environment? Are rules in place to control the movement of data before it gets to SharePoint? One of the challenges of enabling the workflow capabilities in SharePoint 2010 (and this is still true with SharePoint 2013) was the discipline needed to enforce the rules around how the stages of the workflow are executed. Because the workflow is system-based, it needs to be well defined. Typically, organizations use e-mail as the primary vehicle for workflow-based approval and validation. A number of e-mails are exchanged, decisions are made, and the workflow plan is ultimately executed, but the record of the decision is not typically stored with the document.

Planning for enabling electronic forms and/or automated workflow involves investigating the current forms and workflow processes within your organization and then defining how SharePoint will manage them. Define your users (and/or roles) and document the decision points and time constraints of the various stages. This will help validate the usefulness of SharePoint’s forms and workflow tools and help define if and where they should be implemented.

Another thing to consider is that SharePoint 2013 changes the native workflow capabilities by moving them to Windows Workflow Foundation 4, which was substantially redesigned from earlier versions. Why does this matter? If you’ve invested in workflow with SharePoint 2010, whether through custom application development or third-party product or both, you should investigate how these processes might be simplified or enhanced by using new native functionality.

It is also important to note that new features like Web-based forms and document workflow should be part of a broader functional upgrade and should be used only to meet specific business requirements. There is a danger in using new features of SharePoint 2013 for the sole purpose of building a stronger perception associated with ROI without clear ties to the business needs. If that happens, users are more discouraged than excited.

Although your existing in-flight workflows should complete without issue, your upgrade can be impacted based on your ability and willingness to alter existing data collection and workflow processes in SharePoint 2010 prior to upgrade. This may include simple edits to data entry forms or more advanced initiatives like migrating away from a third-party workflow or business process tools.

Preparing for Social Computing and Yammer

Even with the introduction of various new technologies, the most likely place that organizational information exists, aside from inside people’s heads, is in their e-mail mailboxes. And we’re not talking about notes to your spouse—we’re talking about important corporate knowledge like domain expertise, business intelligence, and key decisions. Most of this is information that can’t be accessed by other users and may walk out the door when an employee leaves, leaving the company without some important organizational knowledge.

How much corporate knowledge is lost in your organization’s e-mail? Does your company have a formal process in place to capture, catalog, and store information gathered through e-mail communication with peers, clients, and partners? One of the challenges in solving this problem with SharePoint 2010 was that while it was very good at storing structured content (such as documents), the social features were introduced but still lacking.

That said, SharePoint 2010 did offer new alternatives to help with the storage and retrieval of unstructured knowledge. As an example, users could follow topics and view a newsfeed, but most serious social features required a third-party tool such as NewsGator’s Social Sites. The challenge, however, was that these types of social tools were used sparingly, mainly because organizations were concerned about giving “too much freedom” to users. This has changed as the world itself has changed. Now, with Internet applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, organizations see the value in capturing real-time, unstructured information.

Is your organization ready to embrace changes in the way people communicate using tools like wikis and blogs? Are you willing to give employees the freedom to publish content in small, unformatted bits (think of Twitter)? Does your current SharePoint taxonomy support the inclusion of this new type of information? The promise of capturing “lost” corporate knowledge, currently buried in various employee e-mails, is very exciting. It does, however, come with some cost and cultural change. This is an important point. Often (and this is especially true with SharePoint 2013), functional upgrades require one part technology, two parts business process adjustment, and a good measure of culture change. Users must clearly understand the benefits of altered approaches to their activities. This is a requirement for general user adoption.

Will you look to take advantage of social computing capabilities in SharePoint 2013? If yes, do you have a formal plan for managing and monitoring these features? More important, does the content organization and/or security model you are using in SharePoint 2010 prevent or limit any part of your vision? In addition, with the advent of Site Mailboxes in SharePoint 2013, which communications should still reside in e-mail and which should go into a social dialog? That decision will depend on your culture. No matter what you decide, you should have a decision before you actually upgrade. Otherwise, you’re taking the old “ready, fire, aim” approach, perhaps without even realizing it.

There are a couple of challenges here for existing SharePoint 2010-based organizations. First, if you have dabbled in social computing capabilities (with native functionality or third-party add-ons), you need to consider whether these will be left alone or redone with native SharePoint 2013. The impact on your upgrade is that these steps will happen after the physical upgrade and may or may not be addressed before the new launch. Second, if you have not formalized a social computing strategy but would like to do so as part of your SharePoint 2013 deployment, you will want to begin the education and design pieces before the upgrade so that users are well prepared when this functionality is made available to them. Finally, you’ll need to consider whether you should use SharePoint 2013’s native social features, or if you should instead use Yammer. You should consider using Yammer for newsfeed capabilities, as it will likely replace SharePoint’s social features over time.

Working with SharePoint Content Offline

How often are your SharePoint users, publishers, or readers disconnected from your corporate environment? Are your remote users forced to check out or download a collection of documents before getting on a plane? What if they’re planning to use an iPad instead of their laptop? Are you concerned that document versions fall out of sync because of your remote users? SharePoint 2013, with the integration of SkyDrive Pro, offers substantially improved offline access to document library content. Users can retrieve, alter, and synchronize much of the data in SharePoint easily and automatically.

While this may sound like a wonderful thing, there are configuration issues. There are also levels of functionality that go from simple (copy files for offline access) to advanced (How does putting corporate data into the cloud impact security policies?). Are you currently using an offline solution? Would you like to introduce this capability with your upgrade? How many users will be impacted, and how will your organization be rewarded with the use of offline capabilities? And since not all features work on tablets and other devices, you could potentially be forced into purchasing a third-party tool.

A primary goal of offline-enabled tools is to provide users with a strong sense that they are still part of the larger organizational community, even when disconnected or out of the office. Ways to achieve this are to provide Web-based meetings, Web cams, and instant messaging. In SharePoint terms, enabling users to always access the current version of a given document helps maintain synchronization across the user community. The cascading implication of remote devices is the desire to access SharePoint over any Internet connection without going through a virtual private network (VPN). Are you prepared to not only upgrade to SharePoint 2013, but also provide iPad tools, enable direct-to-Web access, and turn on SkyDrive Pro?

Getting Your Timing Right: When Should You Upgrade?

Determining when to upgrade is not a simple task. The best reason to select a particular time is to take advantage of capabilities that have been introduced in the latest version, such as browser compatibility, mobile device support, or better offline capabilities—tying those features into business goals that are of importance to the organization. That said, do you need any of the new SharePoint 2013 features in your current deployment? If you do, and they clearly tie to business goals and align with your corporate cadence, an upgrade in the short term makes sense. If you do not need SharePoint 2013 features now but think you will over time, include them in your post-upgrade strategy—but spend some time planning this before you push through an upgrade process. If you are not likely to need those features for some time, you might want to consider deferring your upgrade until you have greater momentum within your current deployment. In short, resist upgrading just to get a shiny new toy or because Microsoft said you should.

Recall the list of questions about your current SharePoint environment that we asked at the beginning of this chapter. Let’s look at how the answers to those questions might impact your readiness for an upgrade to SharePoint 2013. Table 10-1 highlights the questions and recommended actions and timing.

Table 10-1 Recommendations on Timing Your Upgrade Based on Current Environment Attributes

Fixing Your SharePoint Structure

A big part of SharePoint is an easy-to-use information architecture. Simply doing an upgrade won’t automatically fix problems like hard-to-use navigation and searches that don’t find anything. You’ll need to step back and ask a few more questions.

Does your current SharePoint navigation taxonomy (the structure and hierarchy of your site) make sense to users? What content do employees use on the portal? (If you don’t know, look at the usage reports and use surveys to find out.) What content is missing or misplaced? Has your business changed since your last SharePoint rollout, or might it change in the future so that the current portal structure does not map to that vision? These are tough questions, but the answers will ultimately have a significant influence on your upgrade path. SharePoint 2013 has incredible new features, but they alone cannot make your portal “better.”

Implementing good technology to manage bad content will not help your users work better, smarter, or faster. We just can’t say it enough.

Is an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 the right time to reorganize your portal content and better align it with what users want or the business demands? Or is your page and content organization stable and successful with less of a need for radical change? Can new functionality be included in these specific sections or added as additional pages without a major disruption to page organization? Believe it or not, your best tool in this piece of the planning will be a whiteboard. Draw your current portal structure. Use sticky notes to represent pages and/or sites (this way, you can move things around as you brainstorm). Think about where new functionality might be introduced. Change your marker color (or sticky note color) and start to make changes. In the end, which color dominates? This will help you decide how you should proceed. note color) and start to make changes. In the end, which color dominates? This will help you decide how you should proceed.