11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations

11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration
Christian BuckleyDirector, Product EvangelismAxceler (echoTechnology)
@buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

Content
Why this presentation is important
The “standard” answers to upgrade and migration
Wit and humor, obscure references to bad 80’s movies
11 strategies you should consider as part of your planning
Online and offline resources

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

Why is this presentation important?
It’s not about the minutia of scripting methods to execute a hybrid database attach upgrade of your environment
We’re here to discuss the sometimes technical, but much more “hip” exercise of proper migration planning
This is the Jack Bauer of migration presentations, people My weapon today…….PowerPoint

What is migration?
Microsoft defines migration as three separate activities:
The reality is that a single migration may include all three concepts

What is migration?
Moving to the latest, greatest platform
Transforming what you did with 2003/2007 to meet your organizational vision

Why migrations are difficult:
Dammit Jim! I’m only a doctor!

What are the Microsoft options?
I’m my own best friend!

11 strategies you should consider as part of your migration planning
Understand the as-is and to-be environments
Conduct proper capacity planning
Understand the customizations on your source system
Understand the migration schedule
Plan for the right kind of migration
Plan for file shares
Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy
Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments
Stage your platform for migration
Decide where and when to involve the users
Determine that your migration is successful

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

Strategy #1: Understand as-is and to-be environments
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
What works
What doesn’t work
What are the organizational “must have” requirements
What are the “nice to have” features

The tendency is to jump to solutions before you understand the problem

Anders Rask, Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

What is your goal?
What is your mission statement
(Just kidding)
What are you key use cases?
What are your priorities?

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 #2: Conduct proper capacity planning

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

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

Think about your future needs:
User growth
Estimates on site creation
Estimates on database growth
Security and Search needs

Strategy #3:Understand the customizations on your source system

Strategy #3: Understand the customizations on your source system
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
Joel Oleson, SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate

Strategy #3: Understand the customizations on your source system
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
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 #4:Understand the migration schedule

What are the business drivers, not just the technology drivers?
Cost
Time
Resources/People
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?

Don’t forget to add to your schedule:
Time to backup your systems
Tasks to update the latest services packs
Communication plans for your end users and partners, including what is being migrated, and (hopefully) how long it will take
Time for ample testing
A lock down period when no servers should be added or moved

Strategy #5:Plan for the right kind of migration

Strategy #5:Plan for the right kind of migration
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 #6:Plan for file shares

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?

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?

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 #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

In Biology, taxonomy is the science dealing with the description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms. “however, the term is now applied in a wider, more general sense and now may refer to a classification of things, as well as to the principles underlying such a classification.”
“Metadata provides context for data. Metadata is used to facilitate the understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data. The metadata required for effective data management varies with the type of data and context of use.”Wikipedia.org

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

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
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 #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

Where does innovation come from in your organization?
What is the intent of your system?
How you architect your solution will impact how you migrate your current environment

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 / service owners
Define your governance model / change control board

Strategy #9: Stage your platform for migration

Strategy #9: Stage your platform for migration
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 #10: Decide where and when to involve users

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

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 #11: Define what success looks like
(probably not this)

Strategy #11: Define what success looks like
Fist waving is good
Double-fist waving is even better
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

Online and offline resources
Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, Anders Raskhttp://andersrask.spoint.me/2010/03/22/whitepaper-on-sharepoint-upgrade/
Migrating to SharePoint 2010, Randy Williamshttp://www.windowsitpro.com/print/sharepoint-server-2010/Migrating-to-SharePoint-2010-104619.aspx
Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303420.aspx
Hardware and software requirements for 2010 (Microsoft)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485.aspx
SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate (O’Reilly, Safari)http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449390457/
Migrating to MOSS 2007, Stephen Cummins, www.echoTechnology.com
Planning to Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 (Joel Oleson)http://www.slideshare.net/joeloleson/preparing-for-upgrade-to-sharepoint-2010-today
What’s New in SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning (Joel Oleson)http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0cd1a63d%2D183c%2D4fc2%2D8320%2Dba5369008acb&ID=332
ReadyPoint migration planning tool for 2007 to 2010 migrations, Axcelerhttp://www.axceler.com/SharePointMigration/ReadyPoint.aspx
Preupgradecheck, Microsofthttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd789638(office.12).aspx
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Upgrade Approacheshttp://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8b66eb3-27c7-4a39-a2e1-3e7d18b12ee1&displaylang=en

Please be sure to fill out your session evaluation!
Drop me a line at cbuck@axceler.comVisit my blog http://buckleyplanet.netFollow me @buckleyplanet

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11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations

by Christian Buckley on Sep 14, 2010

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11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migrations — Presentation Transcript