My presentation on SharePoint migration planning for SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach on Jan 8th, 2011

1. 11 Strategic Considerationsfor SharePoint MigrationsChristian Buckleycbuck@axceler.com@buckleyPLANET SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach January 8th, 2011

3. Microsoft Managed Services (now BPOS-Dedicated)

4. Advertising Operations, ad platform API program

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

6. 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

7. 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

9. 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

10. 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

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

12. This is the bulk of your migration – the planning, reorganization, and transformation of your legacy SharePoint environment

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

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

15. Why migrations are difficult:

16. What are the Microsoft options?

17. 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

19. Based on these requirements, you need to model out the “to be” environment

20. What works

21. What doesn’t work

22. What are the organizational “must have” requirements

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

27. Number of sites

28. Number of site collections

29. Database size

30. Geographical needs of your organization (how many sites, what are their usage patterns)

32. Estimates on site creation

33. Estimates on database growth

35. Topology

36. Performance requirements

37. Security requirements

38. Scalability

39. Disaster recovery

41. Outlines Office Server topology

42. Identifies servers in the current farm

43. Lists SharePoint version and list of components running in the farm

44. Outlines supported upgrade types

45. Provides Site Definition and Feature information

46. Details language pack information

47. Identifies Alternate Access Mappings that will need to be recreated

48. Outlines Customized List Views (these will not be upgraded)

49. Outlines Customized Field Types (these will not be upgraded)

50. Identifies WSS Search topology

51. Provides list of Content Databases and SQL server locationJoel Oleson, SharePoint 2010: Best Practices to Upgrade and Migrate

53. UI design

54. Web parts

55. Workflows

56. Line of business applications

57. 3rd party tools

58. Custom features

59. Site definitions

60. Field types

61. Custom SharePoint solutions

62. Any changes to the file system on your SharePoint servers

63. Pre-Upgrade Check provides some of the analysis

64. How many of those customizations are outside of the SharePoint framework?

66. Cost

67. Time

68. Resources/People

69. Do you have a defined project methodology?

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

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

73. Each one brings with it a set of requirements and decisions

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

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

77. Are users driving, or is it an administrative effort?

79. Who owns the content?

80. Does it need to be moved?

81. Does it need to be indexed/searchable?

82. Is the folder structure important?

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

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

86. 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

88. Legacy content gets migrated slowly, if at all

89. Inconsistent taxonomy across farms and site collections

90. People author locally - multiplies problems globally

91. Authors don’t apply metadata= “shotgun” approach to search OR Authors apply metadata without common classification = better search, but worse authoring experience

92. Portal lacks high fidelity search

93. User can’t find the right content

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

99. Sites and Site Collections can consume these services, within certain boundariesYou still need to understand the administrative impacts You need to clearly define roles / service owners Define your governance model / change control board

101. Network

102. Virtual environments

103. Hosting / datacenter

104. Downtime / end user impacts

105. Communication

106. Location of your teams

107. Backup/recoveryCoordinate your planning with the operations team

108. 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

110. Creation of as-is documentation

111. Prioritization of requirements for to-be environment

112. They know their content – let them drive

113. File share migrations, or organization

114. Taxonomy development

115. Metadata assignment

117. Target number of end users migrated

118. Target number of sites migrated

119. Databases migrated

120. File shares migrated and decommissioned

122. 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