Tips and tricks on how to upgrade SharePoint 2007 and 2010 to SharePoint 2013, experiences, best practice, and recipe on how to success with the upgrade.

1. Upgrading form SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint
2010 to SharePoint 2013 – Experiences, best
practice
#spsoslo
Knut Relbe-Moe
June 1st, 2013

2. Who is Knut Relbe-Moe
 Infrastructure SharePoint Solution Architect, Technical Lead at Steria AS.
 Worked with SharePoint since SharePoint 2003
 SharePoint & Office 365 enthusiast
01.06.2013

3. Experiences with SharePoint 2013 Upgrading
 Worked with several clients upgrading them from 2007 and 2010 to 2013.
 SharePoint doesn’t support upgrading straight from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. You first have to
go trough SharePoint 2010.
 SharePoint 2013 doesn’t support «In-Place upgrade». Which is a good thing!
 SharePoint 2013 supports «database attach» which arrived with SharePoint 2010
 SharePoint 2013 supports upgrade of some of the Service Applications
 Custom solutions are a painful experience
 If no custom code, then upgrade is not difficult
 Involve the end users early in the process to verify if the upgrade was a success.
 Create virtual test environments, because you will have to do a lot of testing
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4. What do you need to consider before you start upgrading to SharePoint 2013?
 Are your solutions based on just SharePoint «out of the box» or have you made some adjustments
(«Custom code»)?
 Do you run on SharePoint 2007, or 2010?
 SharePoint 2013 supports restore of some of the service applications from SharePoint 2010, you have
to consider if this is something you want or if it’s better to create this all over again.
 Do you plan to just upgrade the solution or do you also want to change it?
 Shall I upgrade SharePoint, or will it be easier/cheaper to build the solution again in SharePoint 2013
utilizing all the new possibilities there
01.06.2013

5. What do you need to consider before you start upgrading to SharePoint 2013?
 When you upgrade from 2007 to 2013, you first have to perform a visual upgrade on 2010 before you
upgrade to 2013.
 Should you use Claims authentication? (which you should most likely)
 Then you first have to convert the 2010 environment before you perform a database backup, which
you restore and upgrade in SharePoint 2013.
 Should you upgrade to SharePoint Online?
 Then it’s a total different story, and you have to consider different approaches. You just simply have
to rebuild the infrastructure (site collections, sites, and so on), and then migrate the contents with
some third party tools that support this.
 Never underestimating the value of testing. So just, Test, test, test!
501.06.2013

6. How to upgrade when you have alot of «Custom code»
 Most customizations should work!
 You should consider if you can replace the custom code with new functionality in SharePoint or consider using a third party tool
 You should consider if it’s better to build a new solution in SharePoint 2013, instead of upgrading it.
 You should consider if the service applications also should be upgraded or if you want to recreate them
 Requires that you have access to all the packages (wsp filer), assemblies, basically everything which is installed on the old environment.
 Possible to extract WSP files using powershell, but if you have the old Visual studio project you can in most cases easy convert this from a
SharePoint 2010 project to a SharePoint 2013 project.
 Deploy solutions before upgrading content databases
 Target either 2010 mode sites, 2013 mode or both
 Install-SPSolution –Compatibilitylevel “14,15”
 Known issues:
 Search
 Client side object model
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7. How to upgrade when you have a lot of «Custom code» - Upgrading solutions
 You have to use Visual Studio 2012 with latest updates (at least update 1)
 The visual studio upgrade process will convert solution to deploy to 2013
 Update references to use the 2013 root directory
 /_layouts/15
 /_controltemplates/15
 SPUtility.GetVersionedGenericSetupPath
01.06.2013

8. Upgrading: Service Apps – Managed Metadata Service
 Create the new service application pool on the new 2013 server that will run the old 2010 database
 Use New-SPServiceApplicationPool command
 $AppPool = New-SPServiceApplicationPool –Name “ManagedMetadata2013” –Account domainsp_service
 Referance the restored database for upgrade
 Use New-SPMetadataServiceApplication command to establish connection between the Service application and the DB
 New-SPMetadataServiceApplication –Name “ManagedMetadata2013” –ApplicationPool $AppPool -Databasename “SP_Service_MMS”
 Create service the Service Application Proxy
 Use the “New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy” command
 “New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy –Name “ManagedMetadata2013” –ServiceApplication $Name -DefaultProxyGroup
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9. The following serviceapplications can be upgraded.
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 Search administration
 Business Data Connectivity
 Managed Metadata
 PerformancePoint
 Secure Store
 User Profile (Profile, Social, and Sync databases)

10. Step by step process on upgrading to SharePoint 2013
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 A: Prepare
 B: Upgrade databases
 C: Upgrade Sites

11. A: Prepare, 1: Gather Information and clean up 2010 farm
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12. A: Prepare, 2: Prepare 2013 Farm
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 For a database-attach upgrade, you
upgrade the data and sites on a separate
farm from your original farm . In this step,
you set up and configure this new farm. The
new farm is used to upgrade the data and
sites, and becomes the farm that users will
connect to going forward .

13. 3: Install the software
13
 Place SharePoint 2010 – Farm in Read Only
 Database servers, it has to be either SQL
Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012
 Web and Applications servers: Install all
prerequisites and then install SharePoint 2013
 Install necessary language packs, and then
run the SharePoint products Configuration
Wizard
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14. 4: Configure service applications
14
 Do not use the Farm Configuration Wizard to install the following service applications:
 Business Data Connectivity service
 Application
 Managed Metadata service application
 PerformancePoint Services service application
 Search service application
 Secure Store service application
 User Profile service application
 You can configure these service applications when you upgrade their databases
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15. 5: Configure farm settings
15
 Configure email settings, farm-level security and permission settings, blocked file types, usage and
health data collection settings, and diagnostic logging settings
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16. B: Upgrade databases – 1: Copy databases
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17. B: Upgrade databases – 2: Upgrade service Applications databases
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 Use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to create new
service applications and upgrade the service
application databases. You must also create
proxies for the upgraded service applications and
add the new service application proxies to the
default proxy group

18. B: Upgrade databases – 3: Create web applications on the new farm
18
 Create for each web application in the old farm
a new application in the new farm
 Use the same URLs and port numbers
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19. B: Upgrade databases – 4: Install all customizations to the new farm
1901.06.2013
 Install necessary customizations for your environment:
 solution packages
 custom site definitions
 style sheets
 Web Parts
 Web services
 Features
 Solutions
 Assemblies
 Web.config changes
 form templates

20. B: Upgrade databases – 5: Upgrade content databases
2001.06.2013
 Test the databases first.
 Mount the database
 DB Schema upgrade and site collection upgrade is now separate,
allows Site collection owners to «preview» the new visuals before
committing.
 Upgrade keeps SharePoint 2010 in “native” format providing both a
14 and a 15 hive on the web role servers.

21. C: Upgrade sites – 1: Run site collection health check
21
 Site collection administrators can use the site
collection health checker to identify and address
potential issues in their site collections.
 Health checks are also run automatically before
upgrade
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22. C: Upgrade sites – 2. Update the visual experience site collections
22
 Site Collection owners can run health checks to determine readiness to
upgrade and address issues.
 Start a evaluation Site Collection to allow Site Collection owners to
preview the new interface in a copy of the site collection.
 If all is good, the Site Collection owners starts the upgrade process
 Site Collection owners verify the upgrade to verify upgrade has
succeeded
 Or allow a farm administrator to upgrade all site collections with a
powershell command
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23. C: Content upgrade – overview / Demo
23
Thanx to Gaurav Mahajan (http://gauravmahajan.net) for the SP2013 vmware testing environment
1. Create web application in 2013 farm
2. Set Source DB-To Read Only (in 2010 farm)
3. Backup existing content DB. (in 2010 farm)
4. Restore content db to new SQL Server
5. Test upgrade process using:
Test-SPContentDatabase -name ContentDBName -webapplication http:/mydemo > c:autid.txt
6. Review log files for errors/upgrade blockers
7. Run Mount-SPContentDatabase command to upgrade DB (DB is updated but not site collections)
8. To upgrade the visual experience to 2013 on all site collections run the following command:
Get-SPSite -contentdatabase ContentDBName -Limit All | Upgrade-SPSite –VersionUpgrade
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24. Typical errors
2401.06.2013
 LegacyUIDetected
 MissingFeature
 MissingSetupFile
 MissingAssembly
 Configuration
 Look for UpgradeBlocking: False
 Great!

25. How to succeed upgrading SharePoint
25
 Test upgrade of all contents
 Test, test and test again
 Involve the business owners to early identify if the upgrade was a success
 Create a log of activites and prioritize the error handlings
 Repeat the process with upgrading until endresult is acceptable.
 Expect that mistakes will happen, upgrade is never straight forward. Make sure to
have a plan to resolve the problems. Or consider not upgrading at all, recreate the
site instead.
01.06.2013

26. Another option:
26
 Don’t upgrade! Migrate the data instead of upgrading them
 Microsoft doesn’t have any tools to support this, but it exists many 3trd party tools.
 Tools can migrate everything from single files, libraries, site, site collections. You can also get the metadata with
you.
 They support migration to SharePoint Online.
 My experience is that they work best when you migrate simple content like document libraries, files and so on.
 More complex migrations, also work, but requires a lot of testing, and planning, and some will simply not work.
01.06.2013

27. And then some more pointers….
27
 Do you really have control over your existing SharePoint environment, when it comes to backing it up,
and do you have a plan for how to recover the environment.
 Do you know that all your servers within SharePoint have to be identical, same SharePoint version,
even you have to have the same hard drive partitions, to be able to add a new server to the farm.
01.06.2013

28. Questions?
28
 Thank you!
 Knut Relbe-Moe, Steria AS
 Email: kirm@steria.no
 Mobile: +47 982 24 609
 Twitter: @sharePTkarm
 Web: www.sharePTkarm.com
01.06.2013

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