Microsoft SharePoint, which was launched in 2001, is evolved through many phases of development and enhancements. Starting from WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services), currently we are using SharePoint 2019 (the most recent release from Microsoft SharePoint). Considering the fact that Microsoft tried to improve version with many advance features and tried to satisfy the customer demands using single platform. Many organizations have already shifted from old version to newer and rest are in the process.
In this paper “SharePoint Migration Overview” we will be discussing about first type of migration i.e. “Migration from one version of SharePoint to the higher version”.
There are multiple ways of Migration to most recent version of SharePoint, such as
Though there is no such industry standard on selecting the migration approach that you can use, there are few parameters or factors, which helps to decide correct or feasible migration approach.
Below table highlights such factors and supported migration approach:
Above summary table is based on our experience and the exposure we have received; and it may differ from case to case.
At this stage, now we are aware about different options available and their feature lists. About Third-Party migration tools – all the tools are simple to use, and any SharePoint admin can use them for migration, hence we will skip this part and focus more on the Native Migration Approach / Manual Migration approach in detail.
Multiple steps involved during Migration process and those may repeat for Multi version SharePoint migration. Let’s cover all these steps in details for migration from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016.
At high level, below diagram depicts the Migration process. Figure 1: SharePoint Migration Steps
The first step before starting any migration is to analyze the source of migration, the good news here is Microsoft has provided really smart utility to perform pre-migration analysis. The utility name is SMAT (SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool). This SMAT utility can be downloaded from here.
SMAT does the assessment of entire Farm and creates the inventory for the same. This utility generates different reports and downloads the custom solutions as well. These reports provide below details:
This is an optional step to start any migration, though its optional but it’s very important to perform the cleanup activity. There can be unused content / solutions in old SharePoint Farm, which no longer required in New Farm, hence same can be removed to have better cleaner version of New Farm.
One can refer to reports generated by SMAT tool, to identify some of the non-required content / applications / solutions and remove same. This will also smoothen the migration activity.
There are multiple ways that SQL Admin can use to backup existing Content Database and Restore same to SQL Server in new SharePoint 2016 Environment. one of the approaches is to use SQL Backup commands. Below are the steps / commands used to perform SQL database backup:BACKUP DATABASE WSS_Content TO DISK = ‘E:\DBBackup\WSS_Content.bak’
In above command “WSS_Content” is the Content database name and “E:\DBBackup\WSS_Content.bak” is the path where the backup file will be created.
Restore the above database backup into the SharePoint 2016 SQL (New Environment), below are the steps to restore the databases in new environment:
RESTORE DATABASE WSS_Content FROM DISK=’\\ps7568\DBBackup\WSS_Content.bak” WITH REPLACE
Create new web application in SharePoint 2016 (if the SharePoint 2013 web application uses any Managed Path, you need to create same paths in SharePoint 2016 and use this path to create site collections under this newly created web application).
This is very important step in SharePoint migration, this step is divided into following sub actions and need to be performed in the given sequence:
PS C:\Users\Administrator> Mount-SPContentDatabase “WSS_New_DB” -DatabaseServer “V-COLLAB3-NEW\SHAREPOINT” -WebApplication http://v-collab3-new:1234/ 100.00% Mount-SPContentDatabase: Upgrade completed with errors.
Review the upgrade log file located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS\Upgrade-20110731-231748-447.log.
Above command list downs missing feature details, along with any other issues from migration, below section explains the deployment of custom solutions to fix above features related issues.
This is the last step in migration, wherein the custom solutions will be deployed. This step can also be run after Mount command mentioned in above section. Use below mentioned PowerShell commands to deploy custom solutions in SharePoint 2016 farm.
In above command “E:\SolutionFiles\Intranet.Portal.wsp” is local path of your wsp file.
In above command http://v-collab3-new:1234/ is your URL of newly created web application in SharePoint 2016 environment.
Once we are done with deploying custom solutions, all missing features will be available and we can verify the working of migrated site.
Above are all standard migration steps and can be used for any SharePoint migration in on-prim environment only.
We hope you find these steps helpful in making your SharePoint Migration successful. Please do revert / share your feedback or amendments (if any) for above section.