Presentation given 9/11/2010 at SharePoint Saturday East Bay in San Ramon, California. The majority of a migration effort has nothing to do with the actual technical move of content and bits, but is a planning activity. This presentation walks through 11 areas of focus, sharing best practices.

1. 11 Strategic Considerations for SharePoint Migration Christian BuckleyDirector, Product EvangelismAxceler (echoTechnology) @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

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

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

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

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

12. 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

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

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

16. What works

17. What doesn’t work

18. What are the organizational “must have” requirements

20. Strategy #1: Understand as-is and to-be environments Anders Rask, Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

21. Strategy #1: Understand as-is and to-be environments What is your goal? What is your mission statement (Just kidding) What are you key use cases? What are your priorities?

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

26. Number of sites

27. Number of site collections

28. Database size

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

31. Topology

32. Performance requirements

33. Security requirements

34. Scalability

35. Disaster recovery

37. Estimates on site creation

38. Estimates on database growth

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

66. Cost

67. Time

68. Resources/People

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

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

72. Time to backup your systems

73. Tasks to update the latest services packs

74. Communication plans for your end users and partners, including what is being migrated, and (hopefully) how long it will take

75. Time for ample testing

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

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

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

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

85. Who owns the content?

86. Does it need to be moved?

87. Does it need to be indexed/searchable?

88. Is the folder structure important?

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

91. 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

92. Strategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

93. 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

95. Legacy content gets migrated slowly, if at all

96. Inconsistent taxonomy across farms and site collections

97. People author locally - multiplies problems globally

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

99. Portal lacks high fidelity search

100. User can’t find the right content

101. As a result, poor portal adoption and low user satisfactionStrategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy

102. Strategy #7: Plan for tagging, metadata, and taxonomy What is your broader strategy for tagging, metadata and taxonomy?

103. Strategy #7: Plan 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

104. Strategy #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

105. 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

106. Strategy #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

107. Strategy #8: Understand centrally managed and decentralized environments

109. 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

110. Strategy #9: Stage your platform for migration

112. Network

113. Virtual environments

114. Hosting / datacenter

115. Downtime / end user impacts

116. Communication

117. Location of your teams

118. Backup/recoveryCoordinate your planning with the operations team

119. Strategy #10: Decide where and when to involve users Strategy #10: Decide where and when to involve users

120. 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

122. Creation of as-is documentation

123. Prioritization of requirements for to-be environment

124. They know their content – let them drive

125. File share migrations, or organization

126. Taxonomy development

127. Metadata assignment

130. Double-fist waving is even better

131. Possible success metrics:

132. Target number of end users migrated

133. Target number of sites migrated

134. Databases migrated

135. File shares migrated and decommissioned

137. 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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