Upgrading to SharePoint 2013

UPGRADING TO SHAREPOINT 2013

Upgrade Considerations

Each new version of SharePoint presents a new upgrade experience.

What You Can Upgrade

There are many pieces of SharePoint 2010 you may need to upgrade. Here are some different things you can upgrade

       Content

When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, the SharePoint 2007 farm had to be at least at service pack 2 (SP2). This caused some real problems for SharePoint 2007 farms that were unstable.  If there were not already at SP2, upgrading the farm to that, just to immediately upgrade to SharePoint 2010, was painful and risky.

When upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 you had three options: upgrade SharePoint 2003 in place to SharePoint 2007; attach your SharePoint 2003 content databases to a SharePoint 2007 farm and upgrade your content; or do a side-by-side, or gradual upgrade, whereby both SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 were installed and running on the same hardware. The side-by-side approach was the most popular, but there was an option for almost all upgrade scenarios.

When SharePoint 2010 came out we lost the side-by-side upgrade/ gradual upgrade option. Most SharePoint admin adopted the database upgrade method to get SharePoint 2007 content into SharePoint 2010. It worked well, but it required most companies to buy all new hardware. Then SharePoint 2013 was released.

When SharePoint 2013 came out we lost a second upgrade option, the in-place upgrade. The only option left is the database attach method.

 Service Applications

Since you cannot upgrade your SharePoint 2010 farm, you might assume it’s not possible to upgrade your service applications. For companies making heavy use of service applications, such as Managed Metadata, Search, and User Profile Service, this could be a problem. Those service apps represent a lot of information, and even worse a lot of the SharePoint administrator’s time. All is not lost. There are 6 SharePoint 2010 service applications whose databases can be attached to a SharePoint 2013 farm.

ü  Business Connectivity Services

ü  Managed Metadata

ü  Performance Point

ü  Secure Store

ü  User Profile Service

ü  Search

      Customizations

Customizations are bane of any upgrade. The new SharePoint App model was the recommended way for users to add functionality to SharePoint 2013, and that sandbox solutions were just deemphasized. Regardless of the official word, SharePoint 2010 sandbox solutions work just fine in SharePoint 2013. If their functionality can be done thru a SharePoint app, you should consider it.onality can be done thru a SharePoint app, you should consider it.

What You Can’t Upgrade

Although the upgrade options are very good, there are a few things that cannot be upgraded.

Content

If your content or service application database is from SharePoint 2010 RTM or later, you can attach it to SharePoint 2013.

 Service applications

In SharePoint 2010 the Office Web Apps were installed on top of SharePoint 2010 and installed as service applications. In SharePoint 2013 the Office Web Apps are no longer installed on a SharePoint server, and are no longer service applications. Because of this architecture change, they cannot be upgraded. If the office Web Apps are installed and your SharePoint 2013 farm is connected to your Office Web Apps server, your upgraded content will automatically take advantage of it.

The PowerPoint Broadcast site template offered in the SharePoint 2010 OWAs has no equivalent in the 2013 OWAs, so if you have that site in SharePoint 2010 you’ll need to delete it. You can do so in SharePoint 2010 before you upgrade, or in SharePoint 2013 after you attach your database.

FAST Search Center Sites

In SharePoint 2003 the bulk of the FAST functionality was added to SharePoint’s search, and the FAST product was eliminated. Because of that, SharePoint 2013 has no need to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 FAST Search Center site. Its own Search Center is more than capable. Like the PowerPoint Broadcast site, you can delete these before or after you attach the content database to your SharePoint 2013 farm.

Don’t Upgrade Crap
Unused farms or sandbox solutions should be removed in SharePoint 2010 before moving databases to SharePoint 2013.

PowerShell command in your SharePoint 2010 farm to list any installed third-party solutions:

 Get-SPSolution

You can also get this information in Central Administration by clicking System settings -> Manage farm solutions.

Upgrade Content

While there are several steps to successfully upgrade content from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, the process is relatively straightforward.

Creating the Web Application

Recall that our only option when upgrading content to SharePoint 2013 is to attach a SharePoint 2010 content database to a SharePoint 2013 web application. Therefore, the first step is to create a web application in your SharePoint 2013 farm. This can be the web application in which the data will permanently reside, or a temporary web app used only for upgrading. This flexibility is important is your SharePoint 2010 web application use classic-mode authentication (CBA), rather than claims-based authentication.

In SharePoint 2010, CBA was an option, but a lot of farms continued to use classic-mode authentication as they had in previous versions of SharePoint.

In SharePoint 2013 functionality, claims are an integral part of SharePoint; and it is necessary for most new SharePoint 2013 functionality to work. If your SharePoint 2010 environment uses classic-mode authentication, it will have to be converted to Claims to get the most out of SharePoint 2013. This conversion can be done either in SharePoint 2010 before the upgrade, or in SharePoint 2013 after the upgrade.

Testing the Content Database

There are several steps to attaching your SharePoint 2010 content database to your SharePoint 2013.

 Restoring the Database in SQL Server

When you’re doing the upgrade, you’ll need to shut down all your SharePoint 2010 servers and they do full backups of all your SharePoint 2010 databases.

      Running Test-SPContentDatabase

Now that the databases are restored and configured correctly, you can start testing them to see how nicely they’ll play with SharePoint 2013. When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, you had a great way to access the challenges that ahead of you: the preupgrade-check operation in STSADM.EXE. It would inventory your SharePoint 2007 environment and point you to any problems you might have before you upgraded. Unfortunately, this tool is not available when upgrading to SharePoint 2013, but there is a suitable replacement in Test-SPContentDatabase.

You can run this cmdlet on either SharePoint 2010 or on SharePoint 2013 before the database is attached.

Test-SPContentDatabase -Name WSS_Content_tk_com -WebApplicaton http://upgrade.contoso.com

 Running Test-SPContentDatabase

When you’re looking at the output of Test-SPContentDatabase you should start at the top, because fixing issues there will oftentimes fix issues downstream.

Additional Parameters

Before attaching this database and upgrading site collections, there is one additional parameter of Test-SPContentDatabase to cover, ShowRowCounts. This parameter gives you the row count for each table in the content database before it reports the issues.

Attaching the Content Database

After you have tested your content databases and fixed as many issues as you can, it’s time to attach the database. Use the PowerShell cmdlet Mount-SPContentDatabase to mount the content database to the web application that will serve its content. The syntax for Mount-SPContentDatabase is similar to Test-SPContentDatabase, and if you aren’t using any of the optional parameters when testing your database, you can usually just press the up arrow in Powershell, replace “test” with “mount” and press Enter. Here is the command used to mount the database that you tested earlier against your upgrade web application:

 Mount-SpContentDatabase -Name wss_content_tk_com -WebApplication http://upgrade.contoso.com

Upgrading Site Collections

After restoring your content database in SQL, testing it against your SharePoint 2013 web application, and mounting it in SharePoint, you’re in home stretch.

Another difference between the upgrading process in SharePoint 2010 versus SharePoint 2013 is that it is no longer scoped at the web level, but at the site collection level. The upgrade process can also be delegated to site collection administrators, or it can be done by farm administrators.

Unlike SharePoint 2010, you don’t have a Visual Upgrade option. A site collection is either in SharePoint 2010 mode or SharePoint 2013 mode. In place of the Visual Upgrade mode available when upgrading too SharePoint 2010, you now have the option to create upgrade evaluation site collections. When creating an eval site, SharePoint 2013 creates a copy of your SharePoint 2010 site collection and appends its path with “-eval”. You should always upgrade the site collection at the root of a web application first. When you do, its eval site is created at http://webapp/sites/root-eval. Then it upgrades the -eval site to SharePoint 2013. You can use this eval site to see how well the upgrade went and to look for issues.

Log into a SharePoint 2010 site collection as a site collection administrator, where you should see a red bar at the top extolling the virtues of upgrading. Clicking the “Start now” option takes you to the upgrade page, where you can click the option to upgrade the site collection or click the Try a Demo Upgrade link on the right to take the upgrade for a test drive.

After a site collection has upgraded, the site collection Upgrade link no longer leads to a page offering to upgrade the site collection.

Throttling and Governance

As the site collection happen immediately, some other throttles have to be put in place to ensure that the farm is not taken down by multiple upgrades happening at the same time. Site collections with less than 10 MB in content and fewer than 10 webs are upgraded in the web application app pool. This is throttled to five app pool upgrades per web app. Site collections that are larger than 10 MB or have more than 10 webs are upgraded via a timer job. You can adjust these values in PowerShell. They are stored in the SiteUpgradeThrottleSettings property of the web application.

(Get-SpWebApplication http://upgrade.contoso.com). SiteUgradeThrottleSettings

Upgrading Service Applications

Content databases are not the only databases that can be upgraded from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. There is an exclusive club of service applications whose databases can also be upgraded to SharePoint 2013. Here are the members of that club:

ü  Business Connectivity Services

ü  Managed Metadata

ü  Performance Point

ü  Secure Store

ü  User Profile Service

ü  Search