Upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2013

There is no simple, direct solution to upgrdae from MOSS 2007 to SP 2013. Several factors need to considered before one plnas to upgrdae. This Article tries to give some importnat considerations and approaches about the upgrade process.

The approach one should  include three important steps

1.  Pre-upgrade Assessment: To gather information about the existing platform which helps in determining what the candidates to be migrated are, retired or archived etc.

2.  Upgrade: This is the actual migration process which includes migration of Content, Customizations, etc. on to the target SP 2013 environment.

3.  Validate the Migration: This is to validate the target environment whether the identified candidates are migrated properly or not.

Pre upgrade Assessment:

Gather the data about source SharePoint farm. Source system(MOSS 2007) inventory is the primary input for tailoring migration approach ex: understand the number of applications and sites in a 2007 system. For 2007 farms gather environment settings and farm information

• Generate pre-upgrade and deprecated code reports. Pre-upgrade checker need to run on MOSS2007 environment and more details available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262231(v=office.14).aspx. It is also important to find out what are the candidates for deprecation.
• Generate Site Usage Analysis report to find actively used sites.
    
  

Upgrade:

Below are two options Organizations can opt for based on different factors explained in the rest of the article

·         Two step Upgrade (SP 2010 & SP 2013)

·         Direct Upgrade to SP 2013

1.        Two step Upgrade (SP 2010 & SP 2013):

Two step upgrade is the Microsoft’s recommended approach where Content DBs will be detached and attached on to the 2010 farm first and later migrate the security into claim based security and finally detach the 2010 content DB and attach to 2013 farm. See the detailed steps below

 Two step Upgrade:

·         Step 1: Upgrade Moss2007 content databases to SP2010 and perform data clean up in SP2010 environment.

Deploy Customizations & perform visual upgrade in SP2010. Claims-based authentication is an essential component to enable the advanced functionality of SharePoint 2013. To move classic-mode web applications from SharePoint 2010 Products to SharePoint 2013, you can convert them to claims-based web applications within SharePoint 2010 Products, and then migrate them to SharePoint 2013. 

·         Step 2: Design and build 2013 environment and migrate only active content from SP2010 to SP2013 using OOTB approach. Apply/redo customizations in SP2013 environment. 

2.     Direct Upgrade to SP 2013:

It is not a recommended approach by Microsoft because OOTB (Out of the Box) detach and attach will not work for migration from MOSS 2007 to SP 2013. But there are some tools available in the Market which decently perform direct migration to SP 2013. Few of the leading tools in this area are Metalogix and AvePoint’s DocAve.

What exactly these tools will do: The above mentioned tools will be able to migrate the content and Site to Site as-is migration without any problem. However below mentioned points need to be taken care.

1.       Think about restructuring the sites since the site collections/sites are created long time back and there may be a need to restructure.

2.       Branding – Create new Branding files (Master pages, CSS etc.)

         3. Customizations – WSPs need to be recompiled into the .NET framework 4.0 version since SharePoint 2013 supports this version.

Validate:

Validation is an important phase to make sure the required content, design, sites, customizations are migrated to the target

Conclusion:

This arcticle explains the high level approach and recommendations. You can reachout to me for any further inputs specifically if you are looking for.