Overview of WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2013 Migration

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Recently we have completed team site migration project from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2013. I am writing this post to elaborate migration details and key notes which we took while migration. We have migrated team sites from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2013. We have different categories of customization in our WSS 3.0 team sites. Below are the categories of our team sites.

  • Normal Out of the box team sites.
  • Team sites with Java script and JQuery customization.
  • Team sites which uses custom templates.
  • Team site which is customized with SharePoint designer. 

Team Site migration process details

  1. Run the Per-Upgrade check tool on WSS 3.0 environment. This tool generates the detail report of the team sites and tells us the issue details which may occur in migration process. We analyzed this report and came to know that we don’t have any show stopper issue for our migration process.                                 STSADM.EXE -o preupgradecheck
  2. Activities needs to perform on WSS 3.0 Farm
    1. Take a Content database backup of the team site application from database server.
    2. Copy database backup file to SharePoint 2010 database server.
  3. Activities needs to perform on SharePoint 2010 Farm
    1. Restore TeamSite Content database backup on database server.
    2. Create a new TeamSite web application http://sitename2010
    3. Test the Content DB on app server with the following PowerShell command
      1. Test-SPContentDatabase -name  TeamSites1  -webapplication http://sitename2010
    4. Review the log file for any critical errors
    5. If no migration stopping errors, proceed to next step.
    6. Mount the DB to the web app with the following PowerShell command
      1. Mount-SPContentDatabase TeamSites1 -DatabaseServer "MyServer" –WebApplication  http://sitename2010
    7. Once mount is complete, this will also upgrade the content DB to SharePoint 2010
    8. Open few site and verify that these sites are successfully migrated to SharePoint 2010
    9. Take a backup of the team site content database which we upgraded in previous steps.
    10. Copy database backup file to SharePoint 2013 database server.
  4. Activities needs to perform on SharePoint 2013 Farm
    1. Restore TeamSite Content database backup on database server.
    2. Create a new TeamSite web application http://sitename2013
    3. Test the Content DB on app server with the following PowerShell command
      1. Test-SPContentDatabase -name  TeamSites1  -webapplication http://sitename2013
    4. Review the log file for any critical errors
    5. If no migration stopping errors, proceed to next step.
    6. Mount the DB to the web app with the following PowerShell command
      1. Mount-SPContentDatabase TeamSites1 -DatabaseServer "MyServer" –WebApplication  http://sitename2013
    7. Once mount is complete, this will also upgrade the content DB to SharePoint 2013.
    8. Open few site and verify that these sites are successfully migrated to SharePoint 2013.
  5. User Migration- Our WSS 3.0 team site environment uses form base authentication model. So our all team sites are having form base users and groups in it. But our new SharePoint 2013 environment is claims base so we need to migrate form base users and groups to claims base users and groups. We have written a PowerShell script, which iterate through all our team sites and migrates form base user and groups to claims base users and groups. Once we completed the user and group migration, all users will able to login to SharePoint 2013 version of team sites.
  6. UI Upgrade- When we migrate team sites from WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010, UI will not get upgraded to SharePoint 2010 UI. But when we migrate team sites from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, UI will get automatically upgraded to SharePoint 2010 UI. There are two options available to upgrade team site UI to 2013.
    1. Login to each individual site and you will get option for UI upgrade. You can click on button and it will update your team site UI to 2013. This option is good if you have very few team sites like 5 to 10. If you have more the 50 team sites then this option is not feasible.
    2. We have written a PowerShell script which iterate through the team sites and upgrade UI of all team sites.

Key points of TeamSite Migration  

  1. 90% team sites are successfully migrated to SharePoint 2013 environment.
  2. Team sites customized in SharePoint designer had issues during the migration. However the look and feel did not migrate cleanly. Significant master pages changes will be problematic and will need to handle case by case basis.
  3. Team Sites which are having minor customization with Java script and JQuery are not having any issue in SharePoint 2013.
  4. We have not migrated custom template to SharePoint 2013 so the team Sites which are created using custom template are not successfully migrated to SharePoint 2013. If you want to migrate these team sites then you need to  define strategy on these team sites migration.
  5. Any hard coded links to existing team sites will need to be address manually.
  6. User accounts do not migrate appropriately. However we developed a script to map the accounts so that SharePoint 2013 for recognize it.
  7. We need to upgrade UI from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 after migration. We have more than thousand sites so we have developed a PowerShell script for it.