E-Guide SHAREPOINT UPGRADE BEST PRACTICES

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UPGRADE BEST

PRACTICES

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SharePoint 2013 release puts upgrade issues back in the spotlight

SharePoint upgrade requires share focus on planning, user preparation

n keepingwith

its practice of updating the

collaboration platform SharePoint

roughly every three years, Microsoft

de-livered another version, SharePoint 2013.

Not that it is on the shelves, preparing end users to handle all the

new features added to the collaboration software is a must for

en-suring a successful move to the latest version. That requires heavy

amounts of up-front planning by IT and collaboration teams. In this

E-Guide, learn best practices for a SharePoint upgrade.

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SHAREPOINT 2013 RELEASE PUTS UPGRADE ISSUES

BACK IN THE SPOTLIGHT

From a technical standpoint, the process of upgrading to the SharePoint 2013 release presents a set of challenges and issues that must be avoided or mitigated to smooth the path for a successful deployment. That starts with the basics: Evaluating the need for IT infrastructure improvements.

It's not uncommon for new versions of Microsoft's enterprise software products, such as SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server, to require new and bigger hardware. The long gaps between releases also means that updates will be able to take advantage of added server functionality and improvements made by hardware vendors during the interim. The shift from 32- to 64-bit architectures is an example from SharePoint's past.

The likelihood is that many of the systems running existing SharePoint installations won't satisfy the processing needs of the 2013 release. For ex-ample, Microsoft's minimum RAM requirements for standalone SharePoint 2013 systems and Web and application servers range from 8 GB to 24 GB; for SharePoint 2010, the minimum amounts were 4 GB to 8 GB.

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STORAGE BOUNDARIES GET MORE ELASTIC

Organizations are also collecting and storing more and more information, in both structured and unstructured forms. Between documents, e-mails, multi-media assets, transactional and master data and various other content types, companies require storage capacity beyond all historical norms. In many cases, SharePoint is used to manage storage of content; in addition, Microsoft's maxi-mum recommended thresholds for the number of items in document libraries and task lists has increased into the multiple millions with SharePoint 2013. That means SharePoint is capable of storing more data than ever before. As a result, an evaluation of storage needs for the next three to five years should be included in weighing upgrades.

One of SharePoint's strengths is the broad and deep community of indepen-dent software vendors and systems integrators that support the collaboration platform. SharePoint customers have thousands of add-on tools available to them. In the SharePoint 2013 release, Microsoft has made some significant architectural changes that affect the way the software supports add-ons. At a basic level, the programming interfaces used by add-on developers have been updated, as part of an ongoing move by Microsoft to shift programmatic inter-action from server-side to client-side operations (think jQuery) and expand

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support for REST-based Web services.

In addition, Microsoft has deprecated the "sandboxed" add-on functional-ity it introduced in SharePoint 2010, withdrawing official support for the ap-proach and replacing it with a new add-on app model that's somewhat akin to the ones developed by companies such as Facebook and Salesforce.com. The use of software sandboxes allowed various "tenants" of a single SharePoint farm to add third-party or custom code without affecting other users in the same environment. But there was little adoption of the concept outside of cus-tomers creating custom add-ons.

The new model significantly changes how add-ons function in SharePoint. In short, any add-ons that use the sandbox approach will effectively be incom-patible with SharePoint 2013. Organizations that are looking to upgrade and have affected add-ons they built in-house should start planning to rewrite them, and SharePoint admins should assess whether vendors of any licensed add-ons plan to upgrade their technologies.

FLEX TIME ON SHAREPOINT 2013 DEPLOYMENTS

One of the most significant changes in SharePoint 2013 is to its cloud capa-bilities. Microsoft architected the new release to allow for greater deployment

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flexibility, including fully cloud-based systems and hybrid architectures com-bining on-premises and cloud technologies. For example, add-ons to in-house SharePoint 2013 systems can be run from Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform. Alternatively, companies that have the resources can construct pri-vate clouds and run all or parts of their SharePoint farms there, while small and midsize businesses can run their systems entirely in the cloud, through the newly updated Office 365 service.

Microsoft has also expanded its SkyDrive service, which provides cloud-based storage of documents and files and synchronizes data across different computers and devices. Along with SharePoint 2013, Microsoft released a com-panion SkyDrive Pro tool that supplements document storage in SharePoint, giving business users the option of storing files directly in SharePoint libraries or in their SkyDrive Pro accounts.

While the increased flexibility enabled by the new cloud options certainly provides new opportunities for SharePoint users, it also creates more head-aches in terms of data protection, the overall content management lifecycle and user access control (think new firewall rules and access schemes).

No upgrade from one release to another is ever easy when enterprise soft-ware is involved. But upgrading to SharePoint 2013 promises to be a particular

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challenge, given the number of architectural changes in the software -- not to mention a variety of new front-end features, such as a redesigned user interface and expanded enterprise social networking capabilities.

It will take a cross-disciplinary team, including application developers, infrastructure managers and user interface designers, plus other staffers fo-cused on the user experience, to ensure a smooth transition from older ver-sions of SharePoint. And deciver-sions on whether to move forward with upgrades may not be just a matter of evaluating the new software; the expanded cloud dimension of the SharePoint 2013 release could serve as an inflection point for organizations considering how to reformulate their collaboration systems and strategies.

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SHAREPOINT UPGRADE REQUIRES SHARE FOCUS ON

PLANNING, USER PREPARATION

Now that SharePoint 2013 is on the shelves, preparing end users to handle all the new features added to the collaboration software is a must for ensuring a successful move to the latest version. And that requires heavy amounts of up-front planning by IT and collaboration teams, according to consultants and administrators experienced with a SharePoint upgrade.

Upgrading to the new version has its advantages. With SharePoint 2013, companies can expect a significantly improved user experience, said Mark Gilbert, lead SharePoint analyst at research and consulting company Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

"SharePoint has been criticized -- people will talk about sites as being very 'SharePoint-y' and not [offering] a flexible, rich user experience," he said. But the enhancements in SharePoint 2013 include a better user interface, addi-tional social networking features such as microblogging and activity streams, and more functional mobile capabilities using HTML5, Gilbert added.

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users, making it easier to reference discussions in the collaboration platform, said Jennifer Mason, a SharePoint consultant at Rackspace US Inc.'s Share-Point911 unit in Maineville, Ohio. SharePoint 2013 also offers an easy-to-use button for sharing content with peers, she said.

The latest release includes other features as well -- for example, Mason cited an option that lets users preview a document before opening it by simply hovering over its icon with a mouse. "As releases go, [SharePoint 2013] is more interactive, with [support for] different devices and ways to access content," she said.

PREPARE USERS FOR THE CHANGES

Because of all the new features, though, IT and collaboration managers in charge of upgrades should anticipate a lot of planning before getting started, said Sharon Weaver, knowledge management technology director at Black & Veatch, an engineering and construction company in Overland Park, Kan. Weaver helped usher in an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 at the company.

As with SharePoint 2013, the 2010 release significantly expanded the avail-able features in the software. "When you're looking at 2010," Weaver said, "the

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biggest thing is that it has a lot of options." The key to managing a successful SharePoint upgrade, she added, is to examine the new version carefully and de-termine how it will be used internally and how the governance model will work. "It's vital that the IT management understands what the needs of the orga-nization are before rolling out full functionality," agreed John Schaefer, senior manager of digital content at Black & Veatch. Because of all the capabilities and tools built into SharePoint, rolling out unneeded functions to the business will be a big waste of time, he said.

In particular, IT managers and SharePoint administrators need to make sure that end users are ready for the changes, whether an upgrade is to Share-Point 2010 or 2013.

"Communicate how you're moving [to the new platform] and what the value is for them," said Jason Parks, a principal at Higgins & Parks LLC, a Web design and marketing services firm in Buffalo, N.Y. Parks, a former national practice director for a global IT consultancy, suggested starting the upgrade with a kick-off meeting laying out the purpose, timeline and other details. He said the up-grade leader should also explain the responsibilities of the IT department and various business units typically called upon to assist with migrating required content to the new version.

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At Houston-based oil and gas company Linn Energy LLC, the upgrade team documented changes for users well before a SharePoint upgrade to 2010. "The best thing we did to prepare the users was communicating with them and making sure that they understood the new features," said Erich Braentner, a supervisor at Linn.

Another organization that upgraded to SharePoint 2010 is the Regional Municipality of Niagara, a group of 12 towns and cities in southern Ontario that is testing SharePoint 2013. "There's not a lot of hard training required [as part of a SharePoint upgrade]," said Paul Di Felice, associate director of IT consulting and analysis for the regional body. But he added that IT staff and SharePoint admins should be available for questions, comments and even rants throughout the transition and afterward, so that users will feel like their needs are being met.

"Just letting people vent, question and learn is a big deal in terms of adop-tion," Di Felice said. "A small [problem] will grow if you're not there to deal with it."

DOCUMENT YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE

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to a new version of SharePoint, and as part of that process, it's important to document the existing features and services in a SharePoint environment as well as the new ones that will be deployed in the upgrade, said Brad Shannon, an application services engineer at eGroup, a technology consultancy in Mount Pleasant, S.C.

"If you don't know what you have in your environment, you're going to find out the hard way," Shannon said, explaining that the more detailed the documentation of the current environment is, the better an organization can prepare for the SharePoint upgrade.

Companies should also start with a clean SharePoint farm, Shannon ad-vised. "That means you don't have anything on the farm you don't need," he said. Sometimes SharePoint systems will include items used for testing purposes that were never fully deployed or removed. Leaving them in place can create more work for SharePoint administrators, Shannon said.

Above all, make sure the business knows what it wants before an upgrade and build that into your plans, said Black & Veatch's Weaver. Trying to go back and make changes later on is difficult after workers have adopted new pro-cesses, she said. "So if you're trying to reorganize [your SharePoint environ-ment], be clear about the structure, architecture, scalability and support going

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