Friday, June 14, 2013

Migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013

I recently have done a migration from SharePoint 2007 straight to 2013. This called for a White Paper ;-) I've posted it on Discover Technologies site. here is an abstract and a link to download it. Hope you enjoy it!

SharePoint 2007 provides a great collaboration platform, but as the business matures, so should the platform. Now-a-days companies that invested heavily in SP 2007 are now developing a SharePoint strategy may be confused regarding migration to SharePoint 2010 and or 2013. Needless to say, an upgrade to a newer version is a great undertaking for IT. However, besides the IT involvement, there is also training and end-user adoption. Training and end-user adoption are budget intensive and during this period end users are not as productive as they used to be while working within the old, familiar version of the platform. Companies are looking for a way to migrate to SP 2013, the latest version, however, being 2 versions behind means going through 2 phases of migration as well as end user training and adoption. Even though, from a technical and Microsoft supported perspective, there is no option to jump from 2007 straight to SharePoint 2013 without using third party tools, there is an option to cut the cost and the effort of migrating to the latest 2013 version by almost half by first migrating to 2010 as an interim migration utilizing a trial license for 2010. You can accomplish this without purchasing full version of 2010 and skip the associated end user training and adoptions steps. Even though there is an established method of upgrading from 2007 to 2010, this approach is often not a viable option due to the difference in the hardware support for each version. If 2007 version was supported on 32 bit servers, 2010 is only supported on 64 bit environments. In this case, an upgrade is just not an option and attaching the database is the only supported way of moving to 2010. In moving from 2010 to 2013, a database upgrade is the only officially supported option.... Download it from here