A common SharePoint use case: As SharePoint adoption spreads, many organizations are looking out across the enterprise and finding many groups with their own SharePoint instances. Some of these instances may be full-fledged production systems, while others were installed and are being supported by non-IT teams who needed a unique and customized solution, and then went ahead and installed Windows SharePoint Services. As organizations look at migrating to 2010, they find themselves sorting through these disparate systems, looking for a way to organize and consolidate these sites and data into one environment.
Using Davinci Migrator, an administrator can view content from across these disparate systems and both organize and aggregate sites and data using a familiar interface -- but with more granular planning capability than competing platforms.
Step 1: Within the 'Plan' tab in Davinci, you can easily create a new migration set -- which contains the source sites to be migrated, and the destination sites to which you will migrate. Simply double-click on the left navigation to find the 2007 sites to be migrated, selecting individual sites, or right click to open the context menu and additional selection options.
Step 2: Now select your destination site collection on the right navigation, and click Add to add the source sites and destinations to the migration set below.
Step 3: You can then open a 2003 environment, navigate to the sites to be migrated, select the sites and destination site collection, and click Add.
Once added to the table below, you simply save the migration set and move to the 'Migrate' tab to set your rules and filters, then schedule your migration.
Davinci provides very granular control over your migrations from 2003, 2007, WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0 environments to SharePoint 2010 or Foundation, allowing you to work with individuals, teams, or business units to organize and orchestrate their migrations, each with their own priorities and unique requirements. At the end of the day, if your end users are not happy with the end result, your migration was not successful. With more control over your migration, you can reduce the risks inherent in the process, and optimize the end user experience.
For more information on the Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, you can review the datasheet here, or request a formal demo here.
Well first things first. It seems my months of training and going to bed early to get up for 6am runs paid off. Not only did I complete my marathon, but I ran a PR of 3:32.36 and qualifed for the Boston Marathon! However, getting on an eight hour flight that evening to Germany was not so much fun!
After a quick cat nap upon arrivial, I had a new surge of energy and was ready to take on the beautiful and sprawling city of Berlin (although I was hobbling around all week).
The Estrel Hotel and Convention Center was a great venue for the SharePoint Conference and our booth location was perfectly situated near a session room and the ever important coffee break station!
Another reason you couldn't miss our booth was because we had the "brightest" booth in the hall. It was almost as if you were entering the Emerald City of Oz, as we lit up the show with green blinky pins, pens and cups!
So many highlights, so little time, so here are our top highlights from the week.
1. Excellent demonstrations led by Gail Shlansky and Alex Davenport on ControlPoint, Davinci and FileLoader. Whenever there was a break, we had a demonstration going on in our booth.
2. Co-sponsoring a great SharePint event (impromptu) with Metalogix, NewsGator, HiSolutions, and Qorus at Am to Pm bar. We had a huge turnout, a great dance party, and more importantly welcomed anybody in the SharePoint Community to attend!
3. Great networking with attendees led by our amazing sales team from our London office. We had so many great conversations during exhibit hours and then those "after" hours as well.
4. Well attended and well received conference sessions presented by Christian Buckley. Christians sessions received great traction and always led to people stopping by our booth afterwards to learn more!
5. Gail Shlansky, our Director of Product Development took on Quest and AvePoint in the Administration Shootout and while we are biased about who "won," the feedback from customers and partners we spoke to agreed.
Team Axceler had a great time at the European SharePoint Conference and hope to have a simliar experience at Connections 2011 in Vegas next week!
A common SharePoint use case: After several test migrations, you’ve identified several custom and third-party web parts that are causing aspects of your migration to fail. What you would like to do is identify all of the sites on your farm (or across multiple farms) that contain these custom web parts, and then either test those sites individually, flag them for later migration when you’ve had a chance to upgrade or replace the offending web parts, or even go through and remove the web parts so that the migration can continue.
Using Davinci Migrator’s unique query-by-example interface, you can very quickly identify non-standard web parts using one of the out-of-the-box SQL query reports, allowing you to better organize and orchestrate your SharePoint migration.
Step 1: Open the Discovery tab in Davinci Migrator, select the farm or farms to be searched, and under Custom Queries on the left, select the pre-built query ‘Sites with custom web parts’
Step 2: Select ‘View’ to run your query, and the results are presented below. You can then select ‘Add sites to Migration Set’ to open your current lists of sites to be migrated (in this case, by team), and determine where to add your query results.
Once within the migration set, you can further refine your rules and filters about what is to be migrated, and schedule your migration. One of the most powerful aspects of the Davinci Migrator’s query capability is your ability to modify your own SQL commands on the fly, making the tool easy to use out-of-the-box, but also very granular for those full-fidelity migrations.
For more information on Davinci Migrator, you can find the datasheet here, or sign up for live webinar here.
Axceler is proud to be a sponsor of SharePoint Pro's, Pushing SharePoint Online to the Limit, a one-day online conference for developers and administrators of SharePoint and Office 365 products and technologies. This free conference brings industry experts straight to your computer, offering free, technical SharePoint and Office 365 training.
Visit Axceler’s booth in the virtual exhibit hall and watch some of our product videos, download a whitepaper, or read the latest on ControlPoint, Davinci, and FileLoader 2010.
Date: Thursday, August 25th 2011
Time: 11:00a.m. - 4:00p.m.
Registration: http://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/home.aspx?id=334
We hope to see you there!
In my previous post, I outlined the 5 steps every administrator should review – and take action on – prior to a SharePoint migration. To round out that list, I have some additional suggestions to help you transform your SharePoint environment when moving to 2010. While my previous list focused on site and list transformation, the following are broader suggestions. They are not intended to be all-inclusive, but should help you improve your migration planning efforts:
- Simplify your environment.
Many organizations maintain more than one SharePoint farm – and usually more than one version of SharePoint. Use migration as a path toward consolidation – wherever possible – allowing you to decommission and repurpose hardware, and simplify your life. Reducing the number of farms you maintain may not be an option (based on the enterprise features you employ, and the size of your end user population), but migrating from earlier versions of SharePoint will lessen the administrative (and licensing) headaches.
- Tighten up your permissions.
Hopefully your migration is not the first audit of your permissions health, but either way – take this opportunity to do some deep analysis on users and administrators within your system and clean house. Some suggestions: make sure the right people have access to the right content, delete users who are no longer in Active Directory, and give people access through groups rather than direct access.
- Leverage new functionality.
SharePoint 2010 offers so many new features, such as Content IDs and Document Sets; all of the Service Applications such as Excel Services, Visio Services, and, of course, Managed Metadata Service; new social computing tools; and Sandbox Solutions, among others. Understand what is available in the platform, and – equally important – what custom aspects of your 2007 environment can now be displaced by out-of-the-box capability.
- Improve (or begin) governance.
One of the best practices that you will hear shouted from every SharePoint evangelist is the importance of governance. SharePoint is not a shrink-wrapped product. It takes thoughtful deployment, personalized configuration, and ongoing governance to ensure your organization gets the most out of their investment. Joel Oleson had a great post back in August 2006 on governance that is still very relevant, outlining things you should think about.
As you prepare your SharePoint environment for migration, it’s always best to begin with a plan in mind, and iterate with your team on how to move forward. Use tools like ControlPoint and Davinci Migrator to help clean up, organize, and orchestrate your migrations. And most of all, never rush the process – because fixing problems later takes longer, requires more resources, and costs the business more than doing it right up front. Good luck!