A Christmas Case Study in SharePoint Migration and Administration
Now that we've concluded a massive customer project with one of our consulting partners that included both migration and administration requirements, I wanted to share some details of 
the experience with members of the SharePoint community. The customer was kind enough to authorize us to discuss some details of the project, and share what was learned:
In early October, we were approached by Santa Claus LLc, a wholly-owned subsidiary and IT-arm of the larger North Pole Enterprise Corporation, about plans to move from MOSS 2007 to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. After a very short negotiation process and licensing discussion, the project was awarded. Due to the high visibility of the project, and the obvious global implications of a delayed or failed transition to the new platform that would definitely impact worldwide gift distribution, we immediately offered up additional resources to ensure the project would be successful.
Thankfully, Santa's team had a fairly structured governance model, and kept good records of the customizations and growth of their environment, thanks to prior work with leading vendors in the space. However, over time the system had been expanded due to business need, with several business units building out custom environments that did not comply with the corporate standards. Santa's desire was to migrate the entire environment, spread across several geographical locations, including a single WSS deployment in Pasadena, CA (from an earlier acquisition), to a consolidated set of farms with separate development, test, and production environments.
Some of the issues the Claus team had identified as problem areas for their migration planning included:
- Random gift requests and special orders strewn throughout their environment, which needed to be tracked down and consolidated.
- The need to know how long migrations would take per division, as this could impact the tight toy production schedule. Santa needed to be able to prioritize migrations by division, by team, or by elf.
- Concern about cross-domain permissions issues, and the need to keep the ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’ profiles organized. There was high level of orphaned sites due to moves between these two lists, and needed a way to flag sites and content and then move them to new owners.
- During initial testing, Rudolph's social media mashup web part did not upgrade. It was being used across the organization, but they were unclear of how many sites were using it, or where.
- Overall, Santa realized that he did not have enough time to build millions of toys, provide fulfillment over the course of one night, AND plan a SharePoint migration. He needed his migration to work the first time, on schedule.
Using Davinci Migrator from Axceler, Santa and his team were able to query their multiple environments and identify sites containing specialized gift requests and consolidate them under one location as part of their migration, as well as split up their migration by product and elf divisions, allowing Santa to better estimate the size and schedule of his migrations. Santa was able to create a cross-domain map to identify orphaned sites and content, and ensure that naughty and nice lists remained separate and permissions to each in tact. Using the pre-migration analysis in Davinci, Santa was then able to identify all sites using Rudolph's unsupported web part, helping him to reduce the potential errors in his migration so that his migration was clean and fast.
Once moved to their new SharePoint 2010, the Claus team had some administrative issues that they were hoping to resolve up front through process and tools:
- Santa wanted help in managing the elves' SharePoint permissions, ensuring only those elves who needed ongoing access to the naughty and nice lists had access to those documents.
- Santa wanted visibility into elves' SharePoint activity and usage.
- Santa wanted to find all duplicate Christmas lists on a regular basis.
- Santa wanted to move around toy schematic files between sites in SharePoint, but didn’t have an easy way to move/copy sites.
- Santa had no way to prevent elves from changing the properties in his SharePoint farm.
Using ControlPoint, Santa is now able to see all users that have access to a uniquely secured list ensuring the Elves see the right lists. He set up reports from ControlPoint's Activity Analysis to get visibility to see the most active users, so he knows the hardest working Elves, and a Duplicate file report so he could ensure the elves had an accurate inventory. Using ControlPoint's Copy/Move feature, Santa also now has the ability to easily move files from one list to another and share toy schematics, to better leverage elf efficiencies. And finally, ControlPoint policy enforcement will let Santa set and enforce properties on Site collections, sites, and lists farm wide, allowing him to enforce the governance policies his team has established.
Santa and his team have been quite appreciative of the hard work from the extended team, and the new SharePoint tools in his tool belt. Looking forward to a generously stuffed stocking this year.