Migrating from Companyweb to Office 365 SharePoint

Companyweb is a SharePoint site that comes with all versions of Small Business Server. Thus, it is available in versions, 2003, 2008 and 2010. It basically uses the free version of SharePoint (now known as Foundation) as opposed to the commercial version of SharePoint generally referred to as SharePoint Server.

Office 365 on the other hand is a hosted version of SharePoint Server Enterprise. It is still available for older tenants that are yet to be upgraded as SharePoint Server 2010 whereas all new tenants since February 2013 and those that have already been migrated, it will be SharePoint Server 2013. After November 2013 all Office 365 tenants should be upgraded to 2013 versions of software, including SharePoint. Therefore this article will make the assumption that the migration is to the latest version being SharePoint Server 2013.

There is currently no free migration wizard to move Companyweb to Office 365. The general guidance from Microsoft when it comes to migrating SharePoint is that you need to consider it like moving house. This means that during such a process you generally, throw some stuff away, add some new stuff and relocate other stuff. In short it is generally not a 1:1 transition. You basically take the opportunity to re-engineer and add more value.

This translates into the fact the any migration of SharePoint is a very manual process and there are a lot of things you need to look out for. However, in broad strokes, here are the major 3 approaches to my mind:

1. Exporting

2. Templating

3. Third Party tools

1. Exporting

Most of data within SharePoint can be accessed by desktop applications. For files, you can simply map Windows Explorer (i.e. file manager) to Companyweb document libraries, then map another Windows Explorer to Office 365 SharePoint document libraries and drag and drop the files between locations. To configure drive mapping take a look at this article:

How to configure and to troubleshoot mapped network drives that connect to SharePoint Online sites in Office 365 for enterprises

To migrate other items such as calendar, contacts and lists you have a number of options:

a. You can connect up many SharePoint items via Outlook and again drag and drop between SharePoint sites within Outlook. For information about doing that see:

Connecting a SharePoint Calendar in Outlook

Remember that Outlook can generally be connected to SharePoint calendars, contacts and document libraries.

b. You can export items to applications like Excel and Access. This is a one way process from which you need to import these items back into the new SharePoint. For information about doing that see:

Exporting a SharePoint list to Excel

Create a list based on a spreadsheet

c. More ‘fiddly’ option could include using SharePoint Workspace 2010 and even Sky Drive Pro client app.

Summary – Exporting

Using export techniques generally allows you to move directly from any source SharePoint version to any destination version of SharePoint. Downsides include:

– Very manual process, especially for large sites.

– Bandwidth considerations when dragging and dropping files between sites.

– Security will need to be regenerated on new SharePoint site.

– Loss of meta data i.e. additional information about items in SharePoint i.e. custom columns added to item.

– Loss of version history and previous versions

– Loss of customizations created via custom editors like Frontpage.

– Web parts not migrated.

– Loss of workflows.

2. Templating

The idea with templating is that SharePoint allows you to create a template of the either the structure of a site or an item (i.e. a list) or a template of the structure including the data. The down side is that you can only apply templates to the same version of SharePoint. Thus, you can’t template a site in Companyweb 2003 and import it into SharePoint 2013. The source and destination template need to come from the same version of SharePoint.

Here is some information on creating templates:

Site Templates

Copy or move a library using a library template

If you really want to use the template method you are going to have to upgrade your version of Companyweb to be at least SharePoint 2013. This would mean creating a virtual machine for each version of SharePoint and doing a database migration to each version.

Thus, if you are coming from Companyweb 2003 you are going to have to do a database migration to Windows SharePoint Services 2007, then another database migration to SharePoint Foundation 2010, finally another database migration to SharePoint Foundation 2013. Only then could you consider templating and importing to SharePoint Online.

As you can appreciate this is a very involved process and requires 3 independent SharePoint machines, 3 database migrations at least. If you want to go down this path have a look at the previous series of posts I did on migrating on premise Companyweb.

SBS Companyweb migration

You will of course have to one more after what I wrote about in these posts (Foundation 2010 to Foundation 2013) but the database migration process is identical.

Summary – Templating

Templating allows you to migrate more complete blocks of information that simply exporting. You can also generally maintain history and metadata. At worst it allows to keep the SharePoint site structure but the overheads are steep, because the downsides include:

– Significant requirement in hardware to run up swing migration servers.

– Limits on how large templates can be.

– Large sites take time to copy, attach and upgrade.

– Security will need to be regenerated on new SharePoint site.

– More chance of issues developing while migrating. For example, if there are incompatibilities or database corruptions this process can become complex.

3. Third Party tools

There are not many third party tools available that offer a fully automated process of migrating SharePoint. Some of these almost have minimum SharePoint version requirements, so check before shelling out money. The main downside of these tools are that they are expensive. They are aimed at Enterprises rather than small businesses.

Once such tool is ShareGate but as you can see it is not particularly cheap for a one off migration:

Also be aware that those prices are annual prices. So to do a full site migration you are currently looking at $2,000. That is roughly about 20 hours of time if you want a comparison (and that doesn’t include the time spent to work out how ShareGate functions).

I have used ShareGate and have had conversations with them about their pricing, especially for SMB, but alas it appears like most third party tools with SharePoint Enterprises are the focus.

Another option is Metavistech at:

http://www.metavistech.com/category/tools-office-365

No pricing on their site but expect to pay at least ShareGate money. This tool appears to be more encompassing than ShareGate but I have not any experience with the product.

Another option is Quest Migration Suite for SharePoint at:

http://www.quest.com/migration-suite-for-sharepoint/

Another option is AvePoint:

http://www.avepoint.com/sharepoint-products/

Office 365 MVP Benoit Hamet did a series of posts on migration to SharePoint Online 2010 using AvePoint for migration which you can find here:

Office 365 / SharePoint – Migrate your On Premises SharePoint content to SharePoint 2010 Online – Part 1 – Migration tool installation

Office 365 / SharePoint – Migrate your On Premises SharePoint content to SharePoint 2010 Online – Part 2 – Connection to Office 365

Summary – Third Party tools

These tools are going to make migration much easier. They are going to take just about all of the content and potential even handle securities. However, the down side is cost. None of these plans are cheap, they are thousands of dollars because they are enterprise focused. Downsides are:

– Expensive.

– Need to spend time understanding how tools operate.

– May still need to re-generate securities on new site.

Appendix – Third Party tools

In the mix of third party tools I will throw in Skykick. This a service that will migrate all your on-premise information (mail, data, etc) directly to Office 365. Again, I have no experience with this company and I have received no replies to email conversations I attempted.

They would seem to be a good option provided you simply want the information across into Office 365 as is. I have no idea about how it would appear in SharePoint, how securities would be managed and what happens if there were items that could not be migrated.

It is certainly an option worth considering if you are planning on moving all the data in one hit and just want SharePoint to ‘work’ in Office 365. Personally, I have my doubts until I have actually seen the process operate, in that case I leave it up to other to leave a comment on this post or contact me directly (director@ciaops.com) with their experiences.

Summary

That in broad strokes is what I see as you options. All require work, some require more time, some require more money but all need a fair amount of planning and understanding of the migration process.

The best option for people unfamiliar with SharePoint is probably simply to export the data, however be aware of the limitations that brings.

If you have any questions or need assistance with SharePoint migrations to Office 365 I suggest you contact me directly (director@ciaops.com) and I’ll do what I can to assist. Hopefully, I can build this post out into more information tools and procedures to smooth the way for people. Of course, everything about Companyweb to Office 365 migrations I learn goes into my Guide (www.wssops.com) which I think is pretty good value for everything it contains, especially for SMB.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP2 on SBS 2011

If you want to install SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 2 on Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 here’s the process I’d recommend you follow.

1. Firstly go into the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration and select Manage servers in this farm from under the System Settings section.

Check that the Status of the SBS server DOES NOT SAY upgrade required. If it says Upgrade Required you need to run a PSCONFIG command by following this post.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/05/24/you-must-manually-run-psconfig-after-installing-sharepoint-2010-patches.aspx

However, ENSURE you have a complete BACKUP of Companyweb and you know how to recover SharePoint if needed BEFORE you run PSCONFIG. Resources on doing both of these will be listed below. But DON’T run a PSCONFIG without a good backup and an understanding of how to recover SharePoint on SBS if it all goes pear shaped!

As you can see, in the above screen shot it says No Action Required. This means all patches and updates have been fully applied, so we can apply new updates.

2. Complete a full backup of Companyweb. I recommend you use the stsadm –o backup command or equivalent to get a copy of the data in a nice flat data file. This makes it easy to blow back into a clean site in case of a recovery or rebuild. Information on stsadm –o backup command for SharePoint Foundation 2010 can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc264321(v=office.14).aspx

You should have a DR plan for Companyweb in case the upgrade fails. If you don’t know how to recover Companyweb then I strongly suggest you check out the resource links at the bottom of the page. PSCONFIG commands on SBS don’t have a great history of always working as expected, so be prepared.

3. Download SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 2 from:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2687464

4. Read the above KB article and understand if the known issues with this update will affect you.

5. Run the downloaded Service Pack as an Administrator

Accept the UAC.

Accept License agreement and Continue.

Let the files extract.

Let the files install.

After the install the server is probably going to need to reboot.

6. After the reboot run a Command Prompt as an administrator.

Accept the UAC.

7. Change directory to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\bin

8. At the command prompt type:

PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures

and press Enter.

9. You should see the process commence and run through 6 steps.

All going well, all 6 steps should complete without anything being unsuccessful.

10. Open SharePoint Foundation 2010 Central Administration and select Manage servers in this farm from the System Settings section.

Check that the configuration database version is now 14.0.7015.0000.

11. Check Companyweb is functioning on the server AND workstations.

Resource links

Repair SharePoint Foundation 2010 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg680310.aspx

Reinstall SharePoint Foundation 2010 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg680325

Overview of Backing Up and Restoring Data in SharePoint Foundation – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc264321(v=office.14).aspx

Special Thanks

Susan Bradley for providing SBS 2011 system

Approvals in SharePoint Online

On of the features of SharePoint in general are approvals. This means that document updates can only ‘go live’ once they have been approved. This functionality is not enabled out of the box. So how do you configure this?

In this case I’ll show you how approvals work with a Document Library in SharePoint Online.

Navigate to the Document Library in question as a SharePoint Administrator and select the LIBRARY tab at the top left of the page.

This will expose the Ribbon Menu. On the right of this menu select the Library Settings button.

Under the left hand General Settings column select the link Versioning settings.

At top of the page, in the Content Approval section select Yes for Require content approval for submitted items.

After selecting this the section lower down, Draft Item Security will be enabled. It is generally recommended that you leave this at the default of Only users who can approve items (and the author of the item).

Press the OK button at the bottom of the page to continue.

If you now return to the Document Library you will find that an extra column, Approval Status, has been added.

If a user now uploads a document to this library they will see that it’s status is Pending. At this point only the user and an administrator can see the document in the library.

To approve the document, a user with rights needs to select that document and either from the Ribbon Menu or the ellipse as shown above select Approve/Reject.

They can then make their selection of Approval Status, leave a Comment and press the OK button.

When users now view the Document Library they will see the document (provided it has been approved) and it was last modified by the person who approved it.

So who can approve by default? To do so you’ll need to have at least Design rights.

You can of course create new permission levels and assign them. In which case you will need to check the Approve Items option shown above.

Office 365 suite SharePoint storage

Here’s a handy little chart that has a good summary of SharePoint storage and file uploads

Pricing will depend on your region of course.

SharePoint Online Site Mailboxes

One of the hidden gems of the new Wave 15 (SharePoint 2013) version of Office 365 are Site Mailboxes. They are basically a full Exchange mailbox (for free) that can be associated with a SharePoint Team site.

A Site Mailbox is not enabled by default but it is easy enough to do. You can press the Keep email in context tile on the front page of a new team site or

you can ‘Add an app’ and select Site Mailbox from the list of available apps.

Once the Site Mailbox has been added you’ll need to give it a few minutes to setup.

As the above message highlights, it may take up to 30 minutes for access to the Site Mailbox. Site Owners will be sent an email when the mailbox is ready.

You can now access the mailbox by pressing the Mailbox link from the Quick Launch Menu on the left hand side of the Team Site.

The first time you access the mailbox you’ll need to set the default language and time zone

You should then see the familiar Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface to the mailbox like so:

So now you can send and receive as that mailbox just as you would with normal Exchange accounts.

To navigate back to your site simply select the site name in the top left of the screen.

If you now go and look at your Office 365 users in the Admin centre you should see a new user that matches the Site Mailbox you just created like so:

Clicking on that user you will see they have no licenses and can’t be assigned any.

Now there is not much that you can do here to work with the Site Mailbox. What you need to do is access the Site Mailbox from SharePoint and then select Options from the Settings menu in the top right of the browser.

You should then end up with a screen like

In the middle of this screen you will see that Site Mailboxes are 5GB maximum in size.

I won’t cover the standard OWA stuff here but if you select site mailboxes from the list you’ll see that it is blank. This is because a Site Mailbox isn’t really connected to other Site Mailboxes, BUT if you go to your own personal OWA and select the same options you should see

all the Site Mailboxes you have access to.

You should also see that you have ability to determine whether they appear in Outlook by simply checking the box to the left of the Site Mailbox.

If you edit the Site Mailbox by selecting it and press the Edit button (the pencil) you’ll get another dialog window. In there you will find a sync status option as shown above. You will also notice that you have a button to start sync if needed.

After a while (this is not instantaneous and may take up to 30 minutes or so), users who have rights to the SharePoint Team site, where you created the Site Mailbox, will see that mailbox appear in their Outlook desktop application like shown above.

Now they can happily drag and drop emails between the Site Mailbox and their own Inbox.

If a message arrives with an attachment, as shown above, that attachment can be dragged and dropped to the Document subfolder and this will copy it to the Documents library in the SharePoint Team Site.

This Documents subfolder is effective a direct link to the SharePoint Team site library and thus you can drag use it exactly like a linked Library in Outlook. That means you can drag and drop files that aren’t attachments here and they will also be uploaded to SharePoint.

So Site Mailboxes are easy to set up, are free, get automatically provisioned to Outlook on the desktop and allow a connection for file transfers to a SharePoint. They make a great option for working with projects that may involve team members sharing information via email. Having calendar, contacts, documents AND emails for a project all in one location is very handy but that is not the only application for Site Mailboxes!

This post only scratches the surface of what is possible. If you are looking for more configuration of this mailbox like being able to change the inbound address as well as Send-As permissions then you are going to need to look at standard Office 365 PowerShell commands to achieve this. Not hard but beyond the scope of this post (maybe a future post so stay tuned).

Here are some more resources to help you with SharePoint Site Mailboxes in Office 365:

Overview: Use a site mailbox to collaborate with your team – http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/sharepoint-help/overview-use-a-site-mailbox-to-collaborate-with-your-team-HA103927690.aspx

Prepare for using site mailboxes in Office 365 – http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/office365-suite-help/prepare-for-using-site-mailboxes-in-office-365-HA103834109.aspx

Guest on Eagle Tech Genius

Just for a change, I’ve swapped my podcast hosting mike to be a guest on Eagle Talk Radio. You’ll find the episode here:
http://eaglewavesradio.com.au/2013/07/eagle-tech-genius-11-july-2013/
I’m actually the second guest on for this episode so might need to fast forward just over half way to catch my segments on SharePoint and podcasting.
Thanks to Belinda Luby and Peter Moriarty for the opportunity to be a guest on their show.

Using a site template with a new site collection in SharePoint Online

One of the really great things about SharePoint is that you can template a lot of the content and re-use it elsewhere. You can also create templates that include the contents of a site if you want.

Once you have a site template you can use it within an existing site collection to create a subsite based on this template, but what about if you want to create a completely new site collection (i.e. URL) in Office 365 SharePoint Online based on this template?

Here’s how.

You create the site template as you normally would be going into Site Settings for that site and then selecting Save site as a template.

When complete the new site template will end up in the Solutions Gallery for that Site Collection. You’ll need to click on the hyperlink for the name of the site template you just created to download the template file to your workstation.

You then simply proceed as you would normally to create a new Site Collection, however when it comes time to select a template to base the new site collection select the Custom tab (on the extreme right), which should only have one option – .

Select this option and continue with the new site collection creation process.

In a few moments a new site collection will be created in Office 365. Now navigate to the new site collection URL.

Since the site doesn’t have a template yet you will be prompted to choose one. At the top you’ll see the standard SharePoint templates but below this you’ll see option to upload something to the Solution Gallery of the new site collection. You should select this.

You should see that the Solution Gallery is empty. You now need to upload the template you downloaded from the previous site that was saved on your workstation. To do this simply select the Upload Solution button in the top left and proceed to upload the template from your workstation.

Just before you close the dialog displayed after uploading the file completes you should select the Activate button on the right of the Ribbon Menu to make that template available. Failing to do this will mean that it can’t used.

You should now see a single activated solution in the gallery as shown above.

You’ll need to browse to the URL of your new site collection again but now if you select the Custom tab in the Template Selection area you should see the name of your custom site template as shown above. Select this and press the OK button to proceed with the creation process.

The time it takes to create the new root site in the new site collection depends on how large your custom template is but in a short period of time the new site collection based on your custom template will be created. All you need to do is set the security groups and you are good to go.

That’s how you create a completely new site collection from an existing site template.