I gave this presentation at the SharePoint Federal User Group in Ottawa recently - based on some recent project work we have been doing I tried to distill the migration tips down into real world tips and tricks. It led to an interesting discussion since lots of people were interested in the topic and had approaches they had tried or wanted to ask about.
Here's the presentation on SlideShare:
Showing posts with label migration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label migration. Show all posts
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
SharePoint Conference 2011: How eBay Successfully Upgraded their Intranet to SharePoint 2010
These are my rough notes of the presentation by Ramin Mobasseri and Chris Givens of eBay. The Hub is pretty impressive for the way it organizes information for its users and the lengths it goes to in order to default metadata for improved searching.
Agenda
- Why upgrade?
- Methodology
- About the Upgrade (Technical)
- About the Upgrade (Tactical)
- About the Upgrade (Functional)
- Q&A
Why Upgrade
On MOSS 2007.
Got more complex requirements from business users who didn’t want to write code.
Better search.
Enterprise Social Networking
Better device and browser compatibility.
Demo: The Hub – the core eBay site. ESN is Enterprise Social Networking. Proud of combining managed metadata store with FAST search.
Extensively branded (yellow, large icons for the main menu items.
Global Nav
- Who We Are
- News
- My HR
- Teams
- Workplace
- Our Businesses
Have people search and all sites search at the top of each master page.1 click people search using FAST and typeahead
People results
Contact Info, Department info
Search Best Bets
People look for 3 scopes of things at eBay
1. Business Unit
2. Location.
3. Organization
Managed Metadata filters on the left to allow those scopes. DIfficult to tag pre-existing sites with managed metadata
Upon creation of a site you get Best Bets added automatically
Visio Services
Used by IT Tools team – wanted way to watch health of their servers at all times. Didn’t want to spend money. Took 45 minutes to draw visio diagram and connect to backend systems. Can filter by Production and DR environments or by Dev environments.
Why Upgrade
Social Media at work – did pilots – decided on Yammer, Chatter, Newsgator, and other social networkings. Decision to not dictate technologies on end users, but recommend tools they feel are best.
1st Attempt – try to integrate these tools. If it doesn’t succeed, we aggregate.
List of social networking services under My Social link
End users can make a post and it sends to multiple networks.
Expertise locator tag cloud
Expertise Search
Better Browser and Device Compatibility
Built feature grid – against all browsers. And put a level of support from 0 to 4.
Better performance: Increased performance by 29% (for global users) since servers are based in Denver.
Upgrade Methodology
Upgrade took 3 months.
Agilistic Scrum over the Spiral Waterfalls!
Blend of project methodologies. Started in Agile mode. Had MS Architects vet the scrums to make sure everything was in place. Meanwhile business analysts could create waterfall project plan.
Communication Plan: Write to end users, team site owners, don’t surprise them. They used a grid:
Subject | Type | Target Users | Description | Date Sent.
Governance Plan: Your blueprint. Over 345 new features – yes or no answers with each team and work with IT Operations to get their blessing. If “Yes” how is it configured and who can do what?
Feature Matrix for each set of features.
About the Upgrade (Technical)
Had access to MS Architects to ensure everything was possible.
Project Requirements:
- 3 month timeline, multiple solutions to be upgraded.
- Data Mining/ Farm Documentation
- Detailed Analysis of existing farm
- 3rd party solutions audit.
Ran a source code comparer to diff the SharePoint files in 12 hive against the OOTB files.
Biggest challenge was 3rd party solutions. Had to build whole mockup of 2007 environment and then try migrations into 2010 to see what broke.
You need business users who can test this to see if it works or not.
Environment:
Large server farm. 14 servers, 20,000 users world-wide, 12,000 sites and 33,000 My Sites. 20+ content databases.
Disaster Recovery. Redundant Data Centers for failover.
eBay has full failover – 4 hour failover time window.
$1.5 M of hardware.
Hardware and Performance Topics
Farm Configuration: Had to figure out capacity planning, how many servers, what the SLA’s are and tolerance for risk. For Disaster Recovery you might have to double the costs.
Microsoft offered access to MS Data Centers to test performance. Problem: eBay required other systems to be connected so that didn’t really work. Microsoft provided Architecture review.
IOPS are VERY important – FAST requires high Input Output for disks
SANs – very expensive, work with SQL Server. Everything else is Direct Attached drives for WFE and App servers.
Capacity Planning - how many users concurrently – what will the transaction mix be? Plan for growth.
VS Ultimate Test Tools – allows for performance testing of your applications.
Performance Optimizations: Page weights, global network.
High latency network can cause end user dis-satisfaction. Top 3 HTTP request types tend to be: CSS, Images, JS
How to minimize the page weights?
- Minimize the CSS (remove un-used CSS classes)
- Compress the CSS
- Make images 1px wide
- Minify the JS files
Got page weights down to 67k. Users were happier in global locations
Caching:
- IIS Output Cache – causes weird page weight issue with browser
- ASP.NET Caching
- BlobCache -
- ProxyServers
- CDNs
About the Upgrade: Tactical
Provisioning a site – a custom form. Long running process within a webpart. Anyone can create a site, IT gets a notification.
You specify a Business Unit, Organization, and Office Location default values using Managed Metadata. So when they search it will automatically filter from those sites with those values, they don’t have to do anything. They can find their site using their keywords. This took the longest time.
Rich Proifles: Encourage the end users to modify their user profiles
Offer them incentives.
Get rid of unwanted unused sites (clean your house)
Start your brownbag series early
Build an Upgrade Community to get feedback
Have weekly status meetings with the stakeholders
Make sure you have a Technical PM on the team
Watch out for the phrases: “That’s taken care of” or “That’s finished” – you have to test.
Test test test test
Productivity Hub
Power User Training
About the Upgrade: Functional
Master Pages – colliding requirements between functional groups
Editorial Issues: Did you use Word to edit in MOSS
Watch out for DIV and SPAN tags
Rich Text Editors and Content Editor webparts
The Ribbon: You will see some resistance. Users will settle after training
3 sets of users: Pioneers, Settlers, Stay-Behinds
Managed Metadata Services - Brilliant for search. Allow time for Information Taxanomy, do not rush! Planning to add them to lists and libraries (auto-tagging)? Watch out for Datasheet views.
Service Packs – don’t do SP for 6 months. But plan for it early
Questions
How many people were on the project? 3 devs, 3 IT Pros, 2 PMs (9 or 10 people for 3 months)
Physical or virtual? FAST and Admin was virtual, otherwise it was all physical (due to internal eBay policies)
Training: 20,000 user base – have trained 150 users so far. Train the trainer – Productivity Hub is 3rd most visited hub in the last few months so this is helping with training
Methodology – what do they recommend? Use whatever works. eBay recommends Scrum in Dev and get branding requirements via traditional models. Dev moved ahead while waiting for requirements (had a general idea)
Did you have to change any functionality? Had to rename thousands of host header name changes. InfoPath data connections were statically set – big issue.
Did you have constructive feedback on the intranet? Yes – put up a blog on the issues – have weekly call with Microsoft on post-upgrade lessons learned keeping Microsoft informed
Migration Approach? Was Database Attach in new farm. All database fail – that’s a given. The amount of time it takes to upgrade is directly related to the number of sites – so delete all the empty ones.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Familiar Faces at the SharePoint Summit 2010
Just got back from attending the SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal with my business partner Keith Carter.
One of the nice things about the summit (apart from being in Montreal, which is always fun – awful traffic excepted) was that I saw a lot of familiar faces.
There were a lot of vendors I knew from my days on the SharePoint trade show floors – folks like Gail Shlansky, Yancy Lent, and Ken Allen from Axceler, Dave Seaman from Syntergy, Michael Potter from Nintex, and Tony Lanni from AvePoint.
Other familiar faces included speakers like Ruven Gotz and Wouter van Vugt.
This year, I had a happy surprise - a lot of my former colleagues from Parks Canada were present. We had worked together in the Office 12 TAP days when SharePoint 2007 was about to release and it was a nice reunion.
Like any summit, it was also a chance to meet new folks. Before the summit kicked off, there was a dinner for all the speakers at the Greek restaurant Restaurant Ilios, organized by Danny Boulanger and Alain Lord. We had some nice chats about SharePoint, Holland, and Canadian culture (it turns out we do have one!).
There were a lot of Canadian government folks at the conference – it seemed like a majority of the participants in fact were public servants. There were some interesting chats about the challenges of buying and deploying SharePoint in the government.
On Wednesday I presented on migrating to SharePoint 2010.The interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 was high, so the room was full. I’m embedding my slide presentation below:
SharePoint Summit 2010 - Stress Free Migration
View more presentations from Nick Kellett.
It was a good conference and I look forward to the next one!
Saturday, April 03, 2010
SharePoint 2010 Beta Migration Gotcha – SSP Errors
One of the big changes to SharePoint 2010 is the replacement of the Shared Service Provider concept with a series of application services.
Essentially instead of a central managed “pool” or bundle of application services such as Excel, User Profile, Search, and BDC, the new model allows farm administrators to turn on or off (and separately configure) an infinite variety of services that can add extra functionality to their farm.
This is a much more flexible model.
This new model does cause one problem if you are doing “in-place” migrations of existing 2007 portals to 2010 using the beta bits. For some reason, the Shared Service Provider database does get upgraded to 2010 but it causes a number of portal errors while it does so.
You’ll find these in your upgrade log file, in the 14 hive. These vary from User Profile errors to “certificate” errors. One common error looks like this:
[OWSTIMER] [UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence] [ERROR] [1/8/2010 9:23:42 AM]: Action 14.0.1.0 of Microsoft.Office.Server.Upgrade.UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence failed.
[OWSTIMER] [UserProfileSharedResourceProvider12Sequence] [ERROR] [1/8/2010 9:23:42 AM]: Inner Exception: There are no online service instances for this application.
The “fix” is to delete all Shared Service Providers from your 2007 farm BEFORE doing the in place upgrade. The sts command to do this is:
stsadm -o deletessp -title SSP -force
This isn’t a big deal - this is only a beta problem.I very much doubt this will be the case in RTM which is due next month.
Hope that helps.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
SharePoint 2010 Migration Seminar
In my new role as Chief Technical Officer at StoneShare Inc., a Canadian SharePoint solutions firm, I am currently working on SharePoint 2010 migration options, and will be presenting a seminar on migration at several different events over the next month.
This topic will be focused on administrators and business users who want to understand migration paths and how best to prepare for a 2010 move.
I will do a live demo of an in-place SharePoint 2010 Upgrade - not for the faint of heart :) - and discuss the various options, useful tools, what sort of planning is required, and actual technical steps to get a great migration result.
I’ll be publishing my slides once the seminar is complete. Here’s an overview of the demonstration:
Migrate to SharePoint 2010 - Stress Free!
Considering migrating your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2010? Worried about what’s involved and how to manage it? Don’t let it become a headache! This presentation will discuss some common sense business and technical approaches to take away the pain, and help you deliver your SharePoint 2010 migration project on time and on budget.
Topics Covered:
- A little history: The SharePoint 2003 to 2007 Migration experience
- Common Migration Pains
- SharePoint 2010 Technical Changes
- Governance
- Migration Options
- Migration tools and utilities
- The Migration Process
- Recommendations
I will be presenting at the following events:
SetFocus SharePoint 2010 Seminar
This is part of a four-part series of seminars on SharePoint 2010 that SetFocus is putting on.
When: Thursday, March 18 at 1 – 4 PM PST
Where: Online webinar. You can register for free here:http://www.setfocus.net/marketing/spseminarseries.aspx
Microsoft Ottawa Federal SharePoint User’s Group
This is the monthly SharePoint user group – it is definitely open for more than just Federal SharePoint Users to attend!
When: Tuesday, March 30 at 5 – 7 PM PST
Where: Ottawa at the Microsoft Office on 100 Queen Street
SharePoint 2010 Summit
When: April 12 to 14
Where: Centre Mont-Royale, Montreal
Register online now for this great SharePoint conference in one of the world’s great cities.
http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/index_e.htm
There’s really a lot to discuss and I’m looking forward to the seminars. I’m also crossing my fingers the live upgrade goes as planned each time :)
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