SharePoint 2013 Upgrade Planning For The End User: What You Need To Know by Richard Harbridge - SPTechCon

Editor's Notes

• #9: Surprises are good for birthdays, not for business planning.
• #20: An email should be sent out to Site Collection admin when the temporary site is provisioned.
• #26: When and what to communicate to the upgrade teamIn general, the server administrators and service application administrators set the timeline for upgrade, and site owners are notified only when the process is about to begin. However, because team members have their own tasks to perform at particular points in the overall upgrade process, it is very important that you have a solid plan to communicate the progress of the upgrade to all team members so that everyone knows when it is time to perform their particular tasks. The whole upgrade team must work together to determine the dates and times to perform the upgrade. We recommend that you choose an upgrade window to occur when site usage is lowest. For small single-server deployments, upgrade may be completed in less than a day. Larger deployments can take more time, up to a weekend. There is no way to determine the precise length of time that will be required to upgrade any particular site collection. Because of this, it is very important to communicate with other team members involved in the upgrade process in addition to users. The day or days that you choose for upgrading should be far enough in the future that the upgrade team has enough time to complete all of the preliminary steps. When you plan the timeline, make sure that you schedule time to validate the upgraded sites and time to implement any changes or do any work to re-brand sites.It is important to communicate with site owners, designers, and developers at the following points during the upgrade process:Before the trial upgrade so that they know the general timeline and their roles in the process.After you perform a trial upgrade to find issues. For example, issues such as customized site templates or custom Web Parts should be reported to the appropriate site owner, designer, or developer before you schedule the upgrade, to give them time to investigate the issues and take preliminary steps. Or a developer might decide that it would be prudent to rebuild a Web Part before the upgrade occurs. And site owners might want to note any customizations that were done to their sites, such as site templates and changes to core Active Server Page Extension (ASPX) files. After the environment is upgraded so that they can review the sites and make any changes that are needed.When you are ready for them to upgrade their site collections.When and what to communicate to site usersIt is equally important to communicate with the users of the sites to tell them about the following issues: When the environment will be upgraded   In particular, you must also inform them if their sites will be unavailable during the upgrade.When their sites will upgraded   Site collection owners should communicate to their site users about the timeline for upgrading the site collection. If you, as a server farm administrator, are upgrading a site, you should communicate when that will occur.How the upgrade might affect them and what they should know about the new environment   For example, the site will look different and function slightly differently in the new user interface. You can also point them to available content, such as What's New articles or training materials, to learn about the new version. For more information about feature changes, see What's new in SharePoint Server 15 Beta.How to obtain help   If they find an issue with their site after upgrade, how can they obtain help in addressing it?You can use the new system status bar in the site collections to notify users of these items.
• #34: During an upgrade from the server products in the Office 2007 release to SharePoint 2010 Products, you could allow site owners to use Visual Upgrade to keep sites in the old experience on the upgraded environment. When you upgrade to SharePoint 2013 Preview, all sites that are still in the old experience in SharePoint 2010 Products are automatically upgraded to the 2010 experience. If you want the opportunity to address any issues and review the sites before they are switched to the new experience, upgrade them to the new experience in your SharePoint 2010 Products environment and review them before you upgrade them to SharePoint 2013 Preview. We recommend that you finish visual upgrades before you upgrade to SharePoint 2013 Preview. Finishing visual upgrades before you upgrade provides the following benefits:You can address issues while you still have the server products in the Office 2007 release components available.You can have users be involved in reviewing and fixing issues in their sites.You can roll back to the old experience temporarily if it is necessary. You cannot roll back when you are in the SharePoint 2013 Preview experience.You avoid adding potential errors to the upgrade process. The fewer operations occurring during upgrade, the better. Trying to troubleshoot errors is more difficult when you have more processes involved. And users might think that upgrade has caused an issue when it's really the experience changing to the new version. If you have an issue with how the site interface is displaying, how will you know whether it is an old issue from the site that was forced through visual upgrade, a problem with the 2010 mode in SharePoint 2013 Preview, or a problem with a new CSS file?To check for sites in the old experience, on the SharePoint 2010 Products environment, you can use the Get-SPSite Windows PowerShell command.To check for and upgrade sites still in the old experience in the SharePoint 2010 Products environment by using Windows PowerShellVerify that you have the following memberships:securityadmin fixed server role on the SQL Server instance.db_owner fixed database role on all databases that are to be updated.Administrators group on the server on which you are running the Windows PowerShell cmdlets.An administrator can use the Add-SPShellAdmincmdlet to grant permissions to use SharePoint 2013 Preview cmdlets.Note: If you do not have permissions, contact your Setup administrator or SQL Server administrator to request permissions. For additional information about Windows PowerShell permissions, see Add-SPShellAdmin.On the Start menu, click All Programs.Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command to return all site collections that are in or have subwebs in the old experience:Get-SPSite | ForEach-Object{$_.GetVisualReport()} At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command to upgrade those sites to the new experience:Get-SPSite | ForEach-Object{$_.VisualUpgradeWebs()} For more information, see Get-SPSite and Manage visual upgrade (SharePoint Server 2010).
• #44: MicrobloggingShare content, links, and mediaFollow people, sites, content, and conversationsActivity FeedsProvides a view into recent activity related to content, links, media, and peopleCommunitiesCommunity sites with self-service administration and moderationModern community features such as achievements and reputationDiscussionsModern discussion boardsBlogsClient application integrationCategories, comments, and moderation
• #45: New Search architecture with one unified searchPersonalized search results based on search historyRich contextual previews
• #56: Technical Details:Requires: Blob Caching to be enabled for the web application. (To minimize performance impact due to dynamic generation of images.)Adding Your Own: Additional renditions can be configured for the site collection under Site Settings > Look and Feel > Image Renditions.Stored: In the site collection /_catalogs/masterpage/PublishingImageRenditions.xml file.Supported Image Types: gif, jpg, jpeg, jpe, jfif, bmp, dib, png, tif, tiff, ico, wdp, hdp. Supported Video Types:wmv, wma, avi, mpg, mp3, mp4, asf, ogg, ogv, oga, webm.Changing Image Rendition Dimensions: Since image renditions are versioned after you change the dimensions you have to re-edit all images to crop the image according to the new dimensions.
• #71: A lot of this can seem daunting and I know one of the hardest things is figuring out how to do some of the things I have shown today. If you are interested in further training or assistance please let me know. Based on the number of people who are interested and the areas of interest we can schedule further training sessions to help everyone better use the SharePoint portal.It's our commitment to you that we will continue to hear your feedback and identify the issues. I encourage you to give us feedback during the coming months, and we will continue to deliver more and more functionality, more and more guidance to help you be successful with your application of SharePoint.Thank You for Reading/Listening