The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac : SharePoint, Upgrade

SharePoint 2013 is coming, SharePoint 2013 is coming

Shane — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:57:46 GMT

Thankfully, unlike the night of Paul Revere's fateful ride we are happy to see it coming. Side note: If you are bored go read this article talking about Israel Bissell who did the hard work. He managed to ride 345 miles to Paul's 12. Unfortunately Bissell doesn't rhyme as well as Revere. J Ok, enough history back to SharePoint.

SharePoint 2013 is exciting with lots of new features. Two of the biggest will be more social capabilities and the App store. The inspiration for social feature are pretty clear, it is like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. That's a really good thing as we move closer to the social enterprise. The App store just makes sense. Everyone these days has more Apps than they can even imagine at their fingertips on their smart phones, it was only logical that other software would start having the same capabilities. These two features are just scratching the surface of SharePoint 2013. Fortunately, if you are interested, Microsoft has some great reading on what is new and the Rackspace team has provided 9 free videos showing off some of the 2013 coolness. This article isn't about what is new.

The thing I want to focus on, the information that is hardest to find, is what you can be doing today to get ready for when the final version of SharePoint 2013 is released. The easy answer is nothing. If you are actively caring for and feeding SharePoint then you have nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if you haven't been showing your SharePoint farm all the love and attention it deserves don't feel too bad, about 95% of farms are in the same situation. If you are a little behind, let's talk a little about your "fall cleaning" plans.

Patching

Where are you with patching your current SharePoint 2010 farm? You don't know do you? That isn't a good sign. Luckily Todd has a great post that helps you find your build number and then tells you what that number means. Now, when you look at Todd's list you don't necessarily need to be on the latest and greatest; technically as long as you are at RTM then upgrading to 2013 is supported. Let's be honest though, you shouldn't be running RTM. You should be at service pack 1(SP1) at a minimum. There are 100's of fixes between RTM and SP1 so if you are not there then get a plan together to get there. What about all of those cumulative updates (CU) after SP1? Good question. As a rule of thumb you shouldn't apply a CU unless you have a specific problem and you can point to the CU that fixes it. CUs are not tested like service packs and can introduce a lot of risk. With that in mind be sure to read Todd's note on each Cumulative Update carefully to get an idea of what features they may fix or add. Another important point to remember, there is no way to uninstall a SharePoint CU or SP once you start installing it, so practice on a test farm first and then plan for the worst.

Purging

When was the last time you deleted old content out of SharePoint? No, not your field guide to the battle of Lexington and Concord, but all of those SharePoint sites that nobody uses. There have been studies that show up to 50% of collaboration sites that get created are never used. Even if you are 50% better than the average company, did you delete the 25% that aren't in use? Probably not. This is a great way to get ready for your upgrade. Everything about less content is a win when it comes to doing an upgrade. Nothing is worse than troubleshooting upgrade errors for content that you just end up deleting.

Preparing

Since SharePoint 2013 isn't RTM yet hardware specifics are still a little up in the air, but it is still obvious there will be changes. For example, are you using the Office Web Applications in SharePoint 2010? In 2010 Office Web Apps are required to be installed on a SharePoint server. In 2013 it is required that they not be installed on a SharePoint server. With that one change you have already added at least one server to your farm. What about the operating system and SQL? Windows Server 2008 (not R2) and SQL 2005 or 2008 were supported. Not with SharePoint 2013. Digging into the hardware and software requirements document provided by Microsoft will give you the information you will need to start planning you infrastructure to support SharePoint.

There is a lot more you could do to get prepared, but let's not get carried away. Your server room has smoke detectors, so one lantern by land or two by water might be overkill. If you can get through patching, purging, and preparing then you should be in good shape.

Shane Young – Rackspace Hosting

After SharePoint 2010 database attach upgrade alerts have the wrong URLs

Shane — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:47:21 GMT

Database attach upgrades seem to be the norm these days for customers upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. I am assuming the reason for this is because they are very flexible and generally work pretty well. One of the flexible things about these type of upgrades is you can change your web application URL. Some customers are going from short URL to fully qualified (FQDN) like http://portal to http://portal.company.com. And some of our customers are making complete changes going from http://sharepoint.company.com to http://intranet.company.com. The nice thing about making these types of changes is for the most part a content database has no concept of the web application URL. If you go hunting through the database (which you should never do) you will see everything is relative. The site collections know their urls as / or /sites/sitecollection. That way changing the URL doesn't matter.

But then there are alerts. Alerts are hard coded to the web application URL that was used to create the alert. This is why if you have multiple URLs for you SharePoint site your alerts may be inconsistent. If your portal is setup so you can access it as http://portal or http://portal.contoso.com then whichever of those URLs you are browsing the site with when you click create alert will be the URL SharePoint sends out in the alerts. Kind of annoying for some people but it is what it is. The real problem comes if you switch URLs.

If you change your web applications URL (maybe during an upgrade but not necessarily) everything will continue to work great except for existing alerts. When you have an alert sent to you it will still have that original URL you used to create the alert even if that is no longer a valid URL. Boo!

Now if you do a Bing search of the internet you will find lots of people point to this TechNet resource http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508847.aspx which will prompt you to create a Windows PowerShell script to fix alerts. One small problem. The script only works to update the URL of alerts for the root site collection. In their script they confuse the web application URL and the site collection URL. To be fair I don't blame them. When you look at the configuration objects you will see it wants siteUrl and we have been taught that usually inside of SharePoint site = site collection. Unfortunately in this case siteUrl actual means web application URL.

In the beginning when we used their script to update http://portal/sites/old to http://portal/sites/new our alerts had the link as http://portal/sites/new/sites/new/list which has /sites/new twice.

So then I decided to look at things on my own. I created a new alert through the GUI and then used the following script:

Get-SPweb -site http://portal/sites/new -limit all | ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{write-host $_.user $_.properties["siteUrl"] $_.properties["dispformurl"]}}

This gave me a list of all the alerts for the site collection http://portal/sites/new and I saw the value for siteUrl was http://portal. Hooray!

So then I used this script to update just the alerts in that site collection:

Get-SPweb -site http://portal/sites/new -limit all |ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{$_.properties["siteUrl"] = "http://portal/sites/new";$_.update()}}

Success! But seemed silly to just fix the one site collection so then I wrote a better script that updates the entire web application:

get-spsite -limit all -WebApplication http://portal | get-spweb -limit all |ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{$_.properties["siteUrl"] = "http://portal";$_.update()}}

Now if you compare my script to theirs you will notice I don't bother with mobileUrl because no one I know uses it. Also, they rewrite some other properties. If you want to do the same you can piece together the two scripts to do it but for right now for my customers this is working.

Hope this helps

Shane

SharePoint Consulting and now SharePoint Training

SharePoint 2010 database attach upgrade with managed paths

Shane — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:00:52 GMT

This week I found a new to me issue with doing a database attach upgrade from 2007 to 2010. It seems if your 2007 content database has additional wildcard managed paths (anything other than /sites) that when you upgrade that database to SharePoint 2010 that you will end up with a bunch of explicit managed paths in SharePoint 2010. Kind of break downs like this:

2007 Wildcard managed paths:

/sites
/departments
/projects

2007 site collections in the content database:

/
/sites/teamsite
/departments/hr
/departments/accounting
/projects/CowMachine
/projects/CowNinja

When you create a new 2010 web application and attach the content database you will get the following managed paths:

/sites - wildcard
/departments/hr - explicit
/departments/accounting - explicit
/projects/CowMachine - explicit
/projects/CowNinja - explicit

And of course all of your site collections will be available.

As you can quickly tell this is way less than ideal. For one when you try to create a new site collection for the Cow Black Ops project you will not be able to create it at /projects/BlackOpsCows because there is no longer a managed path for /projects. Boo! So how do you fix it? About time you asked.

Create managed paths before attaching 2007 content databases

The fix here is quite simple. Know your managed paths you need before you do your upgrade. Then right after you create the 2010 web application and before you do the mount-spcontentdatabase you need to go into Central Admin > Web Application management, click your web application and then from the ribbon select managed paths. Now create your wildcard manage paths. In this example you create /departments and /projects. Now return to your regularly scheduled program and do your 2007 content database upgrade.

If you already find yourself with this issue the fix is as simple as you are assuming. Go into central admin > manage content databases and remove your upgraded databases. Once they are detached go delete all of the explicit managed paths for your database. Then create the wild card paths you want. Now reattach your content database. All better. J

Hope this helps

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

A New Upgrade Paper

Shane — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 03:59:16 GMT

This past week a new whitepaper was released on how to deal with upgrades of customizations. I was part of this paper from birth so it is kind of cool to see it make it to MSDN. Anyway, another nice resource for dealing with upgrades.

Part 1 -http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb954662.aspx

Part 2 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb954661.aspx

Shane – SharePoint Help

SharePoint MVP Book is here!

Shane — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:16:00 GMT

I just got my box full of copies. Too exciting.

For those of you not in the know 16 of your favorite SharePoint MVPS got together to do a book all about real world experiences with MOSS. Each one of us wrote our own chapter completely from our point of view. Makes for a very unique book with lots of great information. I recommend everyone buys ten copies. Just for some perspective on how different of a book it is: My chapter starts out with

"It was a dark and stormy night. I had just talked myself into sitting down long enough to take screenshots for my next blog posting when my phone rang. The call was from…"

I am sure it comes as a great shock to most of you but my chapter is actually on upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. Lots of the lessons learned from my Upgrade Class are reflected in the book. Anyway, I need to quit writing this and start reading the other chapters. Should be exciting, maybe not as exciting as Harry Potter was but pretty close. And whatever you do don't tell my English Teacher from High School. She would never believe you that someone let me be part of a book.

Shane – SharePoint Help

My TechEd Sessions With Downloads

Shane — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:21:58 GMT

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to speak at a few different events and conferences. Cincinnati and New York user groups, SharePoint Advisor, and the SharePoint Information Worker Conference are the ones I can think of. As a consultant you get to talk to tables full of people sharing your knowledge and of course being a trainer I get to talk to small groups almost weekly. So you would think speaking at another event wouldn't be all that exciting. Yeah right! Speaking at TechEd was awesome. I think the largest session had 400 people or so. I would like to tell you that I was really nervous and I had to picture everyone naked but it wasn't like that at all.

Joel Oleson and I decided to combine all of our sessions and co-present them. You can read his report here where Dustin is the hero but I am the Hiro. Anyway, it was totally cool. I don't know if you know either one of us but we are total goof balls and that is exactly how we presented. We had lots of fun. I am pretty sure we are the first ones ever to work a Paris Hilton joke into a 400 level session. But anyway. So quickly I will do a rundown of all of our sessions and provide a link to a pdf version of the slides.

OFC304 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Upgrade and Migration Yeah, we had some technical issues with this one but it still managed to be rated as a top 10 session for the day and number 5 in the Office track overall. Not bad for my first TechEd presentation. If you are into upgrades this session was worth the price of TechEd admission alone. (Ok, not really but it was cool) Joel and I brought out some details of the upgrade process not spoken aloud anywhere else. And we had the guts to demo a gradual upgrade in real time. We are also working on an upgrade white paper that will finally bring together all of this content together in one place. Hooray! Don't forget to check out the SharePoint Upgrade site.

OFC207 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance Ok so I didn't present this session but I did sit in the audience and heckle. ;) Good stuff came up in this session. Governance and Information Architecture has been considered a voodoo black art in the SharePoint space for a long time. Well not anymore. Joel and his co-presenter Jennifer Hefner did a great job of exposing some best practices and new tools to help you out. Check out the Governance Codeplex site for a site recovery tool and a site lifecycle management tool. Fun stuff. And if you need help managing the creation of sites check out the Site Provisioning Assistant from SharePoint Solutions.

OFC222 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Administrative Architecture and Planning for Deployment, Part 1 This is a session the has been presented at SharePoint products for a while now. So instead of spitting out the same stuff again Joel and I decided to tweak the presentation and get some new info into it. I think it turned out well. The value though was the real world spin that we put out there on these topics.

OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Deployment & Advanced Administration Topics, Part 2 Admin goes 400 level? Yikes! I think this presentation was rewritten 3 or 4 times up until an hour before we gave it. We really struggled to try and make this thing live up to its billing. Especially since a couple hundred people followed us the half mile between the 2 sessions. Talk about poor planning our Part 1 and 2 were scheduled back to back. Which was perfect except one was in the North end of the building the other in the South. Ouch! We were huffing and puffing to make the trek. Anyway, some more new stuff in the slides. Worth a download and read. :)

It was really cool meeting everyone and speaking was awesome. Now I just need to get on the list to speak at one of the international Tech Eds. I here Barcelona and Australia are very cool.

Shane SharePoint Help