It is Important to know how many Web Applications you have within your farm as having too many can impact the success of your migration.
Microsoft has implemented certain restrictions and limits for the setup of your SharePoint environment and failure to adhere to them can impact a migration. It is vital that you are aware of the relevant limitations and know whether your environment exceeds these criteria before you begin a migration to the latest version of SharePoint. Exceeding any limits could result in a lengthy or potentially even a failed migration.
Web applications are the highest architectural tier where restrictions may begin to affect your migration. Microsoft supports a maximum of 20 web applications per farm. As a result, Microsoft recommends that you restrict the number of web applications to this number and focus on creating additional host name site collections when differentiating between sites. If your SharePoint setup exceeds this supported amount, then you may run into trouble once you migrate your environment over to the latest version of SharePoint. One workaround for this is to create additional host named site collections where possible instead of adding web applications.
The sizes of your Content Databases can have a big impact on your migration to a new SharePoint On-Premises environment.
Your content databases are the hearth and home of your site content in SharePoint. Just like with real homes, having too many makes management difficult. In that same vein, having too much stuff in any one of your homes makes living and functioning in it on a day-to-day basis virtually impossible. Now factor in the prospect of moving all that stuff – the more you have, the harder it is to move, and the longer it will take.
Therefore, the home of your site content within SharePoint has certain supported limits. These limits are placed on the number of content databases you can have within a farm, as well as the size of your content databases.
Microsoft has set a cap of 500 content databases per farm. When you get close to the 500 mark, end users can still enjoy a problem-free experience, opening sites or site collections, the experience for administrators is a different story. When you’re at the 500 content database mark, administrators will start having a hard time creating new site collections. Having this many content databases can make migrating to a new environment a lengthy process, and you may be storing, and therefore moving, content that you no longer need.
There are limits placed on the size of each individual database as well. For general usage scenarios, no single database should exceed 200GB. This limit also applies if you’re using Remote BLOB Storage. If a single database does exceed that amount then chances are you have content in there that you may not need, or perhaps your content would be easier to access if it was dispersed among various content databases. All of these factors are important and should be taken into consideration before migrating your content. If you have content that is unnecessary making your content databases too large in size, or too many content databases within a farm, then your migration may be a slow one and your new environment will not be at optimal functionality.
For information on content database sizes in various usage scenarios see this Microsoft post.
If you’re struggling with the size of your content databases, then Metalogix Content Matrix is the ideal solution. By using Content Matrix you can quickly and efficiently decrease the size of the content databases by moving a site collection from a database that is almost at capacity to a new one. This way any databases that are reaching the size restriction of 200GB can be minimized for optimal usage.
Metalogix StoragePoint can also aid you in prepping your environment for a migration. By using StoragePoint you can increase the performance of SharePoint by using external BLOB storage. This in turn will cut down a 200GB, or greater, database down significantly. After this externalization is completed, your environment will now meet the limits set by Microsoft, allowing you to migrate your environment in a way that ensures optimal performance.
Metalogix ControlPoint can help you ensure that you’re alerted long before content databases get to 200GB. Click here for more about Metalogix ControlPoint.
Site collections are pretty easy to understand – they are collections of SharePoint sites that share common administration pages and site settings. Having site collections is convenient, since you can set them up to share content types, site columns, templates, and Web Parts, all within a single group of SharePoint sites.
However, having too many can have adverse effects on the success of your SharePoint deployment, and therefore any potential SharePoint migration you may be planning. For this reason Microsoft has limits set for the number of site collections you can have per farm, and the size that each site collection can be.
Microsoft has a supported limit of 750,000 site collections per farm, 500,000 of these can be Personal Sites, and 250,000 can be sites with any other template. All 750,000 can reside on one web application, or can be distributed across multiple web applications. It is important, however, to note that this limit is affected by other factors in your environment.
For instance, various factors will affect the effective number of site collections that can be supported by a given content database. If a farm, for example, has a web application that contains 200 content databases, and each of these content databases contains 1,000 site collections, the total number of site collections in the web application will be 200,000. This number falls within the supported limits. However, if each of the 200 content databases on the web application contains 10,000 site collections, even though this number is within the supported limit for a content database, the total number of site collections within the farm would total 2,000,000. This number exceeds the limit for the number of site collections allowed per web application.
A direct result of too many site collections is a decrease in farm performance, possibly affecting you before you even reach the supported limit of 750,000 site collections per farm. These are important factors to consider, since the current poor performance of your farm, due to too many site collections, will continue to affect you post-migration. This in turn defeats the purpose of migrating in order to improve performance and usability of your SharePoint deployment.
Microsoft has also placed a limit on the individual size of site collections. Since they are housed within content databases, the maximum size of a site collection is limited to the maximum size of their content database. So based on the applicable usage scenario, your site collection can be as large as the content database size limit for that usage scenario. For more information about the different content database usage limits see this Microsoft article.
In general, the limit is set to 100 GB per site collection, for both SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online environments. This is because certain site collection actions, such as backup and restore, cause large SQL Server operations to have performance issues, or to fail, if other site collections are active within the same database. Furthermore, site collection backup and restore are only supported for a maximum site collection size of 100 GB.
Site collections larger than 100 GB are therefore at risk of taking a long time or even failing during backup and restore. Again, this factor affects the performance of your SharePoint environment and could undermine the purpose of migrating to a newer, more effective, version of SharePoint.
Metalogix Content Matrix can aid in the organization, or reorganization, of your site collections. By moving site collections around, you can ensure that no one content database exceeds the number of allotted site collections per database, or that any one farm exceeds the 750,000 site collection limit per farm. Once you know where your environment stands with regards to these limits, Content Matrix can help you ensure that you have met all requirements before you begin a migration. This way, your new SharePoint environment will work at an optimal rate.
See here for more information about Content Matrix. Once you have completed your migration, you can ensure that you are warned long before your site collections get to 100GB by using Metalogix ControlPoint.
SharePoint sites and subsites are a place for collaboration, communication, or content storage. They are a great tool that can be an ideal method of storing content as well as presenting it to your internal and external users. However, SharePoint users must be sure to thoroughly understand the limits that are presented with owning sites and subsites. Too many sites within a site collection, or too many subsites within a site, can affect the functionality of your overall SharePoint deployment. This negative impact can in turn be carried over with your migration.
Microsoft has a recommended limit of a maximum of 250,000 sites per site collection. This means that you can create a very large total number of web sites by nesting subsites within your sites. However, there is also a limit applied to the number of subsites that you can have per site view. The recommended limit is 2,000 subsites per site view – if you surpass this number the web site will no longer perform properly. Both are factors to consider for the optimal functionality of your SharePoint deployment, as well as the health of your new environment post-migration.
Even with these limits placed on the number of sites and subsites that your site collections can have, you can still organize your content in a way that suits you and works within the Microsoft limits. For instance, you can create a shallow site hierarchy with 100 sites, each with 1,000 subsites, totalling 100,000 web sites. Or you can create a deep hierarchy with 100 sites; each with 10 subsite levels, also containing a total of 100,000 web sites. Working within these limits is vital for optimal performance, and with various site and subsite configurations, working within the limits is easy and even practical.
Furthermore, there are different limits placed on sites within SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. The restriction for a SharePoint Online environments limits the number of sites per site collection to 2,000 sites. This means that migrating from a regular SharePoint environment to a SharePoint Online environment, for example, could be more complex than a simple migration. In this scenario it would be important to know the number of sites you contain within your environment in order to better organize and manage your migration, ensuring that the limits of your new SharePoint environment are met.
There is a solution that will help you adhere to these limitations, Metalogix Content Matrix. With Content Matrix you can move and reorganize the current location of your web sites and subsites. This ensures that any site collections that are coming close to their site limit, whether the SharePoint On-Premises limit or the SharePoint online limit, can be reorganized to reduce numbers. By rearranging the placement of your sites and subsites you can adhere to Microsoft’s outlined limits, thereby guaranteeing the successful deployment, migration, and performance of you SharePoint environment.
You can also use the Metalogix ControlPoint solution to create alerts regarding these limits pre or post-migration.
SharePoint was essentially created as a hub in which to store and share content. Think of it as a storage locker, a space to put all of your goodies. Now imagine how you would fill that locker – the larger the individual items you store, the smaller the total number of items that would reasonably fit. With smaller, compact, items you could fit double, if not triple the number, comfortably utilizing all that space. The same concept applies to your SharePoint environment; the availability of such a useful storage tool comes with limitations, designed to preserve the functionality of your environment.
So if your SharePoint environment is the equivalent of a storage locker, then files are the possessions you store inside that locker. With large items stashed inside your locker, not only do less items fit in total but navigating through those items become a pain – using your locker becomes difficult. The same concept applies to the files you store within your SharePoint libraries.
A file is considered a large file when it exceeds 250MB. The greater the amount of large files you have in your farm, the greater your farm performance is negatively affected. Even though this limit can be increased within SharePoint to a maximum of 2GB, it is important to consider that if a file exceeding 250MB is already a large file, then files at 2GB will take up even more space, decreasing farm performance further.
It is important to know how many large files your SharePoint environment is holding. In knowing this you can ratify the situation, decreasing the number of large files and optimizing the functionality of your SharePoint farms. It is particularly important to consider this factor before implementing a mass migration, as there may be files you no longer need that are simply taking up space and slowing down the continuity of your SharePoint operations. This, in turn, is an issue that you will invariably end up carrying over to your newly migrated environment.
Metalogix Content Matrix can help you by allowing you to reorganize the location of your large files. If too many large files per farm are the problem, then Content Matrix helps by allowing you to move some of those large files to areas where there is still room remaining for them. This allows you to stay within the Microsoft limits, enhancing the performance of your farm and its subsequently migrated version.
Metalogix StoragePoint can also help you by reducing the size of files with external BLOB storage. By externalizing the content of the large files, you still have access to them, without pushing the Microsoft limit on size. This furthers the usability of your SharePoint environment, and aids in the migration of content that is already within the pre-set limits.
Metalogix ControlPoint allows you to create alerts for large file sizes, or to limit the size of files that can be uploaded across your SharePoint farms. It also has additional flexibility for reporting allowing you to specify what you define as a large file.
SharePoint truly is an ideal way in which to collaborate with co-workers. From shared calendars, to collaboration on documents and projects, to approval workflows, it provides users with a workspace in which they can efficiently perform their work tasks. One of these convenient features is the ability to check out files, allowing end users to alter them without interruption from their fellow employees.
However, with checked out files comes a caveat – if the file has not been checked back in, then SharePoint may not have an up-to-date version of that document. This prevents other end users from seeing the latest version, as the document must be checked back in for the latest changes to be uploaded. This is a factor that would affect the overall success of a migration.
It’s important to know how many files you have checked out, and which files they are in particular, prior to a migration. By ensuring that all files have been checked back in, you ensure that your SharePoint environment has an updated version of all documents. This then allows for a migration of only the latest content.
Sites within SharePoint are an easy way to divide up and organize content. However, with this convenience sometimes comes an overuse. Sites and subsites become created for minute organizational purposes and then are often forgotten. An environment with over 10,000 sites, for instance, may have sites and subsites that haven’t been looked at, used, or modified in a significant period of time.
For instance, your environment may have sites or subsites that were created 3 years ago for the purpose of a specific team project. It was the ideal solution at the time, allowing the team to organize and coordinate on the project while it was relevant, but now that the project has been completed, and the site has not been used since, it no longer has that same relevance. Having too many unused sites therefore only takes up valuable space; a lack of such space will affect the performance of your environment. Furthermore, migrating sites that are no longer relevant or useful will only needlessly add to your migration time.
The question you must ask yourself is whether you truly want to bother migrating a site that has not been modified in a long period of time. This Migration Expert report, therefore, provides you with the opportunity to notice sites that have not been modified over a long period of time, or that have not been modified at all, and gives you the opportunity to clean up your environment pre-migration.
Since the Out of the Box (OTB) SharePoint Upgrade is at the Content Database level, least used subsites will also be upgraded when using an OTB upgrade. Using Content Matrix, you can select what you’d like to migrate, and what you’d like to leave behind at level as granular as individual files that you can leave behind.
Lists that have multiple views and a large number of columns tend to have
poor performance as they surpass 2000 items, and towards the Microsoft List
View Threshold of 5000 items. The more metadata/columns these lists have,
the more they will impact performance. It is important to know if you’re
reaching this limit so that you can split large lists with List Views into
multiple lists or use Search Based Lists instead. Note that Microsoft does not
provide separate List View Threshold guidance for Office 365.
The more
metadata/columns these lists have, the more they will impact performance. It
is important to know if you’re reaching this limit so that you can split
large lists with List Views into multiple lists, narrow down the list filters
to return fewer results, or use Search Based Lists instead.
Creating a
Search Based list involves creating a custom search results page that looks
like a list, but is in fact a search results page. A difference results page
would be needed for each list view.
Splitting lists with Out of the Box
(OTB) SharePoint requires multiple steps:
This is an extremely time consuming process.
Splitting lists using Content Matrix, involves
multiple quick Copy/Paste operations. In each case, you would:
An example of splitting a large list that has financial content with a field called ‘Fiscal Year’, is that follow the above steps and filter only items with a Fiscal Year value of the last 3 years into the new list. Then repeat the process for the previous 3 fiscal years, and so on.
Custom Master Pages, and their associated page layouts, cannot simply be migrated over from SharePoint 2007 or 2010 to the latest version of SharePoint. While the formatting of Master Pages is similar between these versions, it is not the same, and Master Pages written for one version do not work in any of the other versions. It is vital to know how many custom master pages you have and what they are, before migration, so that you know which of these you either have to discard, or rebuild to work with the latest version of SharePoint on-premises or Online/Office 365. Once these pages have been rebuilt, you can easily migrate the content directly from the old version of the page to the new version using both the OTB Upgrade and 3rd party migration tools such as Content Matrix.
Our experience in working with thousands of organizations and systems integrators who have successfully migrated to new versions of SharePoint, has taught us that the development and implementation of Master Pages and Page Layouts is an area that is often misunderstood by IT managers.
Metalogix recommends working with SharePoint UI implementation experts to implement new versions of Master Pages and Page Layouts, and not assigning this task to SharePoint developers, who specialize in a completely different skillset (Visual Studio development vs. HTML and XML) and toolsets (Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer respectively).
In addition, Metalogix recommends working with graphic designers to create the look and feel of the Master Pages (usually using Adobe Photoshop or similar tools), and have the content generated by those tools given to the SharePoint UI implementation experts. Most SharePoint UI experts are not graphic designers, and won’t necessarily create good designs even if they know how to implement designs created by others. Similarly, most graphic designers know how to design beautiful web pages, but are not familiar with UI implementation in SharePoint.
Custom Site Definitions are site definitions that did not come out of the box with your version of SharePoint and were either created by your SharePoint Admin to solve a specific business problem, or installed through a 3rd party solution. Custom Site Definitions are most frequently variations in layout of existing site definitions, with additional Out-of-The-Box (OTB) web parts added by default to a location on the site. In these cases, the best option for migrating sites using these site definitions, and are being used by your users, is to create an equivalent site definition for the latest version of SharePoint, and installing it in your target SharePoint farm prior to migrating the sites involved.
In cases where Custom Site Definitions contain custom Master Pages and Page Layouts, and/or Custom Web Parts, creating these definitions in the latest version of SharePoint will involve the same issues raised in Migration Expert’s reports on these customizations, and these cannot be migrated to Office 365.
Since every new version of SharePoint usually includes new Site Definitions, it may be worth investigating if any of the new Site Definitions meet your needs, and migrating sites to sites based on these new definitions. This is only possible with 3rd party migration products.
This report notifies you of the number of employee specific sites your environment contains. It is important to know this number for two reasons:
MySite adoption requires a significant internal marketing push on the advantages of being able to find experts within your organization, and in the case of SkyDrive Pro, recently renamed to OneDrive for Business, the benefits of enabling cross company collaboration for specific documents that are approved for sharing.
Metalogix recommends using the migration as a time to not only improve on your SharePoint implementation, but also as an opportunity to do a large internal marketing launch or re-launch of your SharePoint site, with executive buy in and support. Our experience has been that this can have as much impact on adoption as some of the more technical aspects of SharePoint implementation such as having a good information architecture.
Microsoft has a supported limit of 750,000 site collections per farm for on-premises SharePoint. 500,000 of these can be Personal Sites / My Sites, and 250,000 can be sites with any other template. All 750,000 can reside on one web application, or can be distributed across multiple web applications. It is important, however, to note that this limit is affected by other factors in your environment. For SharePoint Online on Office 365, this number is only 3000 non-personal Site Collections. It is important to identify how many Site Collections you have so that you can determine if you need to reorganize some of them, or leave some Site Collections on-premises.
For on-premises installations, there are variations in the number of Site Collections based on their relationship with Content Databases. If for example, a farm has a web application that contains 200 content databases, and each of these content databases contains 1,000 site collections, the total number of site collections in the web application will be 200,000. This number falls within the supported limits. However, if each of the 200 content databases on the web application contains 10,000 site collections, even though this number is within the supported limit for a content database, the total number of site collections within the farm would total 2,000,000. This number exceeds the limit for the number of site collections allowed per web application.
A direct result of too many site collections is a decrease in farm performance, possibly affecting you before you even reach the supported limit of 750,000 site collections per farm. These are important factors to consider, since the current poor performance of your farm, due to too many site collections, will continue to affect you post-migration. This in turn defeats the purpose of migrating in order to improve performance and usability of your SharePoint deployment.
Custom web part pages are pages with a custom layout of web parts that was not available Out of the Box. These custom layouts were typically created either in Visual Studio, or using SharePoint Designer, and do not migrate well to new versions of SharePoint; as a result you must recreate them in your new SharePoint environment, prior to migrating. If the web parts on these pages are OTB web parts, then once the page has been recreated, the migration will work smoothly.
Some site definitions such as the ‘Meeting Workspace’ and ‘Document Workspace’, have effectively been discontinued by Microsoft and are no longer available in the newest version of SharePoint. As a result, if you are using any of these site definitions in sites on your current farm, you will have to choose an alternative site definition that has as much of the layout, that the deprecated site definition had, as possible as a target site to migrate to in the newest version of SharePoint. These sites can be migrated, but may have to be modified from within SharePoint after the migration, in order to return them to the same layout and functionality as the original Site Definition. For a full list of discontinued features, see Microsoft’s page about this on office.microsoft.com.
Custom HTML tags, such as <script>, <style> or <ms-style> tags, are typically added inside WebParts that are located within SharePoint pages. These custom content tags may have different requirements in your current environment than the environment to which you are migrating, and can therefore, interfere with the functionality of the page’s CSS after migration. As a result it is important to know how many pages have custom content tags, and what they are, before migration, giving you the opportunity to modify the WebParts accordingly, ensuring the flawless functionality of your newly migrated SharePoint on-premises or Online Office 365 environment.
There are certain Subsite Features which have been discontinued by Microsoft, and are therefore not available on the latest version of SharePoint on-premises and/or Office 365. As such, features such as ‘UpgradeOnlyFile’ and ‘WorkflowAppOnlyPolicyManager’, which are available in your current environment, may not be available on the target environment which you will be migrating your content to, thereby interfering with your migration. As a result, it is imperative to know which, if any, of Microsoft’s discontinued subsite features are activated on your current Farm, so that you can plan accordingly prior to migrating your content.
Orphaned items are items which were created or modified by a user that no longer exists in your Active Directory. These items do not migrate well to new versions of SharePoint, and it is therefore important for users to be aware of orphaned items prior to a migration.
It is important to identify all Sites and Site Collections that use the publishing feature before performing a migration. The primary reason is that site collections do not have the publishing feature available, so if users choose to promote a site, which uses the publishing feature, to a site collection during migration, then the feature will not work on the target Farm. If users try to amend the issue by automatically turning on publishing for site collections in the latest version of SharePoint on-premises and/or Office 365, then all of the site’s navigations automatically convert to be MMD based. This is a change that most Site Collection owners are not typically prepared for, only further confusing and delaying the migration process. It is therefore vital that users know how many sites and site collections use the publishing feature, prior to beginning a migration.
SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365 impose some limits on the length of URLs. If files and folders exceed this URL limit, then it can cause problems during migration. It is therefore important to know how many Files and Folders exceed the URL limit, so that users can address the issue prior to migration.
The recommended limit in SharePoint for single list views is set to 5,000 items. This threshold can be increased in SharePoint, but it will cost users the performance of their environment – furthermore, this limit is a hard limit for Office 365 environments. Therefore, for both a SharePoint On-Premises, and SharePoint Online migration, it is vital to know the size of your lists, as lists with 5000 or more items will hinder the progress of your migration. Knowing the size of your lists in advance of said migration, will therefore aid users by notifying them of the lists that need to be split prior to migration.
Sites and Site collections with a large amount of content inside their recycling bin can hinder the migration process. As a result, it is important to know how many, and which, sites and site collections have too much content within their bins so that they can be cleaned up prior to migration.
This report will notify users of the number of web applications that contain site collections and/or sites created using non-default language packs. This means that if SharePoint was installed with one language, and then a site or site collection was created using a different language pack, this site will be considered as one with a non-default language pack. It is vital for users to know whether their sites and/or site collections have been created using a non-default language pack, as this can negatively impact migrations. Finally, it is also important for users to know what language packs have been installed on their original SharePoint environment, pre-migration, so that they can install the relevant language packs on their target environments before migration begins.
As a site owner, you can use existing list templates and create custom list templates for your site. Lists can be migrated to another site as long as the target site has a valid list template.
Considerations
Some list templates that are discontinued by Microsoft including custom
lists that are being used in your current site, may not be available in the
target SharePoint site or site collections, which will prevent automated
migration. Before you migrate list to other sites, you may want to verify that
the list templates in the target site are present and valid.
The Solution
This report displays the count of deprecated list templates for each
site or sub-site in your site collection. For each invalid site template
reported, you must choose another list template in the target site that
closely resembles the deprecated list template. The report list columns are as
follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the source site that was analyzed |
List Title | The title of the list in the source site |
Description | The description of the list if present |
List Template Name | The template that was used to create the list |
List Template Id | The unique identifier of the list |
Author | The user name of the person who created the list |
Created Date | The creation date of the list |
Last Modified Date | The date the list was last modified |
Unique Permission | Whether or not the list contains unique security permissions. Values are Yes or No. |
InfoPath Forms Services is a server technology that makes it possible for people to fill out forms in a Web browser. InfoPath Forms are browser-enabled form templates which can be filled out in a web browser without requiring additional add-ons or downloads.
Considerations
It is important for the user to be aware about the InfoPath forms
associated with different libraries on a site level.
The Solution
This report displays the count of unique InfoPath Form templates. The
report list columns are as follows:
Column | Description |
Form Name | Name of the InfoPath form template |
Form URL | Location of the InfoPath form template |
Associated List Title | List or library containing the InfoPath form template |
Site URL | URL of the site where the InfoPath form template is present |
You can create a SharePoint solution package to bundle multiple standard and custom features, site definitions, assemblies, and other files into a single package, which stores the files in a format needed by SharePoint to deploy the files to the server.
Considerations
If the SharePoint solution package and its dependencies are not deployed
on the target environment, the custom features may not be available to the
user who migrates to the upgraded environment. The SharePoint administrator
should be aware of such features that are activated on their sites or site
collections.
The Solution
The Custom features report indicates the number of custom features that
are activated on your current farm or site collection, so that you can plan to
migrate your content. As part of the planning process, you can configure the
feature manifest so that the target SharePoint server activates certain
baseline features before your custom feature is deployed and activated.
The report detail displays a list of site URLs and scope where the feature is deployed. The number of rows in the list may not be the same as the feature count that is displayed because the feature count displays the number of unique features in the current environment, and the list displays every instance of the feature in the environment. The report list columns are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the source site that was analyzed |
Feature GUID | Globally unique identifier of the feature |
Scope | SharePoint area where the feature is deployed. SharePoint features can be scoped to Site Collection and Web Site level. |
There are certain types of files that you cannot upload to a SharePoint list or a library. By default, SharePoint blocks these file types. For example, if .asp is on the list of blocked file extensions, a file called "newpage.asp" is blocked. Variations of a file extension are also blocked if the extension is present in the filename.
Considerations
The list of files that is blocked for SharePoint 2016 on-premise is
different than previous on-premise versions of SharePoint. There are no
blocked files in SharePoint Online and Office 365. Before migration, you
should be aware of the blocked extension files present in the source site,
collection or farm, so that you can plan your migration accordingly.
The Solution
Column | Description |
File Name | Name of the blocked file |
File URL | Location of the file |
List Title | List or library containing the blocked file |
File Size | Size of the blocked file |
Site URL | URL of the site where the file is present |
Alerts are notifications of changes to content on a site that SharePoint users receive as e-mail messages or text messages to their mobile phone, depending on how your site is configured. Alerts are great way to keep track of additions or changes to content that users make on your SharePoint objects. Site owners may want to subscribe multiple users to an alert to make sure they get important updates, as well as encourage them to contribute to a discussion board, blog, or wiki.
Considerations
When you plan your migration, it is very helpful to know how many alerts
are configured and which users are assigned to them before migrating the
alerts to the target SharePoint environment. After migration, users can keep
receiving alerts which results in a seamless transition to the new
environment.
The Solution
This report displays the number of users who have subscribed to one or
more alerts in your source site or site collection. The report detail lists
every alert configured for each user. The report columns are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the source site that was analyzed |
Alert Username | User ID of the person who has subscribed to the alert |
Alert Name | Title of the alert as displayed in the user interface. |
Alert Type | The type of object to which the alert applies, which can be a list or document library, a list item or document, or a custom object. |
Associated Object URL |
URL of the object that is linked to this alert |
A sandboxed solution is a packaged set of SharePoint functionality that runs in a secure, monitored process with a limited access to resources within the site collection in which they are deployed.
Considerations
Migration planning must take into consideration the sandboxed solutions
deployed across site collections in a farm, so that administrators can analyze
the constituent features, and manage these solutions in the target
environment.
The Solution
This report displays the number of sandboxed solutions and lists
information about each sandboxed solution. The columns in the list are as
follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the source site that was analyzed |
Solution Name | Name of the sandboxed solution |
Status | Whether or not the sandboxed solution is active. Values are Activated or Deactivated. |
Alerts are notifications of changes to content on a site that SharePoint users receive as e-mail messages or text messages to their mobile phone, depending on how your site is configured. For a particular site or site collection, alerts are great way to keep track of additions or changes to content that users make on your SharePoint objects for your site or site collection.
Considerations
When you plan your migration, it is very helpful to know how many alerts
are configured and which users are assigned to them before migrating the
alerts to the target SharePoint environment. After migration, users can keep
receiving alerts which results in a seamless transition to the new
environment.
The Solution
This report displays the number of source sites that have one or more
alerts. The report detail lists every alert configured for each site. The
report columns are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the source site that was analyzed |
Alert Username | User ID of the person who has subscribed to the alert |
Alert Name | Title of the alert as displayed in the user interface. |
Alert Type | The type of object to which the alert applies, which can be a list or document library, a list item or document, or a custom object. |
Associated Object URL | URL of the object that is linked to this alert |
SharePoint on premise allowed content to be sent to an email address and immediately imported into a SharePoint library. This feature has been removed from SharePoint Online in favor of Site Mailboxes.
Considerations
It is important to know where these content libraries are configured for
accepting email, as alternative methods should be utilized with SharePoint
Online.
The Solution
This report displays the count of email enabled lists and the set of
locations and names of the lists. The columns in the set are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | URL of the web site hosting the email enabled list. |
List Title | Title of the email enabled lists. |
On-premises Business Connectivity Service Applications facilitate complex integration solutions to access data from external data systems such as ERP and CRM, in addition to other data-driven applications that are exposed through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services or Open Data (OData) endpoints.
Considerations
SharePoint BCS applications are not migrated to the target environment.
The integrations must be recreated in the SharePoint Online environment, so it
is important to understand ahead of time where the implementation of this
service application lives in the source environment.
The Solution
This report displays the count of BCS definitions in your environment,
and lists the key properties of the BCS definitions. The columns in the list
are as follows:
Column | Description |
Name | Name of the BCS definition. |
Description | Description of the BCS definition. |
Namespace | URL that represents the BCS definition. |
Version | Version number of the BCS definition. |
LOB System Type | The type of item returned. Possible values are WFC or Database. |
LOB Entities | Entities included in the definition. |
LOB Name | Name of the LOB. |
Profile property mappings enable SharePoint to exchange profile property values with data sources outside of SharePoint. For example, you could map a profile property to an attribute in Business Data Catalog for use with certain SharePoint features like Audiences.
Considerations
SharePoint Online uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) to populate the
SharePoint profile values, and AAD does not support extending the schema and
configuring additional profile property mappings. As a result, the custom
properties do not automatically migrate to the User Profile Service in
SharePoint Online. Depending on the needs of the organization, the custom
properties may require regeneration in the Admin portal of SharePoint Online.
The Solution
This report displays the count of profile property mappings, and a list
of profile property mappings that will not be included in the target
environment. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Connection Name | Name of the connection. |
Connection Type | The type of directory service that this is a connection to. For example, Business Data Catalog or Active Directory Logon. |
Property Name | The technical name of the property that will be used by the user profile service. |
Property Display Name | The human readable name of the property. |
Property Mapping | The name of the attribute that is being mapped. |
Direction | The mapping direction. Possible values are: |
Property Length | Maximum length of the property value. |
Property Usage | Number of user profiles currently containing values for this property. |
Microsoft InfoPath is a software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data from within the context of SharePoint. Though the standalone application has been discontinued, InfoPath Forms Services are included in the on-premises release of SharePoint Server 2016, as well as being fully supported in Office 365.
Considerations
These forms can contain styles that are difficult to migrate or cannot
be migrated. It is important to investigate whether the InfoPath forms used in
the on premise environment contains custom code, references to external
connections, or are admin-approved templates that could create problems when
migrating to SharePoint Online.
The Solution
This report displays the count of Microsoft InfoPath forms and a list of
the forms found in the SharePoint environment. The columns in the list are as
follows:
Column | Description |
Form Name | Name of the InfoPath form template. |
Form URL | Location of the InfoPath form template. |
Associated List Title | List or library containing the InfoPath form template. |
| Site URL | URL of the site where the InfoPath form template is present. |
Locked Sites in SharePoint are created when a SharePoint Administrator intends to prevent the site content from being increased or modified. A site is usually locked in preparation for a migration to another environment, or to an archival location.
Considerations
In SharePoint on premise environments, a site could be marked as Unlocked,
No Access, or Read-Only. However, the
locking behavior is different in SharePoint Online. The Read-Only
option has been removed from SharePoint Online requiring administrators to
explore new plans about how to manage locked site collections.
The Solution
This report displays the number of locked sites and a list of locked
sites. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | The URL of the locked site. |
A customized Master Page may be used to define the look and feel of all the pages across an entire SharePoint environment, and is usually created to establish the branding or corporate identity.
Considerations
A customized Master Page can cause issues with receiving updates to the
user interface in SharePoint Online. In addition, depending on the source
environment, moving an on premise custom Master Page to SharePoint Online may
not be possible. It is recommended that you plan to manage changes to the
end-user experience after the migration.
The Solution
This report displays the count of customized Master Pages and a list of
customized master Page locations in your SharePoint environment. The columns
in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | URL of the site that contains the non-default master page. |
Custom Master Page URL | Server relative path to the non-default master page. |
Master Page URL | Server relative path to the default master page. |
The Secure Store Service is designed to securely hold data that provides credentials to connect to target applications or external systems, and associate those credentials to a specific identity.
Considerations
This feature exists in SharePoint Online but is traditionally not part
of a standard migration and must be configured separately. This is an
important feature to be aware of as the target applications or external
systems that are referenced, may not be available from SharePoint Online, and
at a minimum will require reconfiguration.
The Solution
This report displays the count of secure store applications and a list
of credentials that are not part of a standard migration. The columns in the
list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Application Id | Secure Store application ID. |
| Name | The name of the Secure Store application. This typically matches the Application ID. |
Friendly Name | Display name for the Secure Store application. |
Contact Email | Contact email address associated with the Secure Store application. |
Credential Management URL | URL associated with managing credentials. This is typically not set by the user, but is provided for informational purposes. |
Ticket Timeout | Ticket timeout associated with the Secure Store application. |
Type | The type of the Secure Store application. Values are Group, GroupWithTicketing, Individual, and RestrictedGroup. |
A web application can contain multiple site collections. A Web Application Policy is a comprehensive set of permissions that apply to all users and groups for all site collections in a web application.
Considerations
In SharePoint Online, a comprehensive Web Application Policy is no
longer available. As a result, the governance controls put in place from a Web
Application Policy perspective must be reevaluated and must be set on every
site collection for a SharePoint Online environment.
The Solution
This report displays the count of Web Application User Policies and a
list of policies that exist for a web application in your SharePoint
environment. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Web Application Name | The name of the source web application. |
| Policy User Name | The login ID of the user or group. |
Policy Display Name | Display Name of the user or group. |
Policy Role Binding | Permission granted to the user or group in the source through a named role. |
SharePoint 2013 introduced the concept of Workflow Manager, allowing for newer-style, advanced SharePoint Designer workflows to be leveraged in SharePoint. These workflow associations can be migrated. However, running instances of workflows present a problem: the instance information cannot be migrated. If you attempt to migrate a running instance, the instance information will be lost.
Considerations
When migrating, it is important to understand where and what these
workflow associations are, in order to determine the continuity of workflows
at the target.
The Solution
This report indicates a list of all the 2013 workflow associations in
the environment along with the count of running instances at the time the
report was generated. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | URL of the web site that the workflow is associated with. |
| List Title | Title of the list the workflow is associated with. |
Workflow Association Name | Name of the workflow association. |
Workflow Name | Name of the workflow. |
Running Instances | Number of workflows actively running at that scope. |
Scope | The level that the workflow is associated with. The possible values are List, ContentType, or Site. |
IsReusable | Identifies which workflows were published as reusable workflows. Values are True or False. |
When migrating to SharePoint Online, the instance of a running workflow cannot be maintained. This means that any workflows that are actively running should be completed or cancelled prior to migration or they must be restarted at the target.
Considerations
Since running workflows will lose their state information, running
workflows will need to be restarted after migration unless they are completed
at the source.
The Solution
This report indicates the count of running workflows (2010 style) and
presents a list of those workflows. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Site URL | URL to the web site where the workflow is running. |
Workflow Name | Name of the workflow. |
List Title | Title of the list associated with the workflow. |
Item URL | URL of the item that is associated to the running workflow. If this is a list item workflow, the URL will point to the list item. If this is a site workflow, the URL will point to the site. |
Scope | The level that the workflow is associated with. The possible values are List, or Site. |
Workflow Initiator | User who started the workflow. |
When migrating to SharePoint Online, the instance of a running workflow cannot be maintained. This means that any workflows that are actively running should be completed or cancelled prior to migration or they must be restarted at the target.
Considerations
Since running workflows will lose their state information, running
workflows will need to be restarted after migration unless they are completed
at the source.
The Solution
This report indicates the count of running workflows (2013 style) and
presents a list of those workflows. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Workflow Name | Name of the workflow. |
Item URL | URL of the item that is associated to the running workflow. If this is a list item workflow, the URL will point to the list item. If this is a site workflow, the URL will point to the site. |
Scope | The level that the workflow is associated with. The possible values are List, or Site. |
Workflow Initiator | User who started the workflow. |
Workflow associations can be migrated. However, running instances of workflows present a problem: the instance information cannot be migrated. If you attempt to migrate a running instance, the instance information will be lost.
Considerations
When migrating, it is important to understand where and what these
workflow associations are, in order to determine the continuity of workflows
at the target.
The Solution
This report indicates a list of all the 2010 workflow associations in
the environment along with the count of running instances at the time the
report was generated. The columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Web URL | URL of the web site that the workflow is associated with. |
| List Title | Title of the list the workflow is associated with. |
Workflow Name | Name of the workflow association. |
Running Instances | Number of workflows actively running at that scope. |
Scope | The level that the workflow is associated with. The possible values are List, ContentType, or Site. |
IsReusable | Identifies which workflows were published as reusable workflows. Values are True or False. |
Reusable Scope | Additional information for the scope of a workflow. Valid values are:
|
Content Type Name | Name of the SharePoint content type, for example, Task. |
SharePoint Add-Ins (formerly SharePoint Apps) are an alternative to Full Trust Code in SharePoint by allowing client-side development with modern browser controls (JavaScript, HTML, etc.).
Considerations
These Add-Ins exist as customizations and will not migrate to SharePoint
Online. These Add-Ins must be reconstructed in the SharePoint Online
environment.
The Solution
This report indicates the list of SharePoint Add-Ins in your environment
that should be reconstructed in your SharePoint Online environment. The
columns in the list are as follows:
Column | Description |
Web URL | URL of the web site hosting the add-in. |
App Title | Title of the add-in. |
App Source | Location from where the application was installed. |
APP ID | ID assigned to the add-in. |
Launch URL | URL used to launch the add-in. If the URL is not associated with your SharePoint environment, then the add-in is a provider-hosted add-in that runs outside of the environment. |
Settings Page URL | URL for the settings page associated with an add-in. |
Page URL | URL to the page that contains the add-in, if the add-in is an app part. |
While content size is not the only factor for migration time and performance, it is certainly a major contributing factor. It’s important to know ahead of time where the largest sites are in the source environment to generate appropriate content reorganization plans and migration timelines.
Browser File Handling is a setting in SharePoint that determines how restrictive SharePoint will be in regards to opening files within the SharePoint browser. These settings cannot be migrated over to SharePoint Online, so it is important to understand where additional levels of restriction have been put in place on the source.
Information Rights Management is an extra level of security that can be implemented on content at the list and library level in SharePoint. These settings need to be setup and configured at the farm level before being enabled at the list and library level. Due to this scope, configuration of Information Rights Management does not migrate to SharePoint Online. By identifying these lists and libraries ahead of time, it can be determined where this implementation will need to occur post-migration.
While Full Trust Code (FTC) Solutions are useful for deploying custom SharePoint controls in on-premises environments, these types of solutions are not available in SharePoint Online. It is important to identify those deployed elements in the SharePoint environment as alternative options will be needed after migration.
Having a significant amount of versions of a file can cause performance concerns in a migration effort. It’s important to plan ahead of time to identify the amount of file versions that are relevant to the needs of the business and validate how many of those versions should be migrated to SharePoint Online. Any files with a large amount of versions should be closely analyzed as part of any migration plan.