Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure Vol 2 part 33 pps

MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning for Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 15-23 Lesson 2 Planning Your Upgrade Planning is critical to a successful upgrade project. You must be methodical in your approach, because you will have to prepare all of the solution design areas, from requirements analysis to support. Prepare by assembling the right team, which should deliver business, technical, and project management skills. The team must then establish the working practices and resources that are necessary for the upgrade to complete successfully. Objectives After completing this lesson, you will be able to: • Describe the upgrade cycle. • List the tasks that are necessary to plan an upgrade. • Describe the importance of business communications in the upgrade process. • Describe the goals of a farm survey. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 15-24 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure • Describe how to use tools to gather information about the current environment. • Describe the steps for cleaning up the current environment. • Describe how to develop an upgrade schedule. • Describe how to use the upgrade planning worksheet. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning for Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 15-25 The Upgrade Cycle Key Points There are five key stages to a successful upgrade. The following sections describe these stages. Learn Ensure that you fully understand—and your plan reflects—upgrade requirements such as 64-bit hardware and software. Use the available tools to preempt issues such as missing dependencies or lack of storage capacity. You should know and evaluate the update options for your farm or farms. This should include development of a plan for the completion of all of the tasks that are necessary for all of the versions of Office SharePoint that you must upgrade. You must also ensure that your plan reflects business requirements such as system downtime. Prepare Your upgrade plan should reflect what you have learned. It must have an exhaustive breakdown of events in chronological order, so that the administrators who implement your plan have all of the correct components in place. This plan should include all prerequisites. It should also include information about how to MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 15-26 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure identify and manage any existing customizations and how to manage individual solutions and items. Always establish a fallback position. An upgrade failure may be beyond your control, such as a hardware or power problem, so you must have a plan for ensuring that your business users can still work in the morning. Test If you are upgrading a business-critical system, you must always pretest your plan; this should be no different for SharePoint 2010 upgrades. If possible, you should build a test environment and test each component of your upgrade. This does, of course, take time. However, attempting to rebuild a business system after a failed upgrade will take longer, and it will cause greater problems for your organization. Use copies of production data and hardware if possible, but you can sample data and virtual machines to do worthwhile upgrade testing. Implement When you have completed your tests and are satisfied with your mitigation plan, you should schedule the upgrade. You should have established how much time the upgrade will take through your test runs, but monitor the progress of your upgrade by viewing the status indicators. This will help you to assess any time differences between your tests and the upgrade exercises. Validate Always validate an upgrade by reviewing logs and testing applications. After a long upgrade, it can be easy to ignore apparently minor errors, but you must check everything thoroughly. As part of your upgrade, you should have experienced users who can test the validity of data to reveal any potential issues. You should also test for user experience (UX) in addition to UI changes. Note that the UX concerns the overall familiarity of your applications, and not just the visual changes in the UI. Your user acceptance testing must ensure that users are happy with any changes to working practices enforced by the upgrade. This will be of particular relevance to users who upgrade from Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or migrate from third-party platforms. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning for Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 15-27 Upgrade Planning Tasks Key Points Planning an upgrade is more complex than planning a new deployment—it has all of the challenges of a fresh deployment and the additional problems of migrating existing business environments to the new platform. This means that in addition to planning to perform all of the installation tasks, you must also plan a complete review of your existing environments. The list of tasks that you should perform when planning an upgrade includes: • Gather business requirements. • Plan business communications. • Undertake farm surveys. • Execute upgrade tools to gather information about the current environment. • Test the upgrade. • Perform environment cleanup. • Build hardware. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 15-28 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure • Perform pre-upgrade backups. • Establish a project schedule. • Test rollback and restore options. • Perform post-upgrade activities. • Establish launch and ongoing support management. Some of these areas, such as testing and business requirements gathering, are covered elsewhere in this or other modules in this course and are not duplicated here. Others may be specific to your organization and will not be covered in any detail, such as backups. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning for Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 15-29 Planning Business Communications Key Points Upgrades may affect users through changes to applications, unavailability of service, or changes to working practices. You must prepare the users for these events. If you do not, you may find that their response to the new—and hopefully improved—services may be negative. This is not solely your responsibility and should be undertaken by the entire project leadership team, particularly the project sponsor and business stakeholders. These team members are probably closer to the business than you and should be able to identify key departments and workers who must be engaged in the project or supported through the changes. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 15-30 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure The key elements of your communications planning should include the following: • Announce the upgrade. Do not surprise users with a new deployment, even if everything happens during business downtime, such as over a weekend. You must prepare users and preferably engage them in the preparation for the upgrade. • Identify user training requirements. You must ensure that project team stakeholders identify all of the groups and the changes that may occur to their working environments. You must plan and predeliver any training that is necessary on a test system. This will minimize support desk calls on launch day. It may also identify potential issues that you can then use as input to your overall upgrade plan. • Identify administration training. You and the upgrade team are almost certainly familiar with SharePoint 2010, but the administrators and system operators are still working to maintain the Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. Make sure that these people, who will include frontline support staff, are fully conversant with both the applications and the administrative functions that they are likely to use. • Plan launch support. You should plan to have mentors available on launch day to help with any transition issues. These mentors should be staff from either the IT department or the business, and they should work with users rather than just offering telephone support. This will reduce support calls significantly and will engender a team ethic in the company. How you plan your upgrade can have a significant effect in this area. An in- place upgrade in any but a small departmental environment will involve more support staff in this role, so you should work to involve key users and their managers in this activity. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED Planning for Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 15-31 Planning a Farm Survey Key Points When you have your business requirements, the next step is to plan a thorough survey of your farm. If you understand your farm environment, you will find it easier to ensure that your upgrade is trouble-free. This can be a sizeable effort, so do not underestimate the time that is necessary to complete a farm survey. You should already have documentation that supports your farm, and this is a good place to start. It you are not confident in your system documentation, you must plan a thorough review. Steps that you may need to take include: • Planning to run the Pre-Upgrade Checker tool to quickly identify problems that SharePoint 2010 flags. • Planning to perform a manual inspection of the farm to identify potential issues, such as customizations. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 15-32 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure • Establishing whether you must identify changes by rebuilding an uncustomized version of your production farm and comparing it with the live environment—perhaps by running WinDiff. Clearly this is a major task, but if your documentation is incomplete, you must factor this into your plan. • Identifying numbers of sites and customizations. . Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 20 10 Infrastructure identify and manage any existing customizations and how to manage individual solutions and items. Always establish a fallback position. An upgrade. calls significantly and will engender a team ethic in the company. How you plan your upgrade can have a significant effect in this area. An in- place upgrade in any but a small departmental. desk calls on launch day. It may also identify potential issues that you can then use as input to your overall upgrade plan. • Identify administration training. You and the upgrade team are almost