Migrating Customized SharePoint 2010 site to SharePoint 2013

In my previous article I described how to migrate an out of the box site from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. In the more advanced scenario we have to migrate site which has customization. So in this post I will discuss migrating the SharePoint site which has customization such as:

1. Custom Themes
2. Custom solutions like web parts, BCS models, workflows etc.
3. Databases other than SharePoint Databases
4. Other resource files like language file, missing features

Starting migration for a customized SharePoint site starts as much as the same way as an out of the box site.

One has to create a new web application in SharePoint 2013 environment and mount the database from the old farm normally SharePoint 2010 to the new farm of SharePoint 2013. For complete processes see the link below.

http://www.muhammadshoaib.net/2015/01/sharepoint-2013-migrating-sharepoint.html

or on Microsoft Technet

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/23230.migrating-sharepoint-2010-out-of-the-box-site-to-sharepoint-2013.aspx

After the above process is complete make a list of the customization to be moved to the new farm.

1. Move the custom solution to the new farm. All the solutions required for the application to run should be added and installed on the new farm. You might have to change your custom solution or get an updated one if they are from a third party if there is any compatibility issue. Same is the case for custom workflows. 

      2.    In case of BDC models, backup your BDC models from old farm and change the settings the LobSystemInstance like “DatabaseAccessProvider” according the
            settings in new farm and import it in the new farm using command Import-SPBusinessCatalogModel. A more friendly approach is to add the models by going in to
            the:
             Central Admin à Application Management à Manage Service Applications
             Choose Business Data Connectivity service application and select Import from the top ribbon, browse the “.bdcm” file and import.
 
       3.   Migrating custom themes requires all the related file from the 14 hive folder be moved to new farm’s 15 hive folder. Fix the style sheet and script links
             in master page.
             For multi-language sites resource files should also be moved from the “Resources” folder in 14 hive folder.
       5.   For external databases move the database to new environment and change connection strings in web.config file at the root folder of your application.

These are the more generic type of changes one could perform in migration of customized SharePoint sites. There is a possibility of more things to be moved to SharePoint 2013 farm depending upon the customization you have.

Please do share you experiences. Thanks

PowerPivot 2013 to SQL Server connection

Data model in PowerPivot is a collection of data tables along with their relations as real world entities. PowerPivot data model allow users to integrate data from multiple data tables building relations between them in an excel workbook. A number of sources ranging from SQL server to Text file are available as external data sources in PowerPivot. Data models allows users to work on millions of records in excel but there are some over kill of resources using this technique to manipulate data because of the in-memory analytics engine. Using a large data set in excel workbook consume memory which could affect other application sharing same resources but still data models in excel compresses up to 7 times of the original size. The data compression depends upon the unique values in each column, more unique values means less compression. Another limitation of large data is the size limit of 10mb while working in SharePoint

PowerPivot Tab is available in MS Excel as shown below

if not then user have to enable the tab performing the following steps.

Þ      Go to File à Options à Add-Ins.
Þ      In the Manage box, click COM Add-ins à Go.
Þ      Check the Microsoft Office Power Pivot in Microsoft Excel 2013 box, and then click OK
To connect to Database, click on the "Manage" icon and select "From Database".



Connecting to Database
Database connection can be linked to DBs in SQL Server, Access and SQL Server Analysis services. All the data connections are re-usable and exists in “Existing Connections”. Connection to a database can be created from the “From Database” link as shown below.



 

Friendly data connection is a name given to the connection, it could be anything readable and can be used to identify from other connections when return to some same sort of work. Server name is the name of the machine where SQL server is installed, for local SQL server instances a period (.) can be used. User can select from windows authentication or SQL server authentication to connect to database. Finally put in the database name and test connection, if it’s a success Press next.

User can select from tables directly or filter data according to requirement using the query builder. In case of large records it is efficient to use Query builder and the best way is to exclude all the un-related columns. The best practice is to use the Query builder, because large data can be filtered out here and enhance performance by using less memory. Larger data import requires more memory and can be slow.

Selecting tables allows users to also get the related tables which allows data connections.

The last step to import data using the SQL Data Source will show user a summary of selected tables as well as the connected tables (if selected). Un-related columns can also be excluded using the Review and Filter button. The filter are applied according to the data type of the selected column.

Close the dialog box. A tab for each table selected above will be added to the data management window of PowerPivot. User can view all connected tables in “Diagram View” as shown below

Now the selected data has been imported in to MS Excel, user can work on it using different powerful tools available like Charts, Pivot tables for data presentation.

 You can also find the post on Microsoft Technet

SharePoint 2013: Installing and configuring PowerPivot

PowerPivot 2013 Installation

Microsoft SQL Server 2013 PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 extends SharePoint to use PowerPivot features. To enable PowerPivot 2013 in SharePoint, spPowerPivot.msi needs no be installed. The package can be downloaded from Microsoft download center at the location; http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35577

Setup is a simple click and proceed affair. Configuration starts after the installation.

For systems requirements please refer to the following article on TechNet

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj218792.aspx

Double click the spPowerPivot.msi after downloading, the screen shown below appears.

Click next to proceed and accept the license agreement to install.

All the features below are pre-selected. PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 includes features of PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013. OLE DB for Analysis service provides an interface for PowerPivot 2013 to interact with analysis service in SQL Server. ADOMD.net is a .NET framework data provider to interact with Analysis services in SQL Server. Analysis management object (AMO) is used by application to manage instance of SQL Server analysis services.

A screen to confirm the selection on the previous screen is shown, if you want to change just click back. Click next to proceed for installation to begin.

Installation in progress...

Installation completes.

PowerPivot Configuration for SharePoint 2013

Once installation is complete, configuration can be started by going to

Start Menu à All Programs à PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 configuration

For configuration the logged in account must be an administrator on local machine and a farm admin in SharePoint 2013 Farm. The same account must have rights of DB Owner on SharePoint 2013 Farm configuration data base.

Configuration wizard start by examining the systems settings. This may take couple of minutes.

After examining the system settings, Select “Configure or Repair PowerPivot for SharePoint” option. For a fresh installation this is the only option available as shown below.

Configuration wizard will then run a validation check.

In case of failed validation for different components in wizard, an alert mark is displayed in front of all failed components. I the screen below the alert icon is displayed for different components like “Create Default Web Application”.

For PowerPivot configuration following information is required;

1. Default Account Username, Domain account for web application administrator
2. Default Account Password,  A password for the above mentioned account
3. Database Server, used by SharePoint farm
4. Passphrase, the same passphrase you have used in the configuration of SharePoint Products configuration wizard.
5. PowerPivot server for excel services, an instance will be created in the form of servername\PowerPivot for excel services where servername is the server where SharePoint is installed.

PowerPivot requires a default web application in SharePoint farm for its settings, if you have a new farm and it does not contains any default web application like “SharePoint 80”, the PowerPivot configuration wizard will do this for you but this will require some information.

 

For setting up a default web application information required are;

1. Web application name, any name of your choice
2. URL, A URL for web application in format of http://<sharepointservername>/
3. Application pool name
4. Application pool account, a domain account, preferably the same as you will use for the collection administrator as discussed below.
5. Application pool account password
6. Database server
7. Database name

After the web application settings, fill in the information for site collection for the same web application.

1. Site Administrator, domain account
2. Contact email
3. Site URL
4. Site Title

Add information for Unattended Account for Data refresh. All information except the Account Username and password are pre-filled. You can go with them of change the values as you require.

After you fill in all the information, click on the validate button again, the setup will again run the validation. If validation succeeded you will see the “Run” button is enabled. Click the Run button and this will start configuration.

After successful run, a message will be displayed confirming the completion of all task selected.




You can confirm the setting by going in to;

Central Administration à Web Application management à Manage service Applications.

Here you can find the following service with status as “started”

1. Default PowerPivot Service application
2. Excel Services
3. Secure Store service

You can also find the post on Microsoft Technet

SharePoint 2013: Migrating SharePoint 2010 Out of the Box site

With the introduction of SharePoint 2013 a lots of organization are moving forward from the previous version like SharePoint 2010. Recently I have done migration to some sites in SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

While migrating from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 we could encounter two types of scenarios.

1. Migrating Out of the box site
2. Migrating customized site.

The first one is includes no custom themes or solutions and is rather a simple task then the later one which could have customized themes and solutions. In this post I will go with the first option and will later describe the steps to migrate customized sites. For overview on migration to SharePoint 2013 you can read the article on TechNet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262483.aspx

I will be using the Database attach method to migrate the sites. First thing up in preparing for the migration is to check your current SharePoint 2010 site. For this please run the health check on the current site collection. For more info on running health check read the following article. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219720.aspx

 

For migrating from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 using the database attach method, you will need a full backup of content DB for existing site. For this purpose go to SQL Server 2008 R2 management studio, locate the content database and create a back of it and move it to the new server.

Create a new Web application in SharePoint 2013 Farm by following the steps below:

1. Go to Central Administration à Web application management à Manage Web applications
2. Select the New icon on the top ribbon of the page. A popup screen to create new web application will appear.
3. Fill in the fields like, IIS Website, Application Pool, Port, Path etc. as per your requirements.
4. Leave the Database Name field as it is i.e. with the default value because we will replace this DB with the one we will create with the back from the previous SharePoint 2010 farm.
5. Click ok to create the web application.
6. Do not create any managed paths as the site from the previous farm will bring its existing with it.

Now going into the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 management solution, create a new database with the same name as in the previous farm or with the name according to your new requirements. Restore the backup you have copied from the previous farm to the newly created database.

This will take few minutes depending upon the size of the database. Once restoring is complete, open the SharePoint Products Power shell window and run the following command.

Get-SPContentDataBase <new database name> | Remove-SPContentDataBase

Where “new database name” is the data base attached to the newly created web application in SharePoint 2013 farm. This command will remove the content database from the web application and we can now attach our database on which we have restored backup from the old site. Run the following command to attach database.

Mount-SPContentDatabase “<database name of the DB with backup of old site>” –DatabaseServer “<DB server name>” –WebApplication <URL of newly created web application>

In few minutes database attach process is complete and you can view the list of site collection by going to:

Go to Central Administration à Web application management à View all site collections

 

In order to access the site collections you will have to change the site collection administrators by going to

Go to Central Administration à Web application management à Change Site Collection administrators

SharePoint 2013 use claim based of authentication, if your site in SharePoint 2010 use classic mode authentication then you will need to run the following commands in power shell to access the site.

$WebAppName = "http://<yourWebAppUrl>"
$wa = get-SPWebApplication $WebAppName
$wa.UseClaimsAuthentication = $true
$wa.Update()

 

Now you are ready to explore you site in SharePoint 2013 environment. On your first login, a pink ribbon will appear on the top of page and will prompt you to use SharePoint theme as the current page will be in SharePoint 2010 theme. Click “Start Now” to experience a full SharePoint 2013 site.

That’s it for now, in this next post I will describe the migration of customized site is SharePoint 2013.

 

You can also find the post on Microsoft Technet

SharePoint 2013: The tool was unable to install Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role

Case

When we run the SharePoint 2013 Pre-requisites installer in order to prepare our machine to install SharePoint 2013 product installation on Windows Server 2012, the installer fails due to the error shown in the screen below

The error occurred due to the reason that your operating system Windows Server 2012 do not allow application to connect to internet straight away to download files necessary for installation.

Solution

In order to fix this this error, some steps needs to be taken as described below:

1. Open a MMC console
2. Add the Group Policy Object snap-in
3. Following screen will open
   
4. In Local Computer Policy go to Computer configuration --> Administrative Templates and select "System".
5. Scroll down the list in the System settings and find "Specify settings for optional component installation and component repair". Double click the settings, a screen as displayed below will appear.
   
6. Select enabled in the top left corner and select "Contact Windows Update directly to download repair content instead of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)".
7. Click OK and close the MMC console.
8. Run the pre-requisite installer again and this time it will not give error on and server role installation.

You can also find the same article on Microsoft Technet