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