Productivity solutions
- 10/9/2017
- Skill: Evaluate content and customizations
- Skill: Plan an upgrade process
- Skill: Create and configure app management
- Skill: Create and configure productivity services
- Skill: Create and configure a Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and Secure Store application
- Skill: Manage SharePoint solutions and applications
- Summary
- Thought experiment
- Thought experiment answer
Thought experiment answer
This section contains the solution to the thought experiment.
It’s likely that you will have a combination of code and solutions in this farm. Document both the user solutions (sandboxed) and farm solutions as they exist today (including compatibility version), also capturing the Apps (now Add-ins) that were previously deployed. Work with the development team to determine which solutions and apps are no longer in use, then provide a window of time required to update earlier versions of solutions (if possible). Document the solutions that cannot (or will not) be updated, so they can be installed in a previous compatibility mode.
On the whole, most of the productivity services will successfully make the transition between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016. Create a new Office Online Server, and then work with your user base to determine which Excel Calculation Services components should be replaced by the Office Online Services farm. Remove any other Excel Calculation Services components, as the service is unavailable in SharePoint 2016. Capture the settings of the other Office-based services, such as Visio, Word Automation, and others, for migration to the new environment.
Work with management to understand which components of the environment can be down for extended periods (if available). Consider planning a parallel upgrade for certain components of the farm, and then work with the user stakeholders to schedule a freeze, during which they can still access content from the SharePoint 2013 environment, but not write or make changes (this includes workflows). Test the migration for each series of content databases, working with the SQL team to temporarily optimize components in the data layer to handle the upgrade of more than one content database at a time.