Here are excerpts published by Metalogix. It covers a lot of Pre-upgrade/migration scenarios that could help track down or prevent upgrade/migration issues. I have personally applied a lot of these in my projects in the past, especially environment clean-up activity, where we would ideally delete Orphan sites/site collections, unused sites, unused groups/user accounts, track down large site collections, break them down to smaller site collections, archive old records and apply database level maintenance plans.
Here are the key excerpts from the White Paper:
INTRODUCTION
No migration to SharePoint 2013 should be taken lightly. SharePoint content has grown at a remarkable rate of 75% annually. With that growth, your company’s users demand 100 percent up time and expect few or zero lapses in their ability to access business-critical sites. The IT department, meanwhile, must ensure that only the right people can access certain content while overseeing a smooth, error-free transition that will minimally impact their workload.
Its a simple message: “Clean up your current SharePoint environment today and planning out your future migration to SharePoint 2013 will save you time, money and headaches.” The complexity lies, however, in determining what to cleanup and how to plan for a successful migration.
Cleanup offers two major gains for SharePoint 2013 migration. First, it will increase the performance of your current environment by removing resource-intensive tasks. Second, it will expedite the overall time required to move from your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2013.
Here are the key excerpts from the White Paper:
INTRODUCTION
No migration to SharePoint 2013 should be taken lightly. SharePoint content has grown at a remarkable rate of 75% annually. With that growth, your company’s users demand 100 percent up time and expect few or zero lapses in their ability to access business-critical sites. The IT department, meanwhile, must ensure that only the right people can access certain content while overseeing a smooth, error-free transition that will minimally impact their workload.
Its a simple message: “Clean up your current SharePoint environment today and planning out your future migration to SharePoint 2013 will save you time, money and headaches.” The complexity lies, however, in determining what to cleanup and how to plan for a successful migration.
Cleanup offers two major gains for SharePoint 2013 migration. First, it will increase the performance of your current environment by removing resource-intensive tasks. Second, it will expedite the overall time required to move from your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2013.
PRE-MIGRATION OF USERS AND GROUPS
No SharePoint environment would be complete
without users. During the pre-migration analysis, identifying inactive and active users and groups not only helps you understand their post-migration expectations, it also gives administrators an opportunity to ask why these users are not using SharePoint for their collaboration needs. The result is less overhead and improved
communication with your SharePoint users as you migrate to SharePoint
2013. The following
sections explain how to
identify these users
IDENTIFY INFLUENTIAL USERS
Including
your influential users
in the planning and implementation stages
of your migration
can prove beneficial to the success
of the migration. Users can provide
both “on-the-ground” feedback
during the migration
and communicate their SharePoint 2013 requirements and expectations.
Start by identifying the most active SharePoint users
and sites in your environment by writing Powershell scripts. Communicate with these users
throughout the process
and help get early “buy-in” so that
they will in turn communicate any changes or new features to their team. Some of the examples of Powershell scripts that SharePoint Admin/developer could write are Site Risk Assessment to gauge largest sites/site collections, content DB size, orphan sites, unused sites, large lists, complex workflows, orhpaned users/groups etc.
REMOVE ORPHAN USERS
One often overlooked area of the cleanup
process is removing
orphan users. These are employees
who are no longer
with the company and were removed from Active Directory but still have a SharePoint user account
and associated permissions for sites
or content.Orphan users may also have active SharePoint alerts or My Sites. While orphan users can no longer access the
content, if they’ve created alerts, My Sites, and other
mechanisms in your environment, those can impact SharePoint’s hardware resources. Cleaning
out these users before your migration
will help teams gain back resources
and better predict SharePoint
user growth.
CLEANUP UNUSED SHAREPOINT GROUPS
When new site collections are created, often the default SharePoint Groups (owners, contributors, etc.) are also created
(intentionally or not). Frequently, only a few of those groups are used. This information is valuable as you plan for your migration
and can help reduce
the number of Client Access Licenses
(CALs) needed and reduce your user footprint. It’s also an opportunity to reach out to inactive
users who are still with the organization to ask why they’re not using SharePoint.
CLEANUP UNUSED SITES
Unused sites that contain
almost no content or have very limited activity
are excellent candidates for archiving as you prepare the migration process. You can find under-utilized sites within
any scope (Site Collection, Web Application or even the whole farm) and filter the report to display
certain site definitions.
BREAKUP LARGE SITE COLLECTIONS
Site Collections (or
sites) often outgrow their original size. This suggests
that users are actively
engaged in SharePoint. It also points to a potential resource issue. Very large site collections can impact performance which in turn will likely hinder your migration plans.
Typically, it makes sense to split the Site Collection during the migration process. Or you may want to split the content
so that some of your users can migrate
to SharePoint 2013 and start using it, while other groups use SharePoint
2010.
FIND LARGE SITES (AND PROMOTE TO SITE COLLECTIONS)
As part of
a migration plan, you might decide to reorganize your sites and promote
some of them to site collections based on their size. For example, all sites above 100 GB might be candidates for promotion to Site
Collection.
Microsoft has documented
best practices
for the size of Site Collections that
should be followed. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787(v=office.15).aspx#SiteCollection
FIND SMALL SITE COLLECTIONS (AND DEMOTE TO
SUBSITES)
Another opportunity for cleanup
is to identify
small site collections and demote them to subsites. Often user requests for sites are satisfied by creating site collections. Over time, it might become apparent that those site collections could or should
have been created
as subsites of a different
site collection. Another outcome of
this analysis might be that you choose
to just delete
those site collections since they have very
little use.
IDENTIFY AND
MANAGE LARGE LISTS
Microsoft’s best practices for numbers
of items in a list or folder are often exceeded due to the unanticipated growth of SharePoint. Using the Most/Least Storage reports generated out of PowerShell, you can identify large lists with excessive number of items. During the migration you are then in a
position to split those lists.
You can also use the List Property report
to analyze the columns
to determine whether
they are approaching the Microsoft recommended
list view thresholds (2,000 or more items
with 20 or more columns).
CLEANUP CONTENT
With Powershell, you can generate the List and Library
Storage report includes last accessed and/or
last modified metadata. With that knowledge, you can choose to archive some of the content as part of the migration
effort and/or the migration
can be configured to skip older content that
is no longer needed.
Another effective way to
maintain control over content growth is to implement policies
around versioning. Using Powershell scripts, you can gain insight into the storage
impact of the document
versions. The more versions an item has, the slower the migration
of the item will be. With Powershell, you can use Set List Properties to configure versioning across any scope in the farm. The script can then configure
SharePoint to automatically prune the versions from the content.
REMOVE DUPLICATE FILE
It’s not uncommon for SharePoint to be the repository for the same document in multiple places. To improve
the migration performance and reduce user confusion, write a script to remove Duplicate Files
ARCHIVE THE AUDIT LOG
Powershell scripts can be written to move the Audit Log data from source content databases and stored in a standalone SQL database.
This provides access to audit information even after you’ve
moved to the new SharePoint version. Once the data is in the archive, you can use SQL Server Reporting Services or other
tools can also be used to create audit
reports after migration. This
ensures a continuous audit trail
even after the farm is migrated.
WEB PART DECISIONS
Web parts are used everywhere – your SharePoint environment probably includes
Microsoft web parts, custom
web parts, and third party
web parts.
As you plan your migration, it’s important
to get an accurate assessment of the impact of any custom web parts used in your environment. This step will help
you determine whether to update a custom web part so it works in
2013 or deprecate the component as its functionality is no longer
needed or has been replaced by a new capability in SharePoint
2013.
Web part usage analysis will also assist
in determining if support/maintenance on third party web parts should be continued
or not. We can write Powershell scripts to report out Webparts on the page.
Web Part analysis helps you can gain global insight into which web parts are being used and which
sites they are being used on. The report
can even filter for the Closed
or Hidden web parts.
The Web Part report can be run by site administrators or distributed to them so that they can understand which components will be migrated and which will not. This will set end user expectations and prevent
miscommunication during migrations.
WHERE ARE THE
WORKFLOWS?
The Workflow repotrs could be generated via Powershell to find out details
about workflow definitions, instances and their state. This information is particularly important for migration since it displays
the details for all the in-progress workflows that cannot
be migrated.
ARE THE CONTENT TYPES BEING USED
Content types are a powerful tool in SharePoint that enable organizations to organize, manage, and handle content in a consistent way across site collections. Gaining
insight into the custom content
types and where they are being used will help determine
how the data will be managed once you migrate. Investigating the use of Content
types will also help to highlight opportunities for creating enterprise content types that will provide broader
scope.
Content Type report
can be generated and filtered to show all content types or ones that are
defined but not used. This information
can be used to clean up the content types prior to the migration.
SHAREPOINT PERMISSIONS HIERARCHY
Using Powershell scripting reports, we can report out SharePoint sites/subsites that have broken inheritance and have unique set of permissions. This gives more insight on the complexity of permissions structure and also determines whether these sites should have ideally broken permission structure or not.
Alternatively you could use Metalogix tools known as ControlPoint and Content Matrix to report out all the above Pre-migration checklist parameters.
