Notes from Microsoft Ignite Migration to SharePoint Online Best Practices and New API Investments

Microsoft Ignite is proving to be an exciting conference with new technologies and announcements about how Microsoft is evolving their technology stack to help us collaborate in new and better ways. I'm at the conference attending sessions on security, data protection, migration and other topics and want to share my notes so that they may be a resource to others as well.

Presented: Tuesday May 5, 2015
Presenters: Michael Jordan, Joe Newell, Simon Bourdages

Service Management Targets

- concepts to consider when migrating to SharePoint Online

• ECM sources: SharePoint, File Shares, Public Folders, Google, CMIS, Lotus Notes
• Delivery services: productivity applications, business apps, app lifecycle management, data lifecycle management, hosting platform
• Remediation: model and patterns, drivers, consolidation, rationalization
• Disposition: retire, retain, replace, re-host, rewrite
• Target platform & hosting services: SharePoint, Hybrid, Office 365, Windows Azure

- In planning a migration we must analyze the usage of your collaboration corpus

• Discovery (crawl, discard date, reporting)
• Assessment (inventory, complexity, scale, rationalization)
• Look at the inventory as a funnel

- Consider not migrating

• Content not used, empty
• Nearly empty content, or low usage
• Decommissioned or discovered

- Consider migrating

• Velocity sites
• High impact sites (white glove treatment for these sites)
• Exceptions - Ultra large sites

- Migrating the Collaboration Triangle - Migration Process

• Plan
• Prepare
• Implementation
• Migrate
• Adopt

- Migration API - Who is it for:

• IT admin and developers who are moving
• On prem and file shares to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

- Resources dedicated to ISBV and IT admins
- Limited calls to end user entry points, meaning API won't be impacted the CSOM throttling
- Better equipped to scale to the demand

- What about speed?

• Type of content impacts rate of ingestion
• Using backend resources
• Lots of small scenario specific tweaking that can help get the best out of the API
• Prelim data suggests 5X the speed of CSOM before throttling (conservative early estimate)

- Process Flow

• Package is created
• Package is uploaded to azure blob storage
• 1 CSOM call is made to start the migration process (references a GUID that is specific to your migration process
• Azure Queue gets real time updates
• Once complete the logs in the package gets updated

- Creating the package

• Generating appropriate XML to go with your files
• Document IDs are preserved, permissions are preserved
• XML Resembles the PRIME package
• 8 XML in a package + content

- Upload package to Azure Blog Store

• 1 blog container for content and 1 for manifest
• Microsoft will never except a client request to modify content - will only read the content for migration but will never modify
• Microsoft needs writes to modify the manifest with updates

- One CSOM call to start the migration

• All parameters except queue are required
• Azure queue parameter is optional

- Queue and Logs

• Can use the same Azure queue for multiple packages
• Will get an update for :job started, per elements update, job completed
• Log is stored in each manifest container

Announcement: New Migration API to SharePoint is Now Available Worldwide

• New-SPOMigrationPackage
• ConvertTo-SPOMigrationTargetedPackage
• Set-SPOMigraitonPackageAzureSource
• Submit-SPOMigrationJob

Best Practices Supporting New API

- API addresses the need to ingest migration content at speed/scale
- Migration planning is always required - Sample migration process presented

- Planning Process:

• Assessment - inventory, classification, rationalization, migration pathways
• Pre-migration remediation - IA implications, customization/FTC refactoring or cleanup, large list cleanup, managed metadata
• Migration - security/identity, URL transforms (if needed), Information Architecture: Field/Metadata/template transforms
• Post-migration remediation - reapply branding, reapply customizations, correct data connections, deploy replacement CAM applications

- Migration Process:

• Extraction - content export from source
• Transport - file/content movement to target
• Ingestion - content import into target

- Other Considerations

• Migration fidelity
• Tools: ISV + PowerShell
• Success Criteria
• Can map users within the CSV file that is part of the package created as part of the process
• Checked out status for files is not supported
• info path is not supported
• can run PowerShell against file shares and SharePoint
• API will always overwrite existing content even if dates of target are later than source
• Speed example: 300 GB of content (docs and picture) took approx. 30 sec to convert and prepare package
• web parts not supported, even out of box web parts
• version history is supported, but can create bottlenecks
• in open preview now - can download preview now: http://aka.ms/spomigrationpreview
• managed metadata is not supported
• recommended choosing same data center for Azure and SharePoint on line and will likely get better thru put
• Azure storage costs will be very low due to speed (time of API) unless doing very large migrations

You can watch the entire presentation here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3153

Enjoy.
-Antonio