SharePoint 2013 Upgrade Process

[dropcap][/dropcap] [dropcap][/dropcap]How to we get the SharePoint 2010 upgraded to 2013?

We do not have anymore inplace upgrade, so we need to bring the databases over to SharePoint 2013 Farm. So we need to have SharePoint 2013 farm built, services setup and server distribution before the upgrade.

What are the high level upgrade Stages?

 

What service applications can be upgraded?

Only a few of the service applications below can be upgraded.

1. Managed Metadata
2. Business Data Connectivity
3. Secure Store
4. Search Administration
5. PerformancePoint
6. User Profile – Profile, social and sync databases

How are the service applications upgraded?

Restore the database from 2010 farm and in required rename it while restoring to any new 2013 service app database naming convention. Then can use this database name while creating new service application either from CA or with

How can we upgrade upgrade Site Collections or Content databases?

This involves three steps: Get the databases restores in SQL server. Mount the content database associated with web application. Upgrade the site collection from the sites banner. Or upgrade the content database and the associated site collections with PowerShell.

While upgrading consider  – how are the cpu, memory and disk IO doing as the process running on the servers. Before we do the production upgrade we need to have an test or stage 2013 farm where we can run and note how long the upgrade can take will it help if we run the upgrade parallel. Upgrade performance is very crucial while planning for production upgrade.

We can upgrade as an administration all the content databases, and as a user they can upgrade their site collections by clicking on the upgrade banner.

We will see other detailed admin upgrade commands and considerations in the following post.

Advertisement

Enable Desktop Experience on Servers to Access SharePoint Web Folders

All of us like to access our files like a network drive, and drag and drop and mapping this drive to windows explorer or write/upload to SharePoint using scripts.

In order to access SharePoint like a network drive we need to enable a windows feature on our OS which is called “Desktop Experience” which include a webDAV client which is required to open SharePoint documents as a folder on our machine. On most windows desktop OS it is by default enabled, but on servers we need to enable this feature.

If you see the below image, you can notice that if you click on “Open with Explorer” you may get this error.

The Solution is very simple on to enable this on Windows servers (2008/2012 servers)

1.  Open Powershell command prompt
2. Type “Import-Module ServerManager” without Quotes and execute it(enter)
3. Next you need to execute “Add-Windowsfeature Desktop-Experience” this will install the necessary feature
4. Or you can create a powershell file with the above two commands and execute that file in powershell window like below.

After the server restart you can open the sharepoint files as a web folders: