Category Archives: Migrating to BPOS

Spotlight on Simplicity: moving file systems to SharePoint Online

One of the challenges that we as a business (Paradyne) encountered early on with BPOS was moving customers file systems over to SharePoint Online.
In a traditional on-premise SharePoint scenario there are many 3rd party tools to migrate files structures over to the SharePoint environment, however these generally require extensions to be installed on the target server.
As this is not possible with SharePoint Online we started to look at another way. One simple approach is to simply open up a SharePoint library with Windows Explorer and just drag your files over, however this can run into a couple of fairly sizeable roadblocks:
- a character in the filename that is not allowed in SharePoint
- file transfer fails due to timeout, network conditions, or is interrupted by an inaccessible file or an illegal character in the file name

So what are our choices?
Doing a lot of research, we came across a BPOS partner in the UK that had written a tool to address exactly this challenge.
Enter Files to Go from Thinkscape!
Files to Go is so simple to use that even our non-technical customers have been able to follow the instructions and successfully migrate their files over to SharePoint Online.
It effectively creates a queue of files to be migrated and performs any illegal character changes on the fly, then simply processes the list and copies your files across.
You can either migrate your files into a single library, or run several migrations into different libraries. The folder structure of your file system is kept intact during the migration so that when you open the library in SharePoint Online you are seeing a replica of your file system.
Files to Go also creates its own site within SharePoint Online where you can track the status & progress of the migration as well as view any errors that have occurred.

Overall it is an extremely simple product to use, from the instructions through to the interface. Support is also an email away!
Files to Go currently works with SharePoint Online (under BPOS) and will also be supporting Office 365 upon its release.

Happy migrating!

Public Folder message data in SharePoint Online

The team over at MessageOps have released a great script that takes data from your public folders and replicates it to SharePoint Online as part of your migration away from an on-premise Exchange environment.

You can read more about it here: http://www.messageops.com/public-folder-message-data-and-sharepoint-online

BPOS Tools site launched

A new website called BPOS Tools has been launched aimed at providing BPOS partners and customers with tools to improve their Microsoft Online Services experience.
A variety of software is currently available that ranges from file migration, monitoring, user management & maintenance, as well as end user usability functionality.
A couple of the key solutions that are beneficial to almost every full BPOS solution are:
- Password synchronisation
- Turning document libraries into email-enabled document libraries
- Migrating file systems to SharePoint Online
- Exchange Online monitoring (above and beyond the Microsoft Online Services Health Dashboard)

Have a look! More products and SharePoint web parts and templates coming soon.

Emails with missing bodies during migration

An interesting quirk we have seen while migrating customers across to Exchange Online – results in an email with no body being received by the recipient.
The customer situation:
- domain is added and validated to Exchange Online
- Type is set to ‘Authoritative’
- Inbound is not yet enabled
- customer has user accounts set up in Exchange Online, but is not yet using them

If anyone outside the organisation is using Exchange Online as well, they will find that when sending an the said customer – the body of the message disappears.

We find this to occur when we (using Exchange Online) send emails to customers when we are performing staged migrations.
If you’re trying to send an email to the customer, a workaround can be to attach your original email as an item to a new email to the customer – as attachments still come through.

Hopefully if you’ve seen these emails without bodies – it’s not a ghost but a common issue. :-)

What’s coming in the next version of BPOS

A blog post from the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
Some of the exciting features are:

  • Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
  • Exchange 2010 features (unified messaging, archiving, retention policies, transport rules, multi-mailbox search, free/busy between cloud & on-prem, native migration tools, remote PowerShell, etc.)
  • SharePoint 2010 features (portal site templates, extranet & anonymous access, Office 2010 integration, tagging and social networking, better search, improved features & functionality, Visio & Excel Services, sandboxed solutions, improved workflows, SharePoint Designer 2010 access, better control of FQDNs, etc.)
  • OCS 2010 features (P2P audio/video & file transfer across firewalls, presence with pictures, federation, IM with Windows Live)
  • General updates (single sign-on, identity federation, redesigned admin interface, more administration and access control)

Migrating a WSS 2.0/3.0 site to SharePoint Online

So you have a customer with a Small Business Server 2003 environment that has set up and used Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 or 3.0 and wants to retain the data when they move to BPOS.
As SharePoint Online (like many other hosted SharePoint offerings) doesn’t provide you with command line access to run stsadm.exe, what can you do?
The simple answer (in the case of WSS 3.0) would be to use SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2007 to simply backup and restore the site. While this sounds good in theory SPD has a very well known bug that prevents it from exporting more than 25MB (if your site is more than 25MB).
You could also use SPD to export & import the parts of the site you want using Personal Web Packages, but this can be time consuming depending on how many lists & libraries you have.
Or you could spend a small fortune on migration tools in the market like Metalogix or MetaVis, however I’d prefer a method the customer can afford.

So please join me on this journey of migrating a WSS 2.0 or 3.0 site to SharePoint Online. The WSS 3.0-specific instructions begin at Step 5.
(note: while this has been reproduced several times in various production environments, it is not perfect and can be thrown off by data corruption or issues with the environments)

Step 1 – Perform a backup of the existing site in WSS 2.0 using command line
stsadm -o backup -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).dat

Step 2 – Set up a WSS 2.0 environment and copy across the newly created backup
I’d recommend either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare Workstation for ease of use. Also make sure that your new WSS 2.0 installation matches the source server version. This page will help you determine what service pack level to install.

Step 3 – Restore the WSS 2.0 backup to your new environment
Ensure that you’ve created a blank site in IIS and created this as a web application in SharePoint Central Admin. The run the following command:
stsadm -o restore -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).dat -overwite

Step 4 – Perform an in-place upgrade of WSS 2.0 to 3.0
After installing WSS 3.0 SP2 make sure you run the configuration wizard. Once the databases have completed the upgrade process make sure you go into SharePoint Central Admin and select ‘Finalize Upgrade’ under the Operations tab. When all is done load your site and ensure that it appears the way it should (with all content intact).

Step 5 (or Step 1 for you people who are not doing the WSS 2.0 part) – Export the site to Content Migration Package (CMP) files
stsadm -o export -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).cmp -includeusersecurity -versions 4
(the additional switches will ensure that the metadata comes across as well as all of the version history)

Step 6 – Import the site to SharePoint Online
Once all of the CMP files have been exported you will now need to import them using SharePoint Designer. Simply connect to SharePoint Online from within SPD and click on Site -> Administration -> Restore Web Site, point to the first CMP file created and go find something to keep you busy.
Something important to note with this step – SPD will upload the CMP files to the SharePoint Online site first, then extract them. Make sure the site collection is big enough to handle twice your current site size as it will be storing both the CMP files and the extracted content at the same time.

Once the restore has completed, log in and make sure the destination looks like the source and contains the same content.
Some points of note:
- If the same usernames existing in the customers BPOS profile as in the on-premise SharePoint environment – you will find the created/modifed by fields will retain the original names
- The Last Modified field of all of the lists and libraries will be counted from the time they were created in SharePoint Online

I hope this all makes sense, and if you need any help or have feedback – please don’t hesitate to ask us!

Migrating from on-premise SharePoint to SharePoint Online

I’ve been scouting around, and there doesn’t appear to be any blog posts or real world stories about people who have migrated existing SharePoint sites to SharePoint Online.

I thought I could at least offer the links of some companies that offer tools that can perform migrations between on-premise SharePoint versions and servers, as well as to SharePoint Online.

Quest Software

Metalogix

MetaVis Technologies