This Month we are only one year away before SharePoint Server 2010 reaches end of extended support.
Since many enterprise customer are facing any migration as a very huge and complex project, it is NOW the time to start planning an upgrade or migration to the latest version of SharePoint whether your are still keep running in On-Prem or moving to the cloud.
Looking back to the passed 10 years as we announced SharePoint Server 2010 at our first SharePoint Conference outside of Seattle, SharePoint Conference 2009 held in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 20th, 2009 at the Mandalay Bay with the keynote delivered by Steve Ballmer, I still get that ”goose-skin” feeling when recalling the event surroundings and the crackling air.
Mainstream Support for SharePoint 2010 ended already in october 2014 and went into the extended support which means only securtiy updates are released, will finally end on october 13th, 2020
What does that mean?
- No critical updates were released in 2017 for SharePoint Server 2010 under extended support.
- No security updates will be developed or released after end of support.
- More importantly the operating systems supporting SharePoint Server 2010 are reaching or have reached end of support as well
While SharePoint 2010 at these days were the successor of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (aka MOSS 2007) with a revolutionary new architecture under the hood, our latest versions of SharePoint have even more to offer today:
- newest data compliance standards
- Data privacy controls
- Advanced security features and options
- …and many more…
But while you still would have to go the hard way and first need to upgrade to 2013, 2016, and finally 2019,
SharePoint Server 2013 is already well into its own 10-year lifecycle so its not really recommended to even think about it to stay for longer.
However, if you’re planning an upgrade or migration to SharePoint Server 2019 or SharePoint Online, a list of useful resources is available in the resources section at the end of this post.
Now back to the facts:
Forgetting to consider your Customizations or custom applications and solutions you built over years, you actually can risk you migration project and may even exceed your planned budget or timeline at all.
So here you may also think of several aspects your migration could be impacted by.
Might it be that certain webparts are no longer exisiting on the new versions, not working as intended post migration or even ending up in errors while loading etc. etc.
all of these are things you should thoroughly plan and test, test, test and test with each new version you are going to upgrade to.
A very essential key aspect is the Assessment and Scan of your current environment that you are planning to upgrade.
- Know your content structure and topology,
- get all your customization documentation and sources ready
- rationalize the content (what is for archiving and what is live data)
- remediate potential issues based on your assessment
- Do your really need hundreds or document versions to be migrated?
- Are there any invalid file tpyes, file- and folder names or path too long issues?
- Is the permission structure and level still valid?
- have you broken inheritance at worse down to an item level?
Not migrating is inviting hackers to your vulnerable servers that are nor longer updated with securtiy enhancements or fixes and hence are a target for security breaches of various types.
Resources and Reference materials:
- Overview of the upgrade process from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/upgrade-and-update/overview-of-the-upgrade-process-from-…]
- Upgrade to SharePoint Server 2016 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/upgrade-and-update/upgrade-to-sharepoint-server-2016]
- High level overview to upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Server 2019 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/upgrade-and-update/upgrade-from-sharepoint2013-to-sharep…]
- SMAT: SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool
[https://aka.ms/SMAT]
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