Friday, April 8, 2011

Migrating MOSS to BPOS (Microsoft SharePoint Online) –Part I

MOSS 2007 is also known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and BPOS is also known as Business Productivity Online Suite, but more specifically Microsoft SharePoint Online since BPOS is actually more than just SharePoint. Every since the beginning Microsoft has never really known how to market / name SharePoint, and they still don’t IMHO, but that isn’t the point of this blog.

When you start Googling around you will most likely come across Metalogix tools. The two most notable are BPOS Commander and SharePoint Migration Manager. I have tried to get pricing or a demo on both of these products and the company has been 100% non-responsive other than an automated email that says an account rep will contact me shortly. It has been a while now, and no response, so I tried again. Still no response. I expect the product is priced like Oracle… “how much money do you have to spend with us” is the answer you will get when you read between the lines. With that said, the tooling looks WONDERFUL and should make the task much simpler than many other ways.

The big issues to consider are

  • Mapping Users from current domain to BPOS users.
  • Cleaning up users that are no longer with company
  • Keeping Permissions
  • Domain Groups and SharePoint groups
  • User account activation since they are not active initially
  • Hard coded Urls in things such as Wikis, Announcements, Tasks, HTML Content Areas, etc.
  • Changing Site Hierarchy
  • Identifying Owners of sites… Abandoned sites, SPS 2003 migrated sites so no Owner groups in some cases, etc
  • Determining what sites are still used
  • Converting custom Site Definitions that are basically the same as original Site Definitions to a standard Site Definition that BPOS will accept.

 

Given that I have not heard back from Metalogix and I don’t even know if we will have a budget for such a tool, I decided to start looking elsewhere. This brought me to the SharePoint Web Services 3.0 SDK which is a Windows Help file. It is much easier to use than the online version in my opinion. Though if you want just the docs for each of the web services, it is pretty good. Though, the downloaded versions has code samples for each web service, I find that VERY useful to get started. It does a good job of getting you started. There are two section of interest. Programming Tasks –> Programming Web Services for Windows SharePoint Services and Reference –> Web Services.

Two other good places to start are below. They do a good job of explaining what is available and how to start coding:

I wrote up an Example of how to use the SharePoint Web Services here.

In the past I used the SharePoint Object Model and .NET to develop migration scripts. I also did some direct database updates. The problem with these is that they require console (Server) access and I won’t have that with BPOS. So, the only option if I want to use the SP Object Model is to do the change before hand, then export the data to BPOS and hope for the best.

Since I won’t have console access, I think it makes sense to look at the web services route. The best part about this is that I can do the development (including debugging) on my laptop instead of the SharePoint server itself. The big downside is that the web services seem to be much more complicated to use. Everything seems to be XML based and a special schema just for querying. I would much prefer working with strongly typed objects and being able to use Intellisense.

One helpful thing is that InfoPath can be used. It appears dealing with the namespaces can be a bit tricky, but can be done and hopefully abstracted away. Here and here are posts on how to use XPath and SharePoint Web Services.

In the quest for being able to use strongly-typed objected I thought maybe someone created a LINQ to SharePoint provider. That would be great! As it turns out, someone did. It can be seen here. The problem is that it is ALPHA and appears to have died quite a while ago. The good news is that SharePoint 2010 has been released and it appears that they have included the LINQ to SharePoint Provider. Click here to see it. It looks similar, but I’m not sure if it is the same as the ALPHA one or not.

If you are not working with lists specifically then SharePoint Web Services are a good option.

No comments: