Information Systems Services (ISS) are committed to maintaining SharePoint as a platform for delivering corporate systems, and electronic document management.
The University is currently using SharePoint 2007 which Microsoft will soon cease to support. In order to continue to provide you with a robust and fully supported SharePoint service, it is critical that we make upgrades.
When is this happening?
Between the dates of Thursday 3 July and Monday 7 July 2014 we will be moving all SharePoint sites over to SharePoint 2013, hosted on a set of six brand new servers.
What will be the benefits of the migration?
- Better, faster hardware.
- A more resilient SharePoint service (all new servers will be paired with a second server in the new set up).
- Microsoft supported.
- New look SharePoint sites.
- Improved search.
- Mobile compatibility.
- New features including: real-time document thumbnail previews and in-browser editing of Word and Excel documents.
How will this affect you?
- From 6pm on Thursday 3 July 2013 we will be preventing any further changes to any SharePoint sites. We will do this by making all SharePoint sites read-only until the migration is complete. This is to protect users from losing any data once the migration process has started.
- There will not be any prolonged period of downtime as our old servers will continue to host your site (as read-only) during the migration. However, there may be a brief break in service on the day we switch over from the old servers to the new ones, most likely out-of-working hours.
- Some site’s URLs (web addresses) will change after the migration. We will be retiring the URL of https://mylife.essex.ac.uk and replacing it with https://sp.essex.ac.uk, and personal sites will move from https://mylife.essex.ac.uk to https://mysite.essex.ac.uk . We are also taking this opportunity to consolidate the URLs in use on https://sp.essex.ac.uk. You will need to inform your users, and update any bookmarks, although ISS will also be taking appropriate measures to redirect users to the new web addresses. To see a full list of URL changes click here.
- Users of our Outlook plugin for ESF and UG/PG EAF services will need a new version of the Outlook plugin to be installed. (Instructions will be circulated to affected users.)
- Users who need to scan in documents for ESF and UG/PG EAF services will need new software installed called ‘Websio’ to replace the old software called ‘Dark Blue Duck’. (Instructions will be circulated to affected users.)
- Once the migration is complete, all SharePoint sites will look different. Any sites which use customised templates, called ‘themes’, may lose some, or all, of their customisations. In such cases the sites will revert back to the default SharePoint look.
- Some webparts which were available in SharePoint 2007 are no longer available in SharePoint 2013.
- Some URLs (web addresses) of specific SharePoint libraries will change. If an existing SharePoint 2007 site contains a library which has a ‘Library Title’ that differs to the URL used to access it, the new library on SharePoint 2013 will change the URL to match the ‘Library Title’. SharePoint 2013 will adapt automatically to this URL change – updating navigation and links within your site to cope. It is only if the URL is published or used elsewhere outside of your SharePoint site, that hyperlinks will need updating to reflect the new URL.
Training
We understand that the upgrade to SharePoint 2013 may make the environment unfamiliar to users, and will therefore necessitate some user training, although priority will be given to our users of ESF and UG/PG EAF corporate services. Details and dates to be confirmed.
What you can do now
- Don’t plan any major changes to your SharePoint site for the days surrounding the migration dates.
- Ensure that any documents/pages you are editing are checked-in before 5pm on 3 July.
- If you have a ‘mylife’ site which is using workflows, these may be broken by the migration if they are still ‘in process’ when the migration starts. To minimise issues:
- Aim to complete any that are ‘in process’ before 3 July.
- Do not start any new workflows until after the migration is complete.
IMPORTANT: This does not apply to workflows for ESF and UG/PG EAF.
How you can help
The migration will not mean any loss of data. However, we will be asking site owners to test their sites post migration to ensure all is working as expected. Particular attention will need to be paid to any sites containing workflows or reports as these will need specific testing to ensure they have retained functionality correctly.
Keeping in touch
Please forward this information to colleagues whom you feel would benefit from its content.
If you have any queries resulting from this correspondence, please email the SharePoint Team: sphelp@essex.ac.uk.
Subscribe to the all-new SharePoint Users Group to stay up-to-date with announcements, training, and helpful hints about SharePoint 2013 by email.
Thank you,
SharePoint Team (MIS)
Information Systems Services
