Bill Baer /bɛːr/

We’re excited to announce new improvements to the SharePoint Migration Tool for the month of February. Designed to be used for migrations ranging from the smallest set of files to a large scale enterprise migration, the SharePoint Migration Tool will let you bring your information to the cloud and take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Office 365. Over the past several months we’ve been continually working to add features to the SharePoint Migration Tool to help you accelerate your journey to Microsoft 365, from support for full site migrations, to incremental improvements to the user experience – the SharePoint Migration Tool is designed to support migrations of all sizes.

We’re excited to announce new improvements to the SharePoint Migration Tool for the month of January. Designed to be used for migrations ranging from the smallest set of files to a large scale enterprise migration, the SharePoint Migration Tool will let you bring your information to the cloud and take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Office 365. Improvements this month include: A new, updated UI aligned with the Office 365 user experience This release of the SharePoint Migration Tool includes improvements to the user interface with a new, simplified control service more aligned to the visual themes of SharePoint Online.

The SharePoint Migration Tool lets you migrate lists or files from your SharePoint on-premises document libraries or from your on-premises file shares and easily move them to either SharePoint, OneDrive or Microsoft Teams in Office 365. It is available to Office 365 users. Designed to be used for migrations ranging from the smallest set of files to a large scale enterprise migration, the SharePoint Migration Tool will let you bring your information to the cloud and take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Office 365.

Today’s business environments are very different to those of 10+ years ago. Groove Server has been a trusted friend for peer-to-peer collaboration over a decade, but there are better ways to deliver against today’s business expectations and technical possibilities. It’s time to upgrade to a modern workpkace, taking advantage of ubiquitous connectivity and access to the cloud for scale, agility and performance. For Groove Server 2010 end of support is October 13th, 2020.

The SharePoint Migration Tool is designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. The SharePoint Migration Tool allows you to accelerate your journey to Office 365 overcoming obstacles typically associated with migration projects. With the SharePoint Migration Tool you can evaluate and address the information that matters the most to your organization, the Libraries, and now Lists that form the foundation of the SharePoint experience.

Innovation in the cloud drives tremendous business value, and it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ content and services. Office 365 empowers you to support sophisticated requirements for security and compliance, to manage day-to-day operations, and to maximize the value of Office 365 to people in your organization. We’ve built Office 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private, we give you granular and dynamic controls so that you can manage access and distribution of your organization’s sensitive information.

Last month we announced open beta for the next generation of the SharePoint Migration Tool with new capabilities to include support for SharePoint Lists, programmatic destination site creation and more. Today we’re pleased to announce this version (v2) of the SharePoint Migration Tool is now generally available. The SharePoint Migration Tool is designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.

Attending SPCNA? Come learn about hybrid scenarios with SharePoint and Office 365 in a post-conference workshop. As an attendee of the workshop you’ll receive a $500.00 Azure Pass, a complete SharePoint Server 2016 environment and an Office 365 Tenant that you can use to build your skills and complete hands on labs, both while at the workshop and even after the event. If you’ve already registered for the conference you can add the workshop to your registration by creating a new workshop-only registration at http://sharepointna.

Security is at the heart of what we do… Microsoft has been building enterprise software for decades and running some of the largest online services in the world. We draw from this experience to keep making SharePoint and OneDrive more secure for users, implementing and continuously improving security-aware software development, operational management, and threat-mitigation practices that are essential to the strong protection of your services and data. Today we’re pleased to announce a new resource center where you can get the latest news on our security and compliance investments for SharePoint and OneDrive in addition to presentations, free training, eBooks and more.

In January we announced General Availability of our SharePoint Migration Tool [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/General-Availability-of-the-SharePoint-Migration-Tool-amp/ba-p/143689], designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. Based on our continuous learning and experience from Microsoft FastTrack and feedback from you, we’re pleased to announce new capabilities available in the SharePoint Migration Tool through our new open beta.

GENERAL AVAILABILITY TODAY Taking advantage of cloud services doesn’t have to be difficult or a long-phased migration project. Today we’re excited to announce General Availability of the SharePoint Migration Tool, a simple, and fast migration solution to help you migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. Based on the learning and experience from Microsoft FastTrack, the SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft was designed to help you bring your information to the cloud and take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Office 365.

Know before you go… If you’re considering migrating file shares or other file-centric containers to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online it’s useful to understand if the source files are supported for storage or synchronization. This code sample at https://github.com/wbaer/FileChecker helps to identify illegal characters, length restrictions, and more in one or more file names that can potentially prevent proper synchronization with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive for Business or fail to render through the Microsoft SharePoint or OneDrive for Business Web UX.

Search has become the primary means in the Enterprise for surfacing and locating information, as a result, it has become a mission critical component of SharePoint deployments. The rise in adoption of SharePoint 2010 in organizations has led to more customers seeking to leverage the benefits of the new search architectures, whether Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010 or FAST Search Server 2010, as part of their topologies. In either scenario…read more on the SharePoint Team Blog.

Predicting resource requirements for a new business application, especially one that is customer-facing is a tricky task. It’s hard to know if you have the new Facebook or your hands. You make your best estimates, then spend money on new hardware and hope your estimates were right. Only actual usage tells whether your server infrastructure is running efficiently. What makes this process more painful is the knowledge that your existing environment probably has the capacity to deliver this application if only the servers were used in a more efficient manner.

We just posted a new Virtual Migration Environment for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Project Server 2003 customers looking to migrate/upgrade to Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Project Server 2007. Overview The Virtual Migration Environment is a set of two virtual disks that provide Office Project Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 environments, sample content, and scripts design to assist customers with upgrade and migration from Office Project Server 2003 and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Project Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

We’ve published a new post on the SharePoint Team Blog that details the process, procedures, and options for upgrading from Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 - read more here…

Upgrading is common function with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, whether it be product specific such as Service Packs and Cumulative Updates or platform specific such as new versions of products or the core operating system. Prior to upgrading to any version of a product or patching and updating that product you should understand both the process and options and available to you. This post provides recommended upgrade resources related to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and Server 2010 and the technologies on which depends separated by both Documentation and Tools resources because I hate looking for this stuff myself.

One of the questions I’ve received on a few occasions to date is how to run the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Preparation Tool on a machine that does not have a connection to the Internet. There are two possible methods to working around this scenario: Manually download on another machine and then install the prerequisite software and configure the Server Roles, Role Services, and Features accordingly. See the following posts that describe the prerequisite software and accompanying download locations in addition to configuring the required Server Roles, Role Services, and Features for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and Server 2010.

I’ve been following the SharePoint 2010 Forums and have noticed several common installation issues. These issues and possible steps to resolve those issues are included here. ISSUE #1: when running the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard you may experience the error: Failed to create the configuration database. An exception of type System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException was thrown. Additional exception information: The data is invalid. To resolve the issue you can perform the following steps:

If you will be installing the SharePoint Server Public Beta on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 or Microsoft Windows 7 you will need to download and install an update from http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806 to resolve an issue that occurs in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 when provisioning Service Applications or when accessing pages that make service calls. These operations will result in an error “System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

I’ve been receiving this question frequently this week so I’m sure others are asking as well: Question Can I upgrade prerelease versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server or Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 to the release version when it becomes available? Answer No, the prerelease (beta) versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 are for evaluation purposes only and upgrade to the release version of these products when they become available is not supported.

Today we announced general availability of the public beta versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. This post describes the prerequisite software requirements and provides links to additional hardware and software requirement resources for Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. Contents Web and Application Server Preparation Database Server Preparation Additional Notes Web and Application Server Preparation Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 provide the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Preparation Tool (PrerequisiteInstaller.

I was recently asked a question regarding moving sites between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web applications and whether or not there are any prerequisites associated with such a move. While moving sites can be an arduous and on occasion, a complicated task, moving between variations in platform only adds to the complexities associated with site-level moves. Many of the Features available to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites are not available to Windows SharePoint Services 3.

After several months of work, we’re pleased to announce publication of a new whitepaper: Upgrading SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Customizations to SharePoint Server 2007. To view the whitepaper visit: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb954662.aspx or http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/11/06/upgrade-customization-articles-posted.aspx for additional details.

I was reviewing the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server TechNet article Determine upgrade approach and realized an article I have been working internally over the past few weeks has been published and introduced to the three existing upgrade approaches of in-place, gradual, and database migration. The upgrade approach itself is described/labeled as a hybrid upgrade approach which combines both the gradual and database migration approaches permitting administrators to preview a subset of site collections prior to upgrading the remainder of the environment (for those who have attended my TechReady, etc.

I’ve updated my post Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors to include new errors and solutions. Read more here: http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2006/12/22/prescan-errors-what-they-mean.aspx. Excerpt: ““An outbound zone URL is configured for something other than the default zone on virtual server http://fabrikam/, and no default zone outbound URL is defined. This is not supported, and must be corrected before upgrading.””

In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 host header-based Site Collections can coexist with path-based site collections within a Web Application or optionally reside on multiple Web Applications. Gradual, in-place, and database migration upgrade approaches can be applied to Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 server farms in scalable hosting mode. This differs from Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 where a server farm was configured to run in scalable hosting mode preventing the introduction of path-based Site Collections to the server farm.

MSDN Windows SharePoint Services Run the pre-upgrade scan tool (Windows SharePoint Services) http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/035a3024-bd27-4d63-9499-0f15ac00c6e61033.mspx Issues that are reported by the pre-upgrade scan tool http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/035a3024-bd27-4d63-9499-0f15ac00c6e61033.mspx#section1 Install and run the pre-upgrade scan tool http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/035a3024-bd27-4d63-9499-0f15ac00c6e61033.mspx#section2 Error message when you try to upgrade Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: “Upgrade has encountered one or more lists that were not updated by Prescan.exe and must exit” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923904 Office SharePoint Server Run the pre-upgrade scan tool (Office SharePoint Server)

I’ve made several updates and revisions to my previous post “Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors”, I hope this information will be useful in diagnosing and remediating errors generated by PRESCAN.EXE.

*UPDATED 5/22/2007 I put together this post as a follow-up to my initial PRESCAN topic “Understanding PRESCAN.EXE in MOSS 2007”; hopefully, this will provide insight into the most common PRESCAN errors administrators may encounter and remediation steps where available. These solutions may not fit every environment due to the natural differences in topologies, hosting models, versioning, and infrastructure. Error: There is no Web named “//”. The Content Database contains one or more orphaned Webs.

A recent change has been communicated for all current Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 B2 (Beta 2) customers. The change will require customers who wish to upgrade their B2 environments to first apply B2 Technical Refresh prior to upgrading to RTM, Windows SharePoint Services will not support B2 to RTM direct upgrades. Previously announced upgrade paths will remain unchanged at this time: B2 Technical Refresh remains planned as a release patch, upgrading to RTM will require the modification of a Registry key, uninstalling B2 Technical Refresh, and then installing RTM.