Currently, we are migrating our internal farm from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. The project is scheduled to go-live after 15 months. The go-live date does not include setting up the development environments – DEV, TEST, UAT and STAGE environments. The roll-out only includes the collaboration portal, an internal-facing farm. The next target for upgrade is the partner farm, an extranet solution to share information with partners. Users are authenticated, but the farm is externally facing is located in the DMZ. It is a small farm and we have been provided authorization to develop a proof of concept to migrate an imaginary site collection from the partner farm to Microsoft online.
This past week, I finished the migration testing using Meta-Vis. The second part of the PoC is the integration of authentication for an extranet. This depends on implementation of technologies by other groups before proceeding to the next phase of the PoC validation.
In testing the migration of data, I started by developing new sites and content in the cloud. I had a list of requirements in the sites that are common to site collections in our partner farm. I built the site collection in the cloud and purposely built the features and documents to test the functionality. The content did not include any production or test data that would expose the client to spillage of restricted information. It is important to develop content that is real or it does not validate the test, but also does not expose a customer’s data to release information they do not want released. The second important feature of developing content is the development of content was performed in the cloud. This tested all the features for developing in the cloud. It also validated that the information on the cloud could be moved to an on premise farm should the organization decide it wanted to move from the cloud to on premise should security or cost requirements change in the future.
The Meta-Vis tool was successful in moving content from the cloud into an internal farm. We were then able to validate moving the same content from the partner farm to the cloud. The test cases identified the features that worked, any changes that would need to be implemented for a successful migration. We also validated that the information could be returned on premise due to a change in circumstance. We identified problems with firewalls, but are waiting to test authentication. We have documented changes to administration procedures imposed by using Microsoft Online and the different design considerations.
reilingh 