What You Can’t Upgrade
Reading the preceding pages, it’s tough
to imagine that there isn’t anything that can’t be upgraded to
SharePoint 2013. Although the upgrade options are very good, there are
a few things that cannot be upgraded.
Content
This bears repeating: You can upgrade
to SharePoint 2013 from any version of SharePoint 2010. There is no
way, out of the box, to upgrade content from SharePoint 2007 or
SharePoint 2003. As long as your content or service application
database is from SharePoint 2010 RTM or later, you can attach it to
SharePoint 2013.
Service Applications
Some service applications weren’t so lucky. If a service
application isn’t in the preceding list, it can’t be upgraded. In most
cases that’s not a big loss. The service apps that can’t be upgraded
didn’t have databases, so they didn’t have anything to bring over. They
provided services to data that existed someplace else. As long as that
data is upgraded, and the corresponding SharePoint 2013 service
application is created, the new farm will maintain the functionality
that the SharePoint 2010 farm had.
In SharePoint 2010 the Office Web Apps were
installed on top of SharePoint 2010 and installed as service
applications. In SharePoint 2013 the Office Web Apps are no longer
installed on a SharePoint server, and are no longer service
applications. Because of this architecture change, they cannot be
upgraded. If the Office Web Apps are installed and your SharePoint 2013
farm is connected to your Office Web Apps server, your upgraded content
will automatically take advantage of it. Chapter 15, “The Office Web
Applications for SharePoint,” walk you through what’s new with the
OWAs. It also walks you through how to install the OWAs and configure
SharePoint 2013 to use them.
The PowerPoint Broadcast site template offered in
the SharePoint 2010 OWAs has no equivalent in the 2013 OWAs, so if you
have that site in SharePoint 2010 you’ll need to delete it. You can do
so in SharePoint 2010 before you upgrade, or in SharePoint 2013 after
you attach your database. Either way is fine. If you forget about this
and try to upgrade a PowerPoint Broadcast site, SharePoint 2013 will
snicker under its breath and pleasantly remind you that it cannot
upgrade that type of site.
To avoid the snickering and mocking from
SharePoint, it’s easy enough to scour your SharePoint farm for the
PowerPoint Broadcast sites and remove them. For that, our friend
PowerShell comes to the rescue. Use the following PowerShell statement,
either in SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013, to find all the
PowerPoint Broadcast sites:
Get-SPSite | Where-Object { $_.rootweb.webtemplate -eq " PowerPointBroadcast" }
If you find any of the varmints in your farm, you
can either delete them manually in Central Admin, or show off a little
and use the following PowerShell statement:
Get-SPSite | Where-Object { $_.rootweb.webtemplate -eq " PowerPointBroadcast" } |
Remove-SPSite
Be very careful when automating deletions. Make
sure you use the first statement to see what would be deleted. Even if
you’ve already read Chapter 7, “Administering SharePoint with Windows
PowerShell,” and you understood it all, you can still make costly
mistakes. Nothing takes all the fun out of an upgrade faster than
deleting all the content you just upgraded. Take my word for it.
While you’re deleting unnecessary site
collections, keep your eyes open for the Office Viewing Cache site
collections, as they are not used by the new Office Web Apps either.
There will be one per web application and the URL will be /sites/Office_Viewing_Service_Cache. Like the PowerPoint Broadcast site, these can be deleted before or after the upgrade.
FAST Search Center Sites
FAST was a casualty of the
move to SharePoint 2013. Microsoft bought the search company FAST in
2008 but it was too late in the development cycle to get it properly
integrated into SharePoint 2010. FAST Server for SharePoint was a
separate product for SharePoint 2010 that was bolted on and replaced
SharePoint Server’s content search. Part of that bolted-on experience
was it having its own Search Center site. In SharePoint 2013 the bulk
of the FAST functionality was added to SharePoint’s search, and the
FAST product was eliminated. Because of that, SharePoint 2013 has no
need to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 FAST Search Center site. Its own
Search Center is more than capable. Like the PowerPoint Broadcast site,
you can delete these before or after you attach the content database to
your SharePoint 2013 farm.
