Sharepoint 2013 : Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade (part 4) - Upgrading Site Collections

4. Upgrading Site Collections

The visual upgrade approach that existed in SharePoint 2010 for upgrades from SharePoint 2007 has changed. SharePoint 2013 now uses “deferred site collection upgrade.” Essentially, SharePoint 2013 puts visual upgrade of site collections in the hands of the site collection owners.

In the previous sections of this chapter, I demonstrated upgrading managed service application databases and content databases. My example used a team site (my Intranet) and a publishing site (my Web Site). Figure 9 shows a screenshot of my team site running in SharePoint 2013 after upgrade. Notice the pink banner at the top of the page, prompting the site collection administrator to upgrade the site collection to the new SharePoint 2013 (aka SharePoint 15) look and feel. If you look at the publishing site, you will see the same banner when you log into the site as a site collection owner or site collection administrator.

If you click the X to close the red banner, or opt for SharePoint to remind you later, you can always return to site collection upgrade from the Site Collections Settings page. If you are not a site collection owner or site collection administrator you probably will not see the red banner, but owners and administrators might find SharePoint nagging, because the banner appears frequently until you proceed with the upgrade.

If you do not see the red banner, have site collection administration permissions, and want to perform an upgrade, you can perform the upgrade as follows:

1. Open the Site Collection.
2. Click the Site Actions menu (remember you are still using SharePoint 2010 look and feel).
3. Select Site Settings from the menu.
4. Click the link for site collection upgrade from the Site Collection Administration section.
5. You should see a page like that in Figure 10.

   

   Figure 10. Site Collection Upgrade page

Notice the link on the Site Collection Upgrade page (Figure 10) to try a demo upgrade. This is the “Evaluation Site Collection” feature and is new to SharePoint 2013. You can stand up a test site collection, containing the same content as your upgraded site, but using the new SharePoint 2013 user interface. You can decide to let selected users loose on the evaluation site to validate that the site operates correctly in the new style.

1. Click the link to try a demo upgrade.
2. Click the button to create an evaluation site.
3. SharePoint lets you know that it might be a day or two before the evaluation site is available.
4. You do not need to wait so long.
5. Open Central Administration.
6. Click the Monitoring heading.
7. Click the link to review job definitions.
8. Scroll to the job called Create Upgrade Evaluation Site Collections job for the specific web application.
9. Run this job to complete evaluation site creation for the web application.

If you have e-mail configured correctly, the site collection administrator should receive an e-mail when SharePoint completes the process of creating an evaluation site. You can easily find the URL of evaluation sites from Central Administration.

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Application Management heading.
3. Click the link to view all site collections.
4. Change the drop-down to the desired web application.
5. Open the evaluation site collection.
6. You should see a page similar to Figure 11.

Figure 11 shows that SharePoint has provided an evaluation site for 30 days (implied by the date). SharePoint also lets you know that you should not do any work in the evaluation site collection—evaluation site collections are copies, and you lose any changes made to them when they expire.

If you are happy with your evaluation site and get the thumbs-up from your test group of users (let your users decided when an upgrade is working), you can now complete the site collection upgrade.

1. Return to the upgraded site collection.
2. Either click the link on the red banner to Start now, or click the link to upgrade the site collection from the Site Collection Settings page.
3. On the Upgrade page (Figure 10), click the button to upgrade the site collection.
4. Click the button to confirm that you wish to continue.
5. SharePoint displays a temporary page, showing progress of the upgrade.
6. When complete, click the link to see the new site.
7. Your site should look something like that in Figure 12.