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Case Studies:End of Life SharePoint 2010 Migration Future-Proofs IT Provider

The Challenge

A U.S. Military IT Service Provider was quickly approaching the End of Life for SharePoint 2010 and needed support to promptly plan and execute a migration to a SharePoint 2019 on-premises environment ensuring minimal customer interruption.

The Solution

AIS used AvePoint’s DocAve Migration Tool to migrate the large SharePoint 2010 on-premises farm directly to SharePoint 2019 on-premises, ensuring a direct migration not natively supported by Microsoft. We also used extensions and Webparts to customize and create collections for their intranet site.

The Results

The migration to SharePoint 2019 met all customer project requirements. AIS reduced migration time and cost by moving directly from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2019, skipping all intermediate migrations and reducing the overall data footprint.

Saying goodbye to End of Life SharePoint 2010

With SharePoint 2010 nearing End of Life, AIS started by migrating SharePoint 2010 content into SharePoint 2019 modern site templates to reduce future modernization time.

  • Site architecture design uses hostname site collections in SharePoint 2019 farm.
  • Data from SharePoint 2010 classic lists and libraries are copied to the modern list and libraries in SharePoint 2019 Modern Team sites.
  • Classic pages are copied as Classic pages into SharePoint 2019 sites. Even though pages are classic, but backend lists and libraries’ experiences are modern.
  • Users can easily switch back and forth between modern view and classic view in new SharePoint 2019 sites.
  • We migrated production SharePoint 2010 content into SharePoint 2019 staging environment and finished the testing in a staging environment.
  • Next, we migrated the SharePoint 2010 production content into SharePoint 2019 production environment and performed the testing again. We migrated only updates from SharePoint 2010 Lists and Libraries to the SharePoint 2019 farm at the final going live weekend.

Each office has its own App Catalog site collection for custom code deployment.

Modernizing SharePoint look and feel to customize future updates

The Development team re-designed the old classic home page, which had server-side code, into a new Modern SharePoint home page using the SharePoint Framework and React.js. Our UI/UX team designed the new modern-looking theme for our pages. Our Development team did not need much ramp-up time to learn SPFx development since the team is trained to work on SharePoint front-end development using React.js.

Global Site Navigation includes a custom header and footer designed using the SPFx extension. Our client also requested custom event and link web parts, which we created using SPFx modern web parts with configurable options. Our next step was to convert old classic pages to modern pages.

We activated the publishing feature on the main site collection level so subsites that still have classic pages can take the advantage of SharePoint Master page for their look and feel. For example, our SharePoint 2010 Farm master page was heavily customized using the server-side code. We simplified and re-uploaded to SharePoint 2019 Master page gallery to give classic pages branding.

Another good feature available with SharePoint 2019 is column formatting, which can help to remove a lot of custom JavaScript code from your farm.

SharePoint 2019 works well with both modern pages and classic pages. So, if you have many sites, migrate into SharePoint 2019 as modern team sites, and keep the classic pages. You can later re-design the classic pages into modern pages using out-of-the-box web parts like Quick Links, Hero Web part, Embedded, etc.

Next up

Following the End of Life SharePoint 2010 Migration, the team is working on another migration, this time for SharePoint 2013 on-premises farm to SharePoint Online, including flat HUB site architecture design.

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