Case Studies

Upgrading to SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013
Posted in Chemical, Digital Workplace Solutions, SharePoint

Summary

DMC’s Consulting Services team upgraded Daubert Industries SharePoint 2010 Portal to SharePoint 2013. The project was completed in three phases: a fresh installation of the SharePoint 2013 platform, migration of content, and user training.

Solution

Daubert Industries, a chemical company in the west suburbs of Chicago, originally engaged with DMC to help implement their SharePoint 2010 portal.   After working together on the design of the portal taxonomy, adding content from their network drive, and evaluating SharePoint’s overall value to the organization, Daubert decided to move forward with plans to expand SharePoint’s use throughout the enterprise. 

As the SharePoint evaluation period was wrapping up, Microsoft released SharePoint 2013.  Instead of training users on SharePoint 2010, Daubert elected to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 first so that users would not have to learn the SharePoint 2010 environment and then a new environment shortly after. 

As part of the upgrade effort, DMC’s Microsoft consulting services team took an inventory of SharePoint 2010 customizations and tested them on the SharePoint 2013 platform to confirm backwards compatibility.  Next, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps were installed within a new virtual server environment.  The farm was configured with appropriate settings for email, security and permissions, and converted to claims-based authentication.  DMC leveraged PowerShell to update many of the SharePoint 2013 services. DMC then completed the final technical activity of the SharePoint upgrade process, which was to detach the SharePoint 2010 content database and attach it to the new SharePoint 2013 farm so the database schema could be upgraded. 

Once the site was ready, training sessions were conducted to teach power users how to use the new SharePoint 2013 features and administer the new farm.  Plans are now underway to build Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards derived from data managed by other enterprise systems.

Learn more about DMC's SharePoint consulting services.

Customer Benefits

  • Drag and Drop Files into a Document Library
  • Richer Search Experience (new metadata filtering and file preview features)
  • Office Web Apps (browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
  • More intuitive interface to edit custom columns of a list
  • Easier access to library and list views (they appear next to each other instead of in a drop down)
  • Additional workflow actions (i.e. ‘for’ loops) allowing for construction of more powerful and complex workflows to be built using SharePoint Designer
  • Documents are stored in small slices instead of a large single BLOB (a.k.a. “shredded storage”), so versions don’t use up as much space and saving updates takes less time.

Technologies

  • SharePoint 2013 Foundation
  • SharePoint Designer 2013
  • SharePoint PowerShell