Joel Oleson December 22, 2014 0

I’m working on a strategy paper on the Search-First approach to migrating or upgrading to SharePoint 2013.  I see three big phases to this approach.  The first is building out the brand new ultimate farm, the SharePoint 2013 farm that provides enterprise search.  Many may decide that this first state should also provides profiles and also may provide the new OneDrive to also get people started with SharePoint 2013.  Those who previously deployed my sites, may wait for phase 2 for that.  I’ll be providing more detail in the paper on these phases and a few recommendations on the strategy.  Love to get feedback from those who have approached the upgrade and migration in this manner.

Those that are planning an upgrade to SharePoint 2013 should consider a search-first migration.  The Search-First approach to migration assumes you want to get started, and you are willing to invest in separate infrastructure for SharePoint 2013 Search and leave your existing farm alone for some period of time with the idea of indexing that content with the new farm.  This approach allows organizations to benefit from the improved functionality and user experience while requiring relatively low effort. Microsoft has dramatically improved search in SharePoint 2013 in three key areas: User Experience, Relevancy Tuning and Infrastructure. I’m working on a paper that will highlight these enhancements while illustrating the benefits of a search-first approach. In our experience, a good deployment of search can help with adoption of other structured and unstructured collaborative or portal based workloads by providing discovery, findability and refinement for content most important to the enterprise. This article begins with an introduction to the new features and improved look and feel along with other search relevance, and infrastructure flexibility enhancements that demonstrate the support for Search-First approach to migration.

Organizations that are overwhelmed by the thought of migrating the substantial content they house in SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2007 farms will be encouraged by a Search-First approach. This strategy does not require any changes to the existing infrastructure and provides a mechanism for content to remain in current repository while the technology and search engine for the enterprise takes a leap forward. After understanding the improvements in UI and UX, relevancy and infrastructure it’s easy to see why customers would be looking to implement a Search-First approach to deploying or migrating to SharePoint 2013.

The Search-First Approach to SharePoint 2013 Migration and Upgrade Infographic