Migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013; What steps are required?

Question

I have been given task to migrate SharePoint 2007 (enterprise) application to 2013 on premise. SharePoint 2007 is running on 64 bit server and during migration it should remain live i.e. should work continuously. Since to migrate 2007 to 2013 initially we need to migrate to 2010 and then again to 2013. Now the problem I am facing is SharePoint 2007 is having large number of A. InfoPath forms B. OOB and custom Workflow

InfoPath forms: While InfoPath forms are not basically supported in SharePoint 2013 and also if we want to run workflow with InfoPath form then only 2010 workflow can be run. What planning should I take for this?

Workflow: Workflow are totally different in 2007 than 2013. What plan should I take to migrate those 2007 workflows to 2010?

Is this really required to fully stabilize the 2010 firm first(with all feature running successfully) and then migrate 2010 application with all feature to 2013? Can any one of you who has done such complicated migration from 2007 to 2013 can tell how to handle this situation? I need your immediate help. Thank you.

Here I have to migrate through default way i.e. without any migration tool. How can I do that?

Answer 1

What you'll do is make sure SharePoint 2007 is patched to Service Pack 3. Build a SharePoint 2010 farm (any patch level, or RTM, will work), then subsequently, build a SharePoint 2013 SP1 farm.

When the migration process starts, moving data to SharePoint 2010, mark the SharePoint 2007 sites as Read Only (or mark the Content Databases as Read Only in SQL or SharePoint). This will prevent any additions during the migration. When the SharePoint databases/Site Collections have been upgraded to SharePoint 2010 on a new SQL Server or new SQL instance on the same SQL Server, migrate those databases from 2010 to SharePoint 2013. At this point in time you can evaluate whether or not to upgrade the sites from v14.5 mode to v15.

Once the migration to SharePoint 2013 is completed, have the test audience modify their hosts file to point to the SharePoint 2013 farm. Once validation has been completed, change any applicable DNS entries to point to SharePoint 2013.

This will provide you with the highest availability of the SharePoint 2007 farm until the migration to SharePoint 2013 is completed.

There should be very few cases where workflows or InfoPath forms need to be modified during this migration period. However, pre-migration testing is extremely critical to complete, as there could be many sites that break.

Another area where you'll want to extensively test is any Full Trust Solutions. They will need to be upgraded to at least SharePoint 2010 (many, but not all, SharePoint 2010 Full Trust Solutions can be used without any changes on SharePoint 2013 -- unless you want to upgrade to v15 sites, where they need to be recompiled with SharePoint 2013 support).

Microsoft has a fair amount of documentation on this process:

Upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010

Upgrade to SharePoint 2013