This post assumes a single SharePoint server but if you have multiple SharePoint servers, you must follow these steps on all SharePoint servers in your farm.

Introduction

The SharePoint world is rapidly moving into the Cloud with SharePoint Online and Office 365, but some organizations are still not ready to move completely to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2019 that has support for a hybrid scenario can be a valid solution to allow a gradual move to the cloud.

Installing a SharePoint 2019 farm can be done in an automated way using PowerShell and AutoSPInstaller. One additional advantage of this installation process ensures that the SharePoint farm is installed with the latest updates, leaving the SharePoint farm updated and working properly (if you want to learn how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way, click here and here).

To ensure that after the installation, the SharePoint server is kept always updated, we must ensure that both the Windows Updates and specially the SharePoint Cumulative Updates are properly installed.

Installing SharePoint Updates

To install the latest SharePoint Cumulative Updates in your farm, follow the following steps:

• Download the SharePoint Cumulative Updates
• Backup SharePoint Farm and Configurations
• Install the Cumulative Updates in the SharePoint Farm (using PowerShell)
• Run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard
• Post-Installation Steps

Download the SharePoint Cumulative Updates

All starts by downloading the latest SharePoint Cumulative Updates. To do that, you must download:

• SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019:
  • The latest language independent SharePoint updates
  • The latest language dependent SharePoint updates (even if you just have the English language pack installed in your farm)
• SharePoint 2013:
  • The latest SharePoint 2013 Server updates (if you have SharePoint 2013 Server installed)
  • The latest SharePoint Foundation 2013 updates (if you have only SharePoint Foundation 2013 installed). This update is not necessary if you have SharePoint 2013 Server since SharePoint Foundation 2013 is included in SharePoint 2013 Server

To stay up to date and download the latest updates, click here for SharePoint 2019, here for SharePoint 2016 and here for SharePoint 2013.

Backup SharePoint Farm and Configurations

Before applying the updates, you should perform the following backups:

• Backup the SharePoint farm by running the following command:
  Backup-SPFarm -Directory <BackupFolder> -BackupMethod Full -Verbose

The backup folder should be a shared folder on the network, accessible by both SharePoint and database servers.

Ensure the SharePoint Server VSS Writer service is started on the SharePoint server (not started automatically).

Ensure the SQL Server VSS Writer service is started on the database server.

For more details about SharePoint farm backup, click here, here and here

• Backup all SharePoint databases in the database server that supports the SharePoint farm using SQL Server Enterprise tools
• Backup the web.config files for all web applications
• If you have custom developed solutions using server-side code, backup the solutions. To make this easier, you can download a PowerShell script from my GitHub repository

Install the Cumulative Updates in the SharePoint Farm (using PowerShell)

After downloading the latest updates and taking the necessary precautions, you are ready to install them in your SharePoint farm.

If you want to use the traditional method to update your farm, click here. If you want to learn the PowerShell way and speed up the installation of the Cumulative Updates in your SharePoint farm, read on!

To download the SharePoint Patch PowerShell script, click here. This script, written by Trevor Seward, is an improved version of a PowerShell script originally created by Russ Maxwell for SharePoint 2013.

The way this PowerShell script ensures that the SharePoint patch process time is reduced from 4 to 5 hours to less than one hour is by doing the following:

• If you choose to (use the -Pause switch parameter), suspends the Search Service Application. This is very important since if a search crawl was triggered during the installation of the Cumulative Update, the Search Application could get corrupted and you could be forced to rebuild the entire Search Service Application, recreate any custom managed properties and perform a Full Crawl again to ensure you have search results and all search based solutions work properly
• For SharePoint 2013 (not necessary for SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019), the following services will be disabled and then stopped:
  • Search services are disabled
  • Search services are stopped
  • IISAdmin and SPTimerV4 services are disabled
  • IISAdmin and SPTimerV4 services are stopped
• If you choose to, the Cumulative Updates are installed in passive mode (without any necessary user interaction) but you can still see the installation process in the UI
• When the installation of the Cumulative Updates is complete:
  • For SharePoint 2013 (not necessary for SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019), the following services will be set to automatic:
    • Search services
    • IISAdmin and SPTimerV4 services
  • If you choose to use the -Pause switch parameter, the Search Service Application will be resumed

To start the installation process, open the SharePoint PowerShell window (run as administrator) and execute the following commands:

• Import-Module .\SharePointPatchScript.psm1
• Install-SPPatch -Path -Pause
  • Example: Install-SPPatch -Path D:\SharePoint\Updates -Pause

For SharePoint 2016 and 2019, a monthly Cumulative Update typically contains both the language independent (“sts” file) and the language dependent (“wssloc” file) packages. Sometimes, a Cumulative Update only includes the language independent package. If that is the case, and you already have the latest language dependent package installed, you can run the PowerShell command with the -OnlySTS switch parameter:

• Import-Module .\SharePointPatchScript.psm1
• Install-SPPatch -OnlySTS -Path -Pause
  • Example: Install-SPPatch -OnlySTS -Path D:\SharePoint\Updates -Pause

This will start the SharePoint farm update process (examples for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2019).

For SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation packages will be detected automatically and installed. The example below is for SharePoint 2013 Server.

For SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019, both language independent and language dependent packages will be detected automatically and installed.

Instead of taking hours to perform, the updates should be installed in less than one hour.

A reboot to the server may be necessary.

Run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard

To finish the farm update process, you must ensure that after the updates are properly installed, you execute the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard that will ensure the following:

• The database schema for all SharePoint databases is updated to the latest version
• Copies the required binaries from the install location into the _app_bin directories of all web applications
  
• Fixes security settings on the file system to match SharePoint’s needs
• Updates features registrations with SharePoint

To start, run the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard and select Yes when prompted to reset IIS, SharePoint Administration and SharePoint Timer services.

Depending on your environment, the process will take some minutes to execute the 10 steps of the process.

After a few minutes, the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard will finish executing, hopefully with success.

After clicking on Finish, the Central Administration will automatically be launched.

Post-Installation Steps

To ensure that the farm was successfully updated, it is important to check that the Databases Upgrade Status page.

If the page shows any database still needing upgrade (showing the “Database is in compatibility range and upgrade is recommended” status), some additional steps must be followed.

These steps must also be followed if you encounter the error below while running SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard, saying that there is a mismatch between SharePoint installed version (after updating the farm) and the database schema version.

To ensure all databases are properly upgraded, follow the following steps:

• Upgrade the content databases by executing the following PowerShell command (executed with “run as administrator”):

Get-SPContentDatabase | Upgrade-SPContentDatabase

• Upgrade the remaining content databases, executing the following command (in command prompt with “run as administrator”):

Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

• Run the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) again. After running SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard again, it should run without errors.

To confirm the databases upgrade was successful, go back to the Databases Upgrade Status page. After the previous steps, all SharePoint databases were successfully upgraded.

To ensure the upgrade process was successfully finished, go to the Patch Status page and the Upgrade Status page.

Important Notes

Some important notes on using SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) and PSCONFIG.EXE (command line version):

• You should not run PSCONFIG.EXE as a replacement of SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE)
  • PSCONFIGUI.EXE is the UI based configuration wizard which performs several tasks one after the other after installing fixes. It is the preferred option to ensure that the SharePoint farm update is completed after installing updates in your SharePoint farm
  • PSCONFIG.EXE is the command line tool which gives users granular control over all tasks that are executed and which is therefore often quicker than PSCONFIGUI.EXE but if misused will not make all the necessary tasks required after installing updates in your SharePoint farm
  • If you want to run PSCONFIG.EXE, ensure you run it with the correct parameters: “PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd secureresources -cmd services -install”
    • Above, I used “Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force” since I already had used
      SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) and the only thing I wanted to ensure was that SharePoint databases schema were upgraded
• PSCONFIGUI.EXE should always be executed even when installing SharePoint security updates

For more details, check Stefan Goßner’s articles here and here.

Troubleshooting

During an update there are a few errors that can occur while the patch is being validated against your SharePoint environment before is starts being installed. The most common errors are the following:

• “The expected version of the product was not found on the system” – this article by Stefan Goßner explains the error in detail and what can cause it. Basically, SharePoint is typically composed of the following components:
  • SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation*
  • SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation English Language Pack*
  • Any additional SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation Language Packs*
    
    * – SharePoint Foundation existed from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 and in SharePoint 2016 and 2019, only SharePoint Server is available
    
    To solve this error, you must ensure that all components have the same patch level. If any of the installed components has a lower patch level or doesn’t meet the Cumulative Update Prerequisites, the error above will be shown and you won’t be able to install the Cumulative Update in your SharePoint farm.
    
    Example: Install the May 2019 Cumulative Update in a SharePoint 2013 farm that has Service Pack 1 (15.0.4571.1502 patch level). The installed components have the following patch levels:
    • SharePoint Server 2013 – 15.0.4571.1502 (Service Pack 1)
    • SharePoint Server 2013 English Language Pack – 15.0.4571.1502 (Service Pack 1)
    • SharePoint Server 2013 Portuguese Language Pack – 15.0.4420.1017 (RTM)
      
      The “The expected version of the product was not found on the system” error will be shown since of one of the components (the Portuguese Language Pack) has a lower patch level. To solve this, you must install the SharePoint Server 2013 Portuguese Language Pack Service Pack 1 (you can get the download link here)
      
      To help you to identify the problem, you can use Roiscan which generates a detailed report of all installed Office components, including SharePoint, and verify the patch level of each components.
      
      You can also take a look at this article that can help you ensure that the information about all installed patches is correctly updated in the SharePoint configuration database.
      
• “No product installed for contained patch” – this can occur if you are installing a Cumulative Update for the wrong version of SharePoint. The most common case is when you are trying to install the SharePoint Foundation 2013 Cumulative Update in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm. In this case, you only need to install the SharePoint 2013 Server Cumulative Update

Other errors can occur while trying to run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard after installing the patch:

• “Feature is referenced in database but isn’t installed on the current farm” – this is more common in an farm upgrade scenario (ex: upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019) but can also occur while installing a SharePoint Service Pack or Cumulative Update. To learn more details about this error and how to solve it, click here.
• “An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action.” when you run the following command “Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force”. If you take a look at the ULS Logs, you may find messages like “PSCONFIG.EXE (0x1A8C) UpdatedConcurrencyException: The object SPUpgradeSession Name=Upgrade-20190531-122515-42 was updated by another user. Determine if these changes will conflict, resolve any differences, and reapply the second change. This error may also indicate a programming error caused by obtaining two copies of the same object in a single thread.”. To solve this problem, execute the following command:
  
  PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd secureresources
  
  NOTE: After solving these issues, to finish the process, run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard again.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to install SharePoint Cumulative Updates In Less Than An Hour in a SharePoint Farm Step by Step appeared first on Blog IT.

This post assumes a single SharePoint server but if you have multiple SharePoint servers, you must follow these steps on all SharePoint servers in your farm.

UPDATE 02/05/2019:

The farm update process can take several hours. If you want to learn how to update your SharePoint farm in less than an hour, using PowerShell click here.

Introduction

The SharePoint world is rapidly moving into the Cloud with SharePoint Online and Office 365, but some organizations are still not ready to move completely to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2019 that has support for a hybrid scenario can be a valid solution to allow a gradual move to the cloud.

Installing a SharePoint 2019 farm can be done in an automated way using PowerShell and AutoSPInstaller. One additional advantage of this installation process ensures that the SharePoint farm is installed with the latest updates, leaving the SharePoint farm updated and working properly (if you want to learn how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way, click here and here).

To ensure that after the installation, the SharePoint server is kept always updated, we must ensure that both the Windows Updates and specially the SharePoint Cumulative Updates are properly installed.

Installing SharePoint Updates

To install the latest SharePoint Cumulative Updates in your farm, follow the following steps:

• Download the SharePoint Cumulative Updates
• Backup SharePoint Farm and Configurations
• Pre-Installation Steps
• Install the Cumulative Updates in the SharePoint Farm
• Run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard
• Post-Installation Steps

Download the SharePoint Cumulative Updates

All starts by downloading the latest SharePoint Cumulative Updates. To do that, you must download:

• SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019:
  • The latest language independent SharePoint updates
  • The latest language dependent SharePoint updates (even if you just have the English language pack installed in your farm)
• SharePoint 2013:
  • The latest SharePoint 2013 Server updates (if you have SharePoint 2013 Server installed)
  • The latest SharePoint Foundation 2013 updates (if you have only SharePoint Foundation 2013 installed). This update is not necessary if you have SharePoint 2013 Server since SharePoint Foundation 2013 is included in SharePoint 2013 Server

To stay up to date and download the latest updates, click here for SharePoint 2019, here for SharePoint 2016 and here for SharePoint 2013.

Backup SharePoint Farm and Configurations

Before applying the updates, you should perform the following backups:

• Backup the SharePoint farm by running the following command:
  Backup-SPFarm -Directory <BackupFolder> -BackupMethod Full -Verbose

The backup folder should be a shared folder on the network, accessible by both SharePoint and database servers.

Ensure the SharePoint Server VSS Writer service is started on the SharePoint server (not started automatically).

Ensure the SQL Server VSS Writer service is started on the database server.

For more details about SharePoint farm backup, click here, here and here

• Backup all SharePoint databases in the database server that supports the SharePoint farm using SQL Server Enterprise tools
• Backup the web.config files for all web applications
• If you have custom developed solutions using server-side code, backup the solutions. To make this easier, you can download a PowerShell script from my GitHub repository

Pre-Installation Steps

To ensure that no crawls are started or running during the Cumulative Update installation, it is very import to suspend the Search Service. If a search crawl was triggered during the installation, the Search Application could get corrupted and you could be forced to rebuild the entire Search Service Application, recreate any custom managed properties and perform a Full Crawl again to ensure you have search results and all search based solutions work properly.

To avoid these problems and ensure there are no search crawls running during the installation, execute the following PowerShell command:

Suspend-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication –Identity “<Search Service Application Name>”

Install the Cumulative Updates in the SharePoint Farm

After downloading the latest updates and taking the necessary precautions, you are ready to install them in your SharePoint farm.

First, install the language independent update:

The update will take a few minutes, depending on your server capabilities.

After a few minutes, the update finishes the installation and a reboot to the server is necessary.

If you have a language dependent update, install it after installing the language independent update:

The update will take a few minutes, depending on your server capabilities. In my case, I installed the Portuguese (Portugal) Language Pack Cumulative Update.

After a few minutes, the update finishes the installation.

Run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard

To finish the farm update process, you must ensure that after the updates are properly installed, you execute the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard that will ensure the following:

• The database schema for all SharePoint databases is updated to the latest version
• Copies the required binaries from the install location into the _app_bin directories of all web applications
  
• Fixes security settings on the file system to match SharePoint’s needs
• Updates features registrations with SharePoint

To start, run the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard and select Yes when prompted to reset IIS, SharePoint Administration and SharePoint Timer services.

Depending on your environment, the process will take some minutes to execute the 10 steps of the process.

After a few minutes, the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard will finish executing, hopefully with success.

After clicking on Finish, the Central Administration will automatically be launched.

Post-Installation Steps

To ensure that the farm was successfully updated, it is important to check that the Databases Upgrade Status page.

If the page shows any database still needing upgrade (showing the “Database is in compatibility range and upgrade is recommended” status), some additional steps must be followed.

These steps must also be followed if you encounter the error below while running SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard, saying that there is a mismatch between SharePoint installed version (after updating the farm) and the database schema version.

To ensure all databases are properly upgraded, follow the following steps:

• Upgrade the content databases by executing the following PowerShell command (executed with “run as administrator”):

Get-SPContentDatabase | Upgrade-SPContentDatabase

• Upgrade the remaining content databases, executing the following command (in command prompt with “run as administrator”):

Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

• Run the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) again. After running SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard again, it should run without errors.

To confirm the databases upgrade was successful, go back to the Databases Upgrade Status page. After the previous steps, all SharePoint databases were successfully upgraded.

To ensure the upgrade process was successfully finished, go to the Patch Status page and the Upgrade Status page.

Finally, after the farm is updated, you can resume the Search Service Application, running the following PowerShell command:

Resume-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication –Identity “<Search Service Application Name>”

Important Notes

Some important notes on using SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) and PSCONFIG.EXE (command line version):

• You should not run PSCONFIG.EXE as a replacement of SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE)
  • PSCONFIGUI.EXE is the UI based configuration wizard which performs several tasks one after the other after installing fixes. It is the preferred option to ensure that the SharePoint farm update is completed after installing updates in your SharePoint farm
  • PSCONFIG.EXE is the command line tool which gives users granular control over all tasks that are executed and which is therefore often quicker than PSCONFIGUI.EXE but if misused will not make all the necessary tasks required after installing updates in your SharePoint farm
  • If you want to run PSCONFIG.EXE, ensure you run it with the correct parameters: “PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd secureresources -cmd services -install”
    • Above, I used “Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force” since I already had used
      SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI.EXE) and the only thing I wanted to ensure was that SharePoint databases schema were upgraded
• PSCONFIGUI.EXE should always be executed even when installing SharePoint security updates

For more details, check Stefan Goßner’s articles here and here.

Troubleshooting

During an update there are a few errors that can occur while the patch is being validated against your SharePoint environment before is starts being installed. The most common errors are the following:

• “The expected version of the product was not found on the system” – this article by Stefan Goßner explains the error in detail and what can cause it. Basically, SharePoint is typically composed of the following components:
  • SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation*
  • SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation English Language Pack*
  • Any additional SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation Language Packs*
    
    * – SharePoint Foundation existed from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 and in SharePoint 2016 and 2019, only SharePoint Server is available
    
    To solve this error, you must ensure that all components have the same patch level. If any of the installed components has a lower patch level or doesn’t meet the Cumulative Update Prerequisites, the error above will be shown and you won’t be able to install the Cumulative Update in your SharePoint farm.
    
    Example: Install the May 2019 Cumulative Update in a SharePoint 2013 farm that has Service Pack 1 (15.0.4571.1502 patch level). The installed components have the following patch levels:SharePoint Server 2013 – 15.0.4571.1502 (Service Pack 1)
    SharePoint Server 2013 English Language Pack – 15.0.4571.1502 (Service Pack 1)
    SharePoint Server 2013 Portuguese Language Pack – 15.0.4420.1017 (RTM)
    
    The “The expected version of the product was not found on the system” error will be shown since of one of the components (the Portuguese Language Pack) has a lower patch level. To solve this, you must install the SharePoint Server 2013 Portuguese Language Pack Service Pack 1 (you can get the download link here)
    
    To help you to identify the problem, you can use Roiscan which generates a detailed report of all installed Office components, including SharePoint, and verify the patch level of each components.
    
    You can also take a look at this article that can help you ensure that the information about all installed patches is correctly updated in the SharePoint configuration database.
• “No product installed for contained patch” – this can occur if you are installing a Cumulative Update for the wrong version of SharePoint. The most common case is when you are trying to install the SharePoint Foundation 2013 Cumulative Update in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm. In this case, you only need to install the SharePoint 2013 Server Cumulative Update

Other errors can occur while trying to run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard after installing the patch:

• “Feature is referenced in database but isn’t installed on the current farm” – this is more common in an farm upgrade scenario (ex: upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019) but can also occur while installing a SharePoint Service Pack or Cumulative Update. To learn more details about this error and how to solve it, click here.
• “An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action.” when you run the following command “Psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force”. If you take a look at the ULS Logs, you may find messages like “PSCONFIG.EXE (0x1A8C) UpdatedConcurrencyException: The object SPUpgradeSession Name=Upgrade-20190531-122515-42 was updated by another user. Determine if these changes will conflict, resolve any differences, and reapply the second change. This error may also indicate a programming error caused by obtaining two copies of the same object in a single thread.”. To solve this problem, execute the following command:
  
  PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd secureresources
  
  NOTE: After solving these issues, to finish the process, run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard again.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to install SharePoint Cumulative Updates in a SharePoint Farm Step by Step appeared first on Blog IT.

To read the first part, click here.

Introduction

The SharePoint world is rapidly moving into the Cloud with SharePoint Online and Office 365, but some organizations are still not ready to move completely to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2019 that have support for hybrid scenarios can be a valid solution.

This post is based on upgrading a SharePoint 2010 farm into SharePoint 2016 using the database attach approach but should also be valid if you want to upgrade to SharePoint 2019. This post assumes that the we will only migrate the content database(s) from the source SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 and all other SharePoint databases are created in the target SharePoint 2016 farm during its installation process.

If you want to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

There is another valid migration approach to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 by using content migration. In this approach, the upgrade is not based in a database upgrade process but on content migration and typically a 3rd party solution is necessary to do the content migration. A few 3rd party solutions that can do the job are ShareGate, AvePoint and Metalogix.

Upgrading a SharePoint farm using the database attach approach can be a complex task and the upgrade process is composed by a series of steps:

• Migrating Custom Developed Solutions from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 (outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm
• Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2016 farm

IMPORTANT NOTE: In a typical upgrade process, the below steps should be performed twice if there are custom developed solutions:

• The first time, to test the migration process and allow custom developed solutions to be properly migrated and tested by the end users
• The second time, to perform the final migration, after all custom developed solutions are migrated and tested by the end users

This post will cover:

• Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2016 farm

Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2016 farm

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Migrating from SharePoint 2010 directly to SharePoint 2016 is not supported. To migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 we must first migrate to a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm and then migrate to SharePoint 2016
• To to be able to migrate to SharePoint 2016, the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm must at least have the March 2013 Public Update installed. For more details, click here

The migration is performed using the database attach upgrade method (the only supported method to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 using a database upgrade approach).

In the upgrade process, for both the temporary SharePoint 2013 and the target SharePoint 2016 farms, you should create an empty web application so that a valid SharePoint content database is created. To learn more on how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm (process also valid for SharePoint 2013), click here and here.

After having all custom developed solutions migrated to SharePoint 2016 (if there are any), you should follow the following steps:

• SharePoint 2013: Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application and then the option “Remove content database”. This will make the web application unattached from any web application in the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm

• SharePoint 2013 Database Server (final migration only): Place the database in read-write mode so that users will be able to change content in the target SharePoint 2016 farm. This can be achieved by the following T-SQL command: ALTER DATABASE <CONTENT_DB_NAME> SET read_write
• SharePoint 2013 Database Server: Backup of the content database(s)

• SharePoint 2013 (final migration only): Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application, then the option “Add content database” and finally select the name of the content database previously removed. This will make the web application available again in the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm

• SharePoint 2016 Database Server: Copy the database backup file from the temporary SharePoint 2013 database server to the database server that supports the target SharePoint 2016 farm
• SharePoint 2016:  Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application where you want to migrate to and then the option “Remove content database”. This will make the database unattached from any web application.

• SharePoint 2016 Database Server: Restore the content database backup from the temporary SharePoint 2013 database server. The restore must replace the content database that was created during the SharePoint 2016 installation.

• SharePoint 2016:  If you have custom developed farm solutions, deploy all the migrated WSPs in the target SharePoint 2016 farm.
• SharePoint 2016  Execute the first of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2016 farm (in this example the web application URL is http://sp2016): Test-SPContentDatabase -Name <Content_DB_Name> -WebApplication http://sp2016
  
  • This PowerShell cmdlet will test the content database against the web application to verify if all customizations referenced within the content database are also installed in the farm
  • In my case, I got some missing features errors but none of them are upgrade blocking

• SharePoint 2016:  Execute the second of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2016 farm: Mount-SPContentDatabase -Name “<Content_DB_Name>” -DatabaseServer “<DBAlias>” -WebApplication “http://sp2016”
  • This PowerShell cmdlet attaches an existing content database to a web application
  • In my case, no errors or warnings were shown

• SharePoint 2016:  Execute the third of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2016 farm: Test-SPSite http://sp2016
  • This PowerShell cmdlet runs a series of health checks on the site collection and its contents
  • In my case, I got a warning but once again nothing that is upgrade blocking

• SharePoint 2016:  Execute the fourth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2016 farm: Repair-SPSite -identity http://sp2016
  • This PowerShell cmdlet is similar to the Test-SPSite cmdlet but fixes any issues that it finds
  • The result was identical to the Test-SPSite cmdlet: no upgrading blocking issues were found

• SharePoint 2016:  Execute the fifth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2016 farm: Upgrade-SPSite http://sp2016 -VersionUpgrade
  • This PowerShell cmdlet will upgrade the site collections associated to the web application to SharePoint 2016 mode. Before this cmdlet was executed, the site collections were still in SharePoint 2013 mode.

After the migration is complete, your SharePoint web application is successfully displayed in your brand new SharePoint 2016 environment!

To read the first part of this two part step by step tutorial, click here.

Related Articles

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 Step by Step (Part 2) appeared first on Blog IT.

To read the second part, click here.

Introduction

The SharePoint world is rapidly moving into the Cloud with SharePoint Online and Office 365, but some organizations are still not ready to move completely to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2019 that have support for hybrid scenarios can be a valid solution.

This post is based on upgrading a SharePoint 2010 farm into SharePoint 2016 using the database attach approach but should also be valid if you want to upgrade to SharePoint 2019. This post assumes that the we will only migrate the content database(s) from the source SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 and all other SharePoint databases are created in the target SharePoint 2016 farm during its installation process.

If you want to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

There is another valid migration approach to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 by using a content migration. In this approach, the upgrade is not based in a database upgrade process but on content migration and typically a 3rd party solution is necessary to do the content migration. A few 3rd party solutions that can do the job are ShareGate, AvePoint and Metalogix.

Upgrading a SharePoint farm using the database attach approach can be a complex task and the upgrade process is composed by a series of steps:

• Migrating Custom Developed Solutions from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 (outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm
• Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2016 farm

IMPORTANT NOTE: In a typical upgrade process, the below steps should be performed twice if there are custom developed solutions:

• The first time, to test the migration process and allow custom developed solutions to be properly migrated and tested by the end users
• The second time, to perform the final migration, after all custom developed solutions are migrated and tested by the end users

This post will cover:

• Migrating Custom Developed Solutions from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016
  (details about the migration of custom solutions are outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm

Migrating Custom Developed Solutions from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016

This step is outside the scope of this post but a few notes are important to mention if you have custom developed solutions that you want to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016:

• First, you should analyze the source SharePoint 2010 farm and look for custom developed solutions and in particular for farm solutions and/or sandboxed solutions
• If custom developed solutions are found and if you want to take the easiest migration path, you could simply upgrade your custom developed solutions to SharePoint 2016 without changing the architecture. This typically involves migrating server-side code from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016, possible migration of master pages and adjustments to CSS and JS files
• Despite more difficult, if possible, you should consider migrating the existing solutions to one of the following development models:
  • SharePoint Framework: the latest and the recommended development model for modern SharePoint solutions, enabling an easier migration path to SharePoint Online and Office 365
  • SharePoint Add-Ins: this development model is still supported and can be a valid solution depending on your scenario. However, when possible. you should consider migrating solutions to the SharePoint Framework development model

Upgrade into a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Migrating from SharePoint 2010 directly to SharePoint 2016 is not supported. To migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 we must first migrate to a temporary SharePoint 2013 farm and then migrate to SharePoint 2016
• To to be able to migrate to SharePoint 2016, the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm must at least have the March 2013 Public Update installed. For more details, click here

The migration is performed using the database attach upgrade method (the only supported method to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 using a database upgrade approach).

In the upgrade process, for both the temporary SharePoint 2013 and the target SharePoint 2016 farms, you should create an empty web application so that a valid SharePoint content database is created. To learn more on how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm (process also valid for SharePoint 2013), click here and here.

After having all custom developed solutions migrated to SharePoint 2016 (if there are any), you should follow the following steps:

• SharePoint 2010 (test migration only): Export all WSPs from the SharePoint 2010 farm to file system. To export the WSP files, you can use this PowerShell script.
  SharePoint 2010 (final migration only): Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application and then the option “Remove content database”. This will temporarily make the web application unavailable in the source SharePoint 2010 farm

• SharePoint 2010 Database Server (final migration only): Place the database in read-only mode to ensure the source web application is made available again and so that users cannot change content anymore during the upgrade process. This can be achieved by the following T-SQL command: ALTER DATABASE <CONTENT_DB_NAME> SET read_only
• SharePoint 2010 Database Server: Backup of the content database(s) (in read-only mode in the final migration)

• SharePoint 2010 (final migration only): Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application, then the option “Add content database” and finally select the name of the content database previously removed. This will make the web application available again in the source SharePoint 2010 farm in read-only mode, preventing users from changing any content

• SharePoint 2013 Database Server: Copy the database backup file from the source SharePoint 2010 database server to the database server that supports the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm
• SharePoint 2013:  Go to “Manage content databases” in Central Administration, select the web application where you want to migrate to and then the option “Remove content database”. This will make the database unattached from any web application.

• SharePoint 2013 Database Server: Restore the content database backup from the source SharePoint 2010 database server. The restore must replace the content database that was created during the SharePoint 2013 installation.

• SharePoint 2013:  If you have custom developed farm solutions, add all the exported WSPs (without deploying them) in the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm. For each WSP, run the following command:
  • Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $location\solution.wsp where $location is the file system location of the WSP files
• SharePoint 2013:  Execute the first of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm (in this example the web application URL is http://sp2013): Test-SPContentDatabase -Name <Content_DB_Name> -WebApplication http://sp2013
  
  • This PowerShell cmdlet will test the content database against the web application to verify if all customizations referenced within the content database are also installed in the farm
  • In my case, I got some missing features errors but none of them are upgrade blocking

• SharePoint 2013:  Execute the second of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm: Mount-SPContentDatabase -Name “<Content_DB_Name>” -DatabaseServer “<DBAlias>” -WebApplication “http://sp2013”
  • This PowerShell cmdlet attaches an existing content database to a web application
  • In my case, I got an error that once again was not upgrade blocking. This cmdlet is very likely to throw an error but most times it is an error that will not block the upgrade process

• SharePoint 2013:  Execute the third of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm: Test-SPSite http://sp2013
  • This PowerShell cmdlet runs a series of health checks on the site collection and its contents
  • In my case, I got a warning but once again nothing that is upgrade blocking

• SharePoint 2013:  Execute the fourth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm: Repair-SPSite -identity http://sp2013
  • This PowerShell cmdlet is similar to the Test-SPSite cmdlet but fixes any issues that it finds
  • The result was identical to the Test-SPSite cmdlet: no upgrading blocking issues were found

• SharePoint 2013:  Execute the fifth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary SharePoint 2013 farm: Upgrade-SPSite http://sp2013 -VersionUpgrade
  • This PowerShell cmdlet will upgrade the site collections associated to the web application to SharePoint 2013 mode. Before this cmdlet was executed, the site collections were still in SharePoint 2010 mode.

To read the second part of this two part step by step tutorial, click here.

Related Articles

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 Step by Step (Part 1) appeared first on Blog IT.

In a SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 migration project I was recently involved in, I noticed that in the new SharePoint 2016 Portal, the logo URL in all sites was pointing to an invalid URL.

The Problem

The reason for this is that the Logo URL was pointing to a URL in the SharePoint hive (_layouts virtual directory) and the _layouts virtual directory URL has changed from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016:

• SharePoint 2010 Layouts root virtual directory URL: /_layouts
• SharePoint 2016 Layouts root virtual directory URL: /_layouts/15

The Solution

Since the site collection has a lot of subsites and I would like to avoid having to change the logo URL manually one by one, I built a small PowerShell script that will loop all the sub sites in the site collection and change the Logo URL for each one. Here is the script:

$sitelogo = "/_layouts/15/Images/logo.jpg"

$site = "https://intranet"

$sites = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($site)

foreach ($web in $sites.Allwebs) {

$webUrl = $web.Url

"Changing site logo url at $webUrl"

$web.SiteLogoUrl = $sitelogo

$web.Update()

}

$sites.Dispose()

NOTE: This script should also be valid for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2019.

Hope this helps!

The post SharePoint 2016: Changing logo for all sites in a site collection using PowerShell appeared first on Blog IT.

Over the past few months, I have been gathering some useful SharePoint and Office 365 learning resources that I would like to share with you.

Learning Resources

Here is the list of some of the most interesting learning resources I have gathered:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/m365/ – Get started with Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Learning Virtual Academy

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sharepoint/ – SharePoint Tutorial

http://www.fastsharepoint.com/ – SharePoint Tutorials for Beginners, Developers, Designers and Administrators

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/topics/sharepoint – SharePoint: Online Courses, Training and Tutorials on LinkedIn Learning

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/powerplatform/ – Power Platform – Microsoft Learning Virtual Academy

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office – Office Dev Center

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint – SharePoint Dev Center

https://collab365.community/ – Collab365 Community (Collab365)

https://connor.collab365.community/introduction-to-the-30-day-microsoft-365-challenge/ – Microsoft 365 30-Day Challenge

https://collab365.community/category/sharepoint/ – SharePoint Community Center (Collab365)

https://collab365.community/training/ – Collab365 Community – Training

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/ct-p/SharePoint – SharePoint – Microsoft Tech Community

https://docs.microsoft.com/learn/ –  Microsoft Learn

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/ – Microsoft 365 Blog

https://connor.collab365.community/timeline/ – Microsoft 365 30-Day Challenge

https://en.share-gate.com/blog/start-learn-sharepoint-basics – Learning SharePoint

https://www.365resources.net/ – Office 365 Resources

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/blogs/getting-started-with-sharepoint-framework-tutorials-september-2018/ – Getting started with SharePoint Framework – Tutorials

http://niftit.com/10-blogs-learn-sharepoint/ – 10 Blogs You Must Follow to Start to Learn SharePoint

http://www.matthewjbailey.com/best-way-to-learn-sharepoint/ – Learn SharePoint

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit – SharePoint Starter Kit

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/sharepoint-online-video-training-cb8ef501-84db-4427-ac77-ec2009fb8e23 – SharePoint Online video training

https://www.sharepointsky.com – FREE SharePoint Tutorials – Office 365 SharePoint Online Courses

https://www.enjoysharepoint.com – FREE SharePoint Online Training & Video Courses

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-to-videos/ – PowerApps how-to video series

https://afrait.com/ – blog by Patrick Feninger focused on SharePoint and Office 365 for end users and IT Pros. It has the following interesting blog series:
– https://afrait.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation/ – Digital Transformation Series
– https://afrait.com/blog/category/mastering-office-365/ – Mastering Office 365 Series

https://www.pluralsight.com – Online Developer, IT and Cyber Security Training

https://www.edx.org/ – Online courses from some of the world’s best universities

https://www.iwmentor.com – Information Worker traning focused on SharePoint and Office 365, namely PowerApps and Flow

https://www.powerappsug.com/ – PowerApps User Group

https://www.flowug.com – Flow User Group

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3257924/sharepoint-online-cheat-sheet.html – SharePoint Online cheat sheet

YouTube Channels

If you prefer to learn watching videos, here are some useful YouTube channels:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_mKdhw-V6CeCM7gTo_Iy7w –  SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns & Practices

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj-_bnzOYNMI3ZH1MFvEjrA/ – PiaSys Tech Bites, from the Pnp Core Team, focused on SharePoint and Office 365 development

https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficeGarageSeries/ – Microsoft Mechanics, focused on most recent announcements on Azure and Office 365 announcements for end users and IT Pros

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr183FCaQmgxEo_zQvc-i5w – European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Community

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbTVoDCaPM6wE0xsDGGr9VA – Laura Rogers, SharePoint MVP, focused on PowerApps and Flow

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCspdrsKTBXJTGuco6U3KF0Q – Audrie Gordon, focused on PowerApps and Flow

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnUwvZBeu4P_desNZthZWiA – Paul O’Flaherty, focused on PowerApps and Flow

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2h2NfOMt96WdJu93wX9sgw – Learning SharePoint Videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsGbpWegwyz6IfXSVYgABlQ/ – SharePoint

https://www.youtube.com/user/clardo11/ – DeShon Clark

https://www.youtube.com/user/officevideos/ – Microsoft Office 365

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhJmfAGQ5K81XQ8_od1iTg – Microsoft Ignite

If you have other interesting learning resources, please feel free to share them on this blog post comments.

Related Articles

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you are involved in a SharePoint upgrade and want to learn more about the upgrade process, click here and here.

If you want to know all about SharePoint 2019, the new version of SharePoint Server, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post SharePoint and Office 365 Learning Resources appeared first on Blog IT.

Recently, I migrated a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016 and used an automated installation process using PowerShell and AutoSPInstaller to install the new SharePoint 2016 farm that ensured that the latest updates where applied, leaving the SharePoint 2016 farm updated and working properly (if you want to learn more about how to install a SharePoint farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here).

After installing the farm and migrating the web applications, new updates were installed in the farm (if you want to keep up with the latest SharePoint updates, click here) but when I ran the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard to ensure the new updates were properly installed (to know more about the need to run SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard after a SharePoint farm update, click here), I got an error that was preventing me to finish the update process.

Important Note: Both source SharePoint 2010 and target SharePoint 2016 farms have Standard SharePoint licenses.

The Problem

After installing the updates and after running the SharePoint Products and Configuration, I was getting the following error:

The error details:

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown.  Additional exception information:

Feature (Name = [SharePoint Portal Server Status Indicator List template], Id = [065c78be-5231-477e-a972-14177cc5b3c7], Description = [SharePoint Portal Server Status Indicator List template], Install Location = [BizAppsListTemplates]) is referenced in database [Content_DB], but isn’t installed on the current farm. The missing feature might cause upgrade to fail. If necessary, please install any solution that contains the feature and restart upgrade.        (EventID:ajxkh)

Feature (Name = [SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Features], Id = [0806d127-06e6-447a-980e-2e90b03101b8], Description = [Features such as the Visio Services, Access Services, and Excel Services applications included in the SharePoint Server Enterprise License.], Install Location = [PremiumWeb]) is referenced in database Content_DB] but isn’t installed on the current farm. The missing feature might cause upgrade to fail. If necessary, please install any solution that contains the feature and restart upgrade.        (EventID:ajxkh)

Feature (Name = [SharePoint Portal Server Report Library], Id = [2510d73f-7109-4ccc-8a1c-314894deeb3a], Description = [SharePoint Portal Server Report Library], Install Location = [ReportListTemplate]) is referenced in database [Content_DB], but isn’t installed on the current farm. The missing feature might cause upgrade to fail. If necessary, please install any solution that contains the feature and restart upgrade.        (EventID:ajxkh)

Feature (Name = [InfoPath Forms Services Support], Id = [c88c4ff1-dbf5-4649-ad9f-c6c426ebcbf5], Description = [InfoPath Forms Services Lists and Related Pages to Enable Presentation of Forms on the Server.], Install Location = [IPFSSiteFeatures]) is referenced in database Content_DB], but isn’t installed on the current farm. The missing feature might cause upgrade to fail. If necessary, please install any solution that contains the feature and restart upgrade.        (EventID:ajxkh)

Feature (Name = [Data Connections Feature], Id = [00bfea71-dbd7-4f72-b8cb-da7ac0440130], Description = [], Install Location = [DataConnectionLibrary]) is referenced in database Content_DB], but isn’t installed on the current farm. The missing feature might cause upgrade to fail. If necessary, please install any solution that contains the feature and restart upgrade.        (EventID:ajxkh)

Upgrade [SPContentDatabase Name=Content_DB] failed.        (EventID:an59t)

Exception: The upgraded database schema doesn’t match the TargetSchema        (EventID:an59t)

Upgrade Timer job is exiting due to exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException: The upgraded database schema doesn’t match the TargetSchema

There are two main problems here:

• There are references in the content database to SharePoint Enterprise Features (InfoPath Form Services, Visio Services, Excel Services, etc) – my guess here is that sometime along the way, the source SharePoint 2010 farm had an Enterprise SharePoint license and was downgraded to a Standard license, leaving behind however references to Enterprise features in the content database
• There is a mismatch between the content database schema version and the version of SharePoint updates installed in the farm

One additional symptom that confirms there is an upgrade issue is the Upgrade Status page in Central Administration that showed the upgrade status as Failed:

The Solution

The solution to this problem was a two part solution, both applied in the target SharePoint 2016 farm:

• Fixing the missing Enterprise features references in the content database
• Fixing the content database schema version mismatch

Fixing the missing Enterprise features references in the content database

To fix the problem with references to Enterprise SharePoint features, I used the SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool, which basically enables us to delete from the Farm, Web Application, Site Collection and sub sites any references to features that are not installed in the farm. The version I used was the version 2.4.8 that you can download here, that supports SharePoint 2016. The version 3.0, for some reason, didn’t detect the farm, which made it useless (maybe a beta version, not sure).

In this case, to remove the missing feature references, I used the SharePoint Feature Administration and Clean Up Tool to:

• Remove the missing features from the farm
• Remove the missing features from the sub sites

First, I removed the missing features from the farm, by removing the features marked as “Faulty” in the “Farm Feature Administration” tab, using the “Uninstall” button for each missing feature.

After that, I removed the features marked as ERROR in the “Remove / deactivate features in the selected sites” tab, by selecting all the site collection faulty features and using the “Remove from selected SiteCollection” button.

Finally, for each site, I selected the faulty site features and removed them by using the “Remove from selected Site (SPWeb)” button.

Fixing the content database schema version mismatch

To fix the version mismatch between the content database schema version and the version of installed SharePoint updates, I executed the following PowerShell command (executed with “run as administrator”):

Get-SPContentDatabase | Upgrade-SPContentDatabase

After this, I ran the SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard again, and this time, it ran successfully:

To confirm if everything was OK, I checked the following pages in Central Administration in the target SharePoint 2016 farm:

• The Upgrade Status page
• The Database Upgrade Status page

In the Upgrade Status page, there is now a Succeeded upgrade status:

In the Database Upgrade Status page, there is an indication of “No action required” for all content databases in the farm, meaning that all databases were properly upgraded and the respective schema version is the same as the installed SharePoint updates:

Hope this helps!

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

In the meantime, SharePoint 2019 RTM is already out there! If you want to know all about the new features available in the new SharePoint Server release, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you are involved in a SharePoint upgrade and want to learn more about the upgrade process, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post SharePoint 2016 Upgrade: How to solve the “Feature is referenced in database but isn’t installed on the current farm” error appeared first on Blog IT.

Today, after migrating a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, I suddenly caught an error with the current navigation in a SharePoint Publishing site. The site collection contains three main sub sites. For two of them, SharePoint navigation worked perfectly fine but for the other one, the navigation was not being shown.

The Problem

To try to find out the problem in the problematic sub site, I navigated to the Navigation settings page and caught the following error:

The given key was not present in the dictionary. Stack Trace: at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException() at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CachedArea.CreateResultSetFromSuperUserAndSuperReader(StringCollection superReaderItemIDs, StringCollection superUserItemIDs, Dictionary`2 cachedObjects, SPWeb contextWeb, SPQuery query, List`1 fieldrefs, ICachedObjectFactory objectFactory) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CachedArea.GetChildForListByQuery(String listName, SPQuery query, SPWeb contextWeb, Boolean onlyPopulateCache, List`1& itemsFetched, Boolean skipIfThrottled) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalWebSiteMapNode.FetchDynamicItems(PublishingWeb pubWeb, NodeTypes includedTypes, Boolean& websFetched, Boolean& pagesFetched) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalWebSiteMapNode.PopulateNavigationChildrenInner(NodeTypes includedTypes) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalWebSiteMapNode.PopulateNavigationChildren(NodeTypes includedTypes) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapNode.GetNavigationChildren(NodeTypes includedTypes, NodeTypes includedHiddenTypes, Boolean trimmingEnabled, OrderingMethod ordering, AutomaticSortingMethod method, Boolean ascending, Int32 lcid) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapNode.GetNavigationChildren(NodeTypes includedTypes, NodeTypes includedHiddenTypes, OrderingMethod ordering, AutomaticSortingMethod method, Boolean ascending, Int32 lcid) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapNode.GetNavigationChildren(NodeTypes includedHiddenTypes) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider.GetChildNodes(PortalSiteMapNode node, NodeTypes includedHiddenTypes)

The Solution

To solve the problem, all I had to do was reactivating the “SharePoint Server Publishing”  Site Feature (not the corresponding Site Collection feature) on the problematic sub site:

After reactivating the feature, the navigation started to work as expected.

NOTE: This solution should also be applicable to other versions of SharePoint Server, including SharePoint 2019. To learn more about all the new features in SharePoint 2019, click here.

Hope this helps someone!

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

In the meantime, SharePoint 2019 RTM is already out there! If you want to know all about the new features available in the new SharePoint Server release, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you are involved in a SharePoint upgrade and want to learn more about the upgrade process, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post Fixing the “The given key was not present in the dictionary” navigation error in a SharePoint 2016 farm appeared first on Blog IT.

Recently, after installing a SharePoint 2016 farm (to learn more on how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell click here and here), I was configuring the Search Service Application in a customer’s SharePoint 2016 farm and got into a crawling error while trying to crawl the content of one of the web applications that is configured to use a FQDN URL and https, for example https://intranet.contoso.com. This web application is using a Content Database that was migrated from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016.

The Problem

The error that was being thrown was during the Full Crawl of the Content Source was:

“The crawler could not communicate with the server. Check that the server is available and that the firewall access is configured correctly. If the repository was temporarily unavailable, an incremental crawl will fix this error.”

Failed Attempts

When I saw this message, the first thought that crossed my mind was lack of permissions for the Default Content Access Account. The account was properly configured to have Full Read permissions on the web application and this was not the problem.

My next thought was that this could be a firewall problem and some ports necessary by the Search Service Application to properly crawl the web application content were not opened in the firewall (for a complete list of the necessary ports in a SharePoint 2016 installation, click here or here). However, after the firewall was properly configured, the error remained.

After some searching in the Internet, I tried without any success the following approaches:

• Disabling the loopback check on the server
• Disabling https for the web application
• Creating a new empty web application with a FQDN URL and tried to crawl its contents
• Resetting the search index
• Deleting and recreating the content source

The Solution

After all the failed attempts, I was able to solve the problem by extending the web application to a non-FQDN URL (for example http://intranet) and configuring this URL as the start address in the Content Source in the Search Service Application. This URL is internal (the host is only configured in the server’s hosts file and is not configured in the DNS) and is being used for crawling purposes only.

Important detail: For the search results to be correctly presented, the newly added URL was configured in the Default Zone in Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) in Central Administration.

The goal here is to allow users to use the FQDN URL (ex: https://intranet.contoso.com) to access the SharePoint Portal and the search results to include this same URL.

If I had configured the non-FQDN URL in a non-Default zone in AAM, the search results would always include the non-FQDN URL instead of the FQDN URL that users use to access the SharePoint Portal. To learn all about using the Default Zone to crawl content and AAM, please read the following two fantastic articles by Brian Pendergrass:

• Beware crawling the non-Default zone for a SharePoint 2013 Web Application
• Alternate Access Mappings (AAMs) *Explained

I was able to configure a FQDN URL as the start address of a Content Source in the Search Service Application in one of my development environments without this problem, so I guess this behavior must be due to some infrastructure configuration in the customer’s environment which I have not yet been able to discover.
If I find a solution that allows the usage of a FQDN URL to be configured as the start address in the Content Source in the Search Service Application, I will update this post.

Hope this helps!

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

In the meantime, new search capabilities have been introduced in SharePoint 2019. To learn more about them and all the new features in SharePoint 2019, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you are involved in a SharePoint upgrade and want to learn more about the upgrade process, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

Happy SharePointing!

The post SharePoint 2016: Problems crawling content and the “The crawler could not communicate with the server.” error message appeared first on Blog IT.

Introduction

• Downloading and installing SharePoint prerequisites
• Downloading and installing the SharePoint binaries
• Downloading and installing the lastest SharePoint updates
• Downloading and installing the required language packs (optional, necessary if you want the SharePoint interface to be presented in a language other than English)
• Configuring the SharePoint farm using SharePoint Products and Configuration Wizard

• Downloading the SharePoint installation package, click here for more details
• Installing SharePoint and configuring the SharePoint farm

• SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2013
• SharePoint 2016
• SharePoint 2019 (to learn more about all the new features in SharePoint 2019, click here)

• 1 SharePoint 2016 Server
• 1 Database Server

Managed Accounts and Pre-Installation Requisites

• To avoid problems executing the AutoSPInstaller script, ensure that the passwords of the above accounts do not contain any special characters (ex: $,%,&,/. etc)
• The above table contains a proposal to name the accounts for the SharePoint installation. If you choose to use different names, ensure that the account names do not exceed 20 characters since NETBIOS names have a limit of 20 characters

Download AutoSPInstaller PowerShell script

Creating the AutoSPInstaller configuration file

• SharePoint version to install
• The SharePoint product key
• The Farm Account and all Managed Accounts and their credentials
• The database instance that will support the SharePoint environment
• The web applications we want to create (ex: Intranet. My Site, etc)
• The service applications we want to enable and their configurations
• Outgoing email settings for the farm
• Database names: this is extremely useful since it allows us to have complete control over the names of all the databases that will be created during the SharePoint farm configuration and avoid having databases with unclear names containing GUIDs which is the default behavior if we configure the farm using SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard (PSConfig)

Installing SharePoint

• Managed accounts credentials will be validated. If any of the credentials is incorrect, the script will stop
• SharePoint prerequisites will be installed
• SharePoint will be installed
• SharePoint language packs will be installed
• SharePoint updates will be installed

Configuring the SharePoint Farm

• Create all managed accounts
• Configure IIS and SharePoint ULS log file paths
• Create the configured web applications (ex: Intranet, My Site)
• Configure the service applications
• Configure outgoing email settings for the farm

Multi-Server Installation

• What is your farm topology and the number of servers you want to consider (WFEs, Application Servers and Database Servers)
• Which services and service applications will be provisioned for each server
• Will you be using MinRoles or will you use a custom installation where you will be manually selecting the services and service applications that will be provisioned for each server?

• Front-end
• Application
• Distributed cache
• Search
• Custom
• Single-server farm
• Front-end with Distributed Cache (merge of Front-end and Distributed cache MinRoles). available with Feature Pack 1 update or later
• Application with Search (merge of Application and Search MinRoles). available with Feature Pack 1 update or later

• Use Remote Installation
• Install SharePoint individually in each SharePoint server

AutoSPInstaller Input File Configuration for Multi-Server Installation Notes when not using MinRoles

• <Custom Provision=” false” />
• <SingleServerFarm Provision=”localhost ” />

• <Custom Provision=”localhost” />
• <SingleServerFarm Provision=”false” />

<ServerRoles>
    <Custom Provision="localhost" />
    <WebFrontEnd Provision="false" />
    <WebFrontEndWithDistributedCache Provision="false" />
    <SingleServerFarm Provision="false" />
    <Search Provision="false" />
    <Application Provision="false" />
    <ApplicationWithSearch Provision="false" />
    <DistributedCache Provision="false" />
</ServerRoles>

Remote Installation

Install SharePoint individually in each SharePoint server

• SharePoint bits must be installed on all servers but farm configuration must only be done once all servers have the SharePoint bits installed. You may Install the SharePoint bits (all steps before the “Configuring the SharePoint Farm” in this post) in all servers at the same time but you must stop the installation process once you are asked to continue with farm configuration
• After the SharePoint bits are installed on all servers, you may proceed to the “Configuring the SharePoint Farm” section of this post BUT this must be done server by server, one at a time, sequentially. The AutoSPInstaller configuration file will determine what services and service applications are going to be provisioned on each server:
  • When you run the farm configuration in the first server, the farm will be created and the services and service applications that are configured to run on that server will be provisioned
  • When you run the farm configuration on the other servers, each server will be added to the farm and the services and service applications that are configured to run on that server will be provisioned

Related Articles

The post How to install a SharePoint 2016 farm using PowerShell and AutoSPInstaller Step by Step (Part 2) appeared first on Blog IT.