Introduction

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

Upgrading to SharePoint 2019, that has an improved support for a hybrid scenario, can be a valid solution to allow organizations to gradually take the path to the Cloud.

A hybrid scenario in SharePoint 2019 will allow you the following:

• Hybrid App Launcher
• Hybrid Sites
• Hybrid OneDrive for Business
• Hybrid Business to Business (B2B) sites
• Hybrid self-service site creation
• Hybrid auditing
• Hybrid taxonomy and content types
• Hybrid Business Connectivity Services
• Hybrid Search

With these scenarios, organizations can keep some of their workloads On-Premises and start taking advantage of all the innovations in SharePoint Online and Office 365.

Enabling Hybrid Experience

To enable an hybrid environment in a SharePoint 2019 farm, you will have to follow the following steps in Central Administration:

• Select the “Configuration Wizards” option

• Launch the Hybrid Configuration

• Select “Next”

• Select the SharePoint 2019 and Office 365 accounts that will allow the hybrid experience to be enabled. The Office 365 account must be of a global administrator. In the end, select the “Validate credentials” option so that both credentials can be validated.

• Next, the credentials are going to be validated

• The Hybrid Configuration prerequisites are going to be validated. In my case, some errors were found.

The errors that the wizard showed were originated by the fact the App Management Service was not configured in the farm. To solve this problem, I had just had to create a App Management Service service application. In my case, I used an automated way to create the service application using AutoSPInstaller.

• To confirm that the App Management service application was successfully created, go to the Service Applications page and check if the service application is listed

• After creating the service application, I started the Hybrid Configuration Wizard again and the prerequisites are now correcty validated.

• Select the features you want to use in your hybrid environment. In my case, I selected Hybrid OneDrive, Hybrid Sites, Hybrid B2B sites and Hybrid App Launcher.

• Wait until the Hybrid Configuration Wizard finishes configuration.

• After the successful run of configuration wizard, SharePoint server environment will be connected to Office 365. To finish the process, click “Close”.

• To complete the process, perform an IISReset on the SharePoint 2019 server.

Testing the Hybrid Environment

After the hybrid environment is configured, you can test it:

• Hybrid App Launcher: the App Launcher will now allow users to start using Office 365 (ex: OneDrive)

• Hybrid OneDrive: when users select “OneDrive” in the App Launcher, they will be redirected to OneDrive for Business in the connected Office 365 tenant

Technical Considerations

There a few important technical notes to consider:

• You have to register your domain with Office 365 (ex: contoso.com)
• You have to create a UPN domain suffix in your On-Premises Active Directory domain that matches the public domain
• You have to sync On-Premises Active Directory with Azure AD and Office 365

For more details on these requirements, click here.

Related Articles

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

If you want to learn how you can rename a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you want to modernize your SharePoint classic root site to 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 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 Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click 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 Configure a Hybrid Experience with Office 365 in a SharePoint 2019 farm appeared first on Blog IT.

Introduction

This two part blog post is the first part of a blog post series that will try to give you an idea of the advantages of moving to the Cloud and the benefits of adopting Microsoft 365 as a collaboration platform.

We live in a world that is rapidly moving towards Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions in several areas from collaboration, E-Commerce and many other areas, are moving from a reality where systems and respective data are deployed within the companies infrastructure (On-Premises) to the Cloud.

The goal of this two part blog posts is to give you an overview of the main features included in Microsoft 365 and how your organization can take advantage of them if you migrate to Microsoft 365.

In the first part of this post, I already discussed the following topics:

• Microsoft 365
• Collaboration with SharePoint and OneDrive
• Mobility
• Use Microsoft Teams as your Work Hub
• Easy and Secure External Sharing

To read the first part of this post, click here.

These are the main topics I will discuss in the second part of this two part blog post:

• Security and Reliability
• Business Applications Development
• Insights
• Migration Options
• Hybrid Scenarios
• Other Benefits

Security and Reliability

In the first part of this blog post, I already talked a little bit about Microsoft 365 which includes Windows 10, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security.

One of the main concerns of companies in choosing a Cloud collaboration platform, in which the Microsoft 365 is an example and leading platform, is the security of their information. One of the biggest challenges when organizations are deciding if they want migrate to Microsoft 365 is related to the demystification that having the information in the Cloud is less secure than if it resides on the premises of the organizations themselves.

To address these same concerns, Microsoft has made a very strong investment in security which provides users and system administrators with several features to address these needs and apply a set of best practices in four main areas:

• Security
• Privacy
• Compliance
• Transparency

In addition to security, Reliability is another major benefit of a Cloud solution (Microsoft 365 has a average 99,98% availability) and organizations don’t need to worry about maintaining their own infrastructure.

Below, are some of the main security features natively offered by the platform.

Security

Regarding Security, Microsoft 365 ensures the encryption of data in transit and at rest. At rest, Bitlocker technology is used to encrypt all information on the servers’ hard drives. In addition, all files are segmented (in small pieces called chunks) and each segment is individually encrypted and encryption keys are securely stored in a different physical location.
In transit, all files are encrypted with TLS using 2048-bit keys.

Privacy

Regarding Privacy, it is possible to define differentiated access policies based on 4 vectors: user, device, location and sensitivity of the information. Some examples include:

• Set a time bound window for external sharing or only allow sharing with certain domains
• Block access from insecure locations (example: open Wi-Fi networks)
• Enforce multi-factor authentication (ex: supply a PIN sent to a mobile device). You can enforce multi-factor authentication for all users, for a restricted set of users or based on conditions like the device being used or the access location (example: open Wi-Fi networks)

Compliance

In what regards to Compliance, the main concern is to define a set of rules that allow sensitive information to be protected and to prevent the leakage of sensitive information outside of the organization. These are some of the features Microsoft 365 includes to address this need:

• Data Loss Prevention: Allows organizations to create policies to protect their most sensitive information. Example: prevent documents with credit card information or citizen card numbers from being shared outside the organization. To read more about Data Loss Prevention, click here.
• Microsoft 365 Unified Labeling: Allows organizations to create policies that protect the content of documents stored in the Microsoft 365 platform (mainly SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange). Protection is based on the Azure Rights Management service and allows for administrators to configure sensitivity labels that can be applied to emails and documents to protect sensitive information. Labels can be applied automatically to all documents in a SharePoint document library, based on specific content types or based on the contents of the document (ex: documents containing credit card numbers). For protected documents, you can restrict access to a restricted set of users, enable encryption and apply a variety of document level protection such as:
  • Block copy and paste of email or document information
  • Block Print Screen of a document
  • Block document printing
  • Block email actions like Forward or Reply
  • etc

To learn about Microsoft 365 Unified Labeling and Information Protection, click here.

Transparency

Regarding Transparency, a very important note is that Microsoft does not have access to the organization’s data and the only occasions where this may be necessary is in resolving support incidents that require access to the data. In these cases, and using a feature called Customer Lockbox, the customer can approve or reject access requests, and access is only granted in case the request is approved. In addition, all accesses are audited to ensure the transparency of the process.

These are just a few of the examples of the vast set of features available to users and administrators to protect information residing on the Microsoft 365 platform. Security is such a huge topic that is impossible to summarize all features in this post. Stay tuned for my next posts where I will address security features in more detail!

Business Applications Development

Microsoft 365 has a very rich feature set and it addresses a very broad range of collaboration needs. The good thing is that is also highly extensible allowing for developers to build rich user experiences for pretty much any business requirement.

There are other powerful ways to extend SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 without the need of professional developers and the Rapid Application Development approaches are gaining more and more space in the development world, essentially to build business applications.

Microsoft’s vision for Rapid Application Development is composed by two main development platforms:

• PowerApps
• Microsoft Flow

PowerApps

PowerApps is a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform that provides a Rapid Application Development environment to build custom business applications. Using PowerApps, “citizen developers” can quickly build custom business applications that connect to your business data stored On-Premises (accessible through a On-OnPremises Data Gateway) or to Online data sources.

Currently there are dozens of connectors that allow PowerApps applications to connect to data sources like SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, etc.

One of the great things about PowerApps applications is they are developed in a mobile-first approach and you can easy use business applications in any mobile device from your tablet to your mobile phone.

PowerApps is great to quickly build business applications and below are a few examples of business applications that could be developed using PowerApps:

• Expense Report
• Travel Request
• Vacation Request

To take a look at an example of what PowerApps can do, take a look at the Microsoft Expense Report sample.

To learn more about PowerApps, click here.

Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow is a Cloud-based service that makes it easier for line-of-business users to create workflows that help automate time-consuming business processes and help connect applications and services.

As in PowerApps, Flow currently there are dozens of connectors that allow flows to connect to data sources like SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, etc.

There are numerous examples of where Flow can be used to automate processes and Flow is great to be used together with PowerApps. A good example would be a Expense Report built with PowerApps with the Approval process handled by Flow, allowing you also for example to automate the integration of approved expenses with your ERP or financial system.

To learn more about Microsoft Flow, click here.

Other Development Options

If the business requirement is too complex and PowerApps and Flow may not be the best approach, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 offer a huge development platform, mainly trough the development of solutions based on SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

Insights

Microsoft 365 as a collaboration platform generates a lot of information, specially if you are a large organization. To help you get insights from the information stored in Microsoft 365, you can use:

• Power BI: Provides a business intelligence platform that allows you to generate reports and dashboards to get critical business insights from a variety of data sources.
  
  
  To learn more about Power BI, click here.
  
• Delve: Allows you to browse and discover relevant content for you, including your recent documents, content based on who you work with and trends in the organization
  
  To learn more about Delve, click here.
  
• My Analytics: Allows you to measure Personal and Organizational Productivity Indicators, time spent in meetings and focused work or track your response and email read times
  
  To learn more My Analytics, click here.

Migration Options

If you have information On-Premises, either using an old file share or an On-Premises version of SharePoint Server, the path to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 is achieved using a content migration approach to migrate content to SharePoint Online and typically a 3rd party solution is necessary to do the migration. A few 3rd party solutions that can do the job are ShareGate, AvePoint and Metalogix. Microsoft has also released sometime ago the SharePoint Migration Tool that also does the job but with less options than the 3rd party solutions.

The great thing when you migrate to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online (specially if you are using SharePoint Server) is that this should be the last migration you have to do! If you are using SharePoint Server and instead choose to do a SharePoint version upgrade, you will always have at least one more migration ahead of you (assuming you want to have Microsoft support, MS support for SharePoint Server will end after a few years, you can find more information here).

Migrating to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 has another clear advantage: reduction of IT costs and probably reduction of overall licensing costs since you don’t have to be worried about paying SharePoint Server licenses (and also SQL Server licenses if SharePoint is the only reason why you use SQL Server). In Microsoft 365, licensing is paid in a subscription based model where you can choose the best subscription model that fits your organization’s needs.

Hybrid Scenarios

If your organization is still not ready to migrate to Microsoft 365 entirely (one of the strongest reasons is in the case of data residency requirements where highly sensitive may not leave the country and there is no Microsoft 365 data center in that country, like for example in Portugal). In this case, a hybrid scenario may be your best option.

There are several hybrid supported scenarios and a possible approach could be to keep the most sensitive information On-Premises (for example in SharePoint 2019 that has improved hybrid support) and take the less sensitive information into the cloud and start taking advantage of the cloud innovations from SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365.

Other Benefits

Microsoft 365 is a huge productivity suite and there are other applications in the suite that are relevant:

• Yammer: Corporate social network where you can promote discussions and ideas and promote employee engagement across your organization. To learn more about Yammer, click here.
• Microsoft Stream: Microsoft 365 streaming platform where you can store and tag relevant corporate videos, assign videos to channels and share videos across organizations allowing you to promote employee engagement. To learn more about Microsoft Stream, click here.
• Microsoft Forms: Allows you to quickly create surveys and get feedback from users in your organization. To learn more about Microsoft Forms, click here.
• Dynamics 365: CRM platform included in Microsoft 365 where you can manage customers, relationships and create dashboards to help you make better decisions and help your business grow. To learn more about Dynamics 365, click here.

Conclusion

Knowing where to take your business and choose the right collaboration platform is a critical business decision. Microsoft 365 is a very comprehensive collaboration and productivity suite that can help your organization to work smarter and take advantages of the constant innovations that Microsoft keeps adding to the suite.

If you still are in On-Premises scenario (either using file share, SharePoint Server or any other collaboration platform), you should carefully evaluate the options you have and evaluate the Pros and Cons of keeping your organization On-Premises or move to the Cloud (to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365).

One thing I have no doubt: Microsoft is putting all the innovation and best collaboration features in SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 and the gap to SharePoint Server is getting bigger and bigger, leaving companies that are not taking advantage of Microsoft 365 in a clear disadvantage with the ones that do.

One last argument: if your are still On-Premises, most probably you already have Microsoft 365 licensed and probably not using it or not taking full advantage it. If you are already paying, why not start taking full advantage of the innovations in Microsoft 365?

To finish, and to get a broader vision of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 evolution over the years, don’t miss Jeff Teper “Hitting Refresh on SharePoint” articles:

• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 1
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 2
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 3
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 4

To read the first part of this post, click here.

Related Articles

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 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 Microsoft 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 Microsoft 365 or thinking to migrate to Microsoft 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

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

If your organization is still not ready to migrate to Microsoft 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 Why You Should Migrate To Microsoft 365 (Part 2) appeared first on Blog IT.

Introduction

This two part blog post is the first part of a blog post series that will try to give you an idea of the advantages of moving to the Cloud and the benefits of adopting Microsoft 365 as a collaboration platform.

We live in a world that is rapidly moving towards Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions in several areas from collaboration, E-Commerce and many other areas, are moving from a reality where systems and respective data are deployed within the companies infrastructure (On-Premises) to the Cloud.

The goal of this two part blog posts is to give you an overview of the main features included in Microsoft 365 and how your organization can take advantage of them if you migrate to Microsoft 365.

These are the topics I will discuss in the first part of this two part blog post:

• Microsoft 365
• Collaboration with SharePoint and OneDrive
• Mobility
• Use Microsoft Teams as your Work Hub
• Easy and Secure External Sharing

To read the second part of this post, click here.

Microsoft 365

First things first! What is Microsoft 365?

One of the main concerns of companies in choosing a Cloud collaboration platform, in which the Microsoft 365 is an example and leading platform, is the security of their information. One of the biggest challenges when organizations are deciding if they want migrate to Microsoft 365 is related to the demystification that having the information in the Cloud is less secure than if it resides on the premises of the organizations themselves.

Microsoft has launched a licensing model that includes an impressive security feature set called Microsoft 365. This is a bundle that includes:

• Windows 10
• Office 365
• Enterprise Mobility + Security

This bundle comes in three different flavors:

• Microsoft 365 Business
• Microsoft 365 Enterprise
• Microsoft 365 Education

The way I see it, Microsoft 365, in which Office 365 is a big part, has two main branches that are closely linked:

• Collaboration
• Security

The main purpose of Microsoft 365, is to empower business to collaborate in a secure way.

If you want to know more about all the security features included Microsoft 365, click here.

Below, is a summary of the top reasons why you should move to the Cloud and start using Microsoft 365. The summary is mainly focused on Microsoft 365 features.

Collaboration with SharePoint and OneDrive

Besides email, Microsoft 365 information will be stored either in SharePoint Online or OneDrive:

• SharePoint Online: the heart of collaboration in Microsoft 365 and where shared information in your organization should reside
• OneDrive: based on the same technology as SharePoint, it is a private space that allows each employee in the organization to store their personal documents. Each employee gets from 1 TB to 5 TB depending on your licensing model.

Office Web Apps (SharePoint and OneDrive)

With Microsoft 365, each Office application has a corresponding web app that allows you to collaborate on documents directly from the browser without the need of its corresponding Office client applications. These are the available Office Web Apps in Microsoft 365:

• Word Online
• Excel Online
• PowerPoint Online
• Visio Online
• OneNote Online

Each of this web apps allows you to open and edit documents directly from the browser. The experience is similar to the Office client application and there are just a few restrictions in edit experience (ex: you can open but not edit macro-enabled Excel files).

Real-Time Collaboration and Co-Authoring (SharePoint and OneDrive)

Are you tired of reviewing documents sending successive copies of the same document back and forth by email and not knowing what the latest version of the document is? Mee too and this is where co-authoring is a huge help!

When documents are stored in SharePoint or OneDrive, co-authoring allows you to share a document with users inside or outside your organization and have them collaborate on the document in real time without the need to save multiple versions of the same document and loose track of the changes that were made by each contributor. All contributions are merged into the same document and you can see who else is editing and what changes each contributor has made.

This allows you to have full real time collaboration over the same document instead of having multiple copies going back and forth by email, having the added advantage to significantly reduce the size of your mailbox and making you much more productive.

SharePoint and OneDrive take advantages of secure sharing, allowing you to choose who can access and edit the document.

To learn more about real time collaboration and co-authoring, click here.

Stop Sending Attachments by Email

Another advantage of using SharePoint and OneDrive for collaboration is that instead of attaching a copy of your document in the email, you can simply share a link to the document that is stored in SharePoint or OneDrive.

For users, the attachment looks exactly the same as a normal attachment with the difference of a having a small “cloud” symbol near the document icon.

This way, we also significantly reduce the size of user’s mailboxes since what we are sharing is the link do the document in SharePoint or OneDrive and not a copy of the file. Sharing documents this way also enables users to use real time collaboration by allowing them to co-edit the “attached” document. The document can be edited either in the browser or using the appropriate Office client application.

To learn more on Cloud Attachments, click here.

Offline Access

Documents in SharePoint and OneDrive are stored in document libraries. You can sync any SharePoint or OneDrive files to a folder on your computer where you can work directly in the files using File Explorer and you can even access and work on the files when you’re offline.

Once you get back online, any changes that you or other users make will be synced automatically.

To learn more on how to sync a SharePoint or OneDrive document library, click here.

Microsoft 365 Groups

Microsoft 365 groups are the preferred method for team collaboration in Microsoft 365. When created, an Microsoft 365 group provides the following for its members:

• A Security Group (Azure AD)
• A Shared Group Mailbox (Exchange)
• A Shared Team Site (SharePoint)
• A Shared Notebook (OneNote)
• A Team in Microsoft Teams (if created through Teams or if later a Team in Microsoft Teams is associated to an existing Microsoft 365 group)
• A Teamwork Planning Space (Microsoft Planner)

Microsoft 365 Groups can be created from a variety of ways in Microsoft 365 (among others: SharePoint, Outlook and Microsoft Teams) and its main purpose is to facilitate teams inside the organizations to collaborate. For instance, the Shared Group Mailbox that is created is not a distribution list but a shared mailbox in Exchange Online and it allows for a new member in the group to have instant access to all emails sent to the shared mailbox prior to his addition to the group!

To learn more about Microsoft 365 Groups, click here.

Mobility

One of the strongest advantages when you migrate to Microsoft 365 is mobility. You will be able to access your documents, emails, business processes from any device and from any location.

Below, are a few examples of what you can do directly from your mobile phone or tablet:

• Access your email and contacts using Exchange Online and Outlook Mobile App
• Open and collaborate on shared documents in SharePoint Team Sites using Office mobile apps (there is a mobile version for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc)
• Share and access important news with your team using SharePoint Communication Sites
• Access your organizations dashboards using Power BI
• Access important business processes (example: approve your team’s expenses) using PowerApps
• Join a meeting directly from your phone using Microsoft Teams mobile app
• Access relevant corporate information using the mobile SharePoint app

All of this can be achieved in a secure way. I will talk a little bit more on security later in the second part of the blog post.

Use Microsoft Teams as your Work Hub

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform that was launched on March 14, 2017 and it combines workplace chat, audio and video based conference call meetings, notes, attachments and all that relates to digital team work. This service integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 including Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online and can also integrate with non-Microsoft products.

Microsoft Teams is already the fastest growing business app in Microsoft’s history and is rapidly growing to be the work hub for collaboration in Microsoft 365. In summary, Microsoft Teams provides:

• 1-to-1 and Team Chats: You can chat with any internal users in your Microsoft 365 tenant and also guest users (for more details, about internal users and external users and Pros and Cons of Single Tenant vs Multiple Tenants in Microsoft 365, click here)
• Channels: By default, a single channel called “General” is created for every Team but new channels can be created. The most common approach is to create a few channels, one for each relevant topic within the Team. For now, all channels share same security settings as the team but in the near future it will be possible to have private channels (with specific permissions)
• Meetings: You can organize and attend online meetings (audio and video) and you can even start your meeting using your PC and continue attending it using your mobile device. All you need is a stable internet connection!
• Files: You can open your files directly in Teams without the need to go to SharePoint where the files are stored. Soon, Teams will have the full SharePoint files experience and the user experience to interact with files will be even better than it is today (if you want to know more about the recent announcements on Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365, click here and here)
• Tabs: Tabs is a great way to add content to your Team or channel. It allows you to add new tabs that show content from Microsoft 365 (ex: a shared calendar, the Team Planner, a PowerBI dashboard) or relevant external content (ex: an external web page)
  
  
• Connectors: Similar to tabs but it allows you to get content from a variety of content sources directly into a channel (ex: a relevant RSS feed, Twitter account activity, etc)
  
  
• Bots: Microsoft Teams also has the ability to communicate with Bots that are artificial intelligence applications which can complete simple or complex tasks using chat-based commands
• Mobile App: All the above can be done using the Teams Mobile app, which is a rich feature set app, available for IOS and Android

To learn more about Microsoft Teams, click here.

Easy and Secure External Sharing

For organizations to be able to share content from an On-Premises SharePoint installation, it involves some complex IT configurations to be set in place. If you migrate to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, it gets much easier to share information with external users, allowing information to be easily shared in a secure way.

SharePoint Online makes it possible to easily share:

• Sites: Share a whole site with an external user
• Document Libraries: Share only the contents of a specific document library
• Folders: Share only the contents of a specific folder
• Documents: Share only the contents of a specific document

To be able to share with external users, external sharing must be enabled on the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and from a security perspective it is possible to control for which domains external sharing is allowed (either by using black or white lists).

To learn more about external sharing on Microsoft 365, click here.

To read the second part of this post, click here.

Related Articles

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 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 Microsoft 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 Microsoft 365 or thinking to migrate to Microsoft 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

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

If your organization is still not ready to migrate to Microsoft 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 Why You Should Migrate To Microsoft 365 (Part 1) appeared first on Blog IT.

Introduction

SharePoint and Office 365 have come a long way and it is nothing but amazing to see the constant innovation that Microsoft has been introducing to the platform over the years!

There are lot of new announcements being released at a very fast pace and it is challenging to stay up to date with everything that is being released!

This post will try to resume the latest announcements in the SharePoint and Office 365 world and what it means for end users, IT Pros and developers.

Hope you are ready for a ride, fasten your seat belt, because there are many new features coming (some of them may be already rolled out at the time of this writing). While it is impossible to talk about everything that has been announced, I will try to resume some of the biggest announcements in a two part series. These are the main topics I will discuss in the second part of this two part series:

• What’s New for Administrators
• What’s New for Security and Compliance
• What’s New for SharePoint Server (On-Premises)
• Fluid Framework
• Other Relevant Announcement

To read the first part of this post series, click here.

What’s New for Administrators

As in other areas, there are a lot of new announcements for administrators.

SharePoint Admin Center

In Preview for some time, the modern SharePoint admin center will become the default experience for administering SharePoint Online including the management of classic experiences through the new modern UI. Below, some of the most important announcements.

Consolidated Views (Available Soon)

With the new update, in the new SharePoint admin center experience you can manage both settings related to modern SharePoint experiences and classic features, meaning that there will be no need to to work across modern and classic admin centers to manage settings across modern and classic settings.

Bulk Actions (Available Soon)

Soon it will be possible to performing bulk actions against a collection of sites. These actions include updating the site’s sharing configuration, performing hub site association or deleting sites.

Site URL Rename (Available Soon)

One my favorite announcements of the whole event! Site URL Rename has been one of the most popular requests via UserVoice and soon it will be possible in the SharePoint Admin Center to change a site URL.

If you are worried if you are going to have broken links, stop worrying! The changes to the site URL will have no impact since access requests to the old URL will be redirected to the new URL, meaning that users will not need to update their links and bookmarks.

SharePoint Site Swap (Coming Soon)

A new Windows PowerShell cmdlet (Invoke-SPOSiteSwap) will be available soon that allows admins to replace the root site within a tenant, e.g. https://contoso.sharepoint.com with an existing site, such as https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/<modernsite>. This is extremely useful if you have a classic site as the root site of the tenant and you want to replace it with a modern site.

To learn more about all the announcements for administrators, click here.

What’s New for Security and Compliance

If it is nothing but impressive to see the way SharePoint and Office 365 introduces new collaboration features, it is not less impressive the investments made on security in the Office 365 platform. In 2017, Microsoft has launched a licensing model that includes an impressive security feature set called Microsoft 365. This is a bundle that includes:

• Windows 10
• Office 365
• Enterprise Mobility + Security

This bundle comes in three different flavors:

• Microsoft 365 Business
• Microsoft 365 Enterprise
• Microsoft 365 Education

If you want to know more about all the security features included Microsoft 365, click here.

Below, are the main announcements for Security and Compliance.

Sensitivity Labels for SharePoint Sites (Private Preview)

Collaborating in a secure and protecting the information in your tenant is critical, specially if you have sensitive information.

By using Sensitivity Labels, you can apply security and access policies to SharePoint sites based on the sensitivity of the site. You can create sensitivity labels (ex: Confidential Document) and associate them with policies in the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center to for example restrict users from download or print documents or even share them with external users. These labels can then be applied to files, emails, groups, sites and teams to enforce consistent policies across the information in your tenant.

One of the major security announcements of the event is that soon it will be possible to edit protected documents with Sensitivity Labels as long as you have edit permissions on the document. This is a major update since before this update, it was not possible to edit protected documents at all.

External Access Expiration (Preview Q3 CY19)

Another important update announced in the event is that it will be possible for a tenant administrator to specify how long external users can have access to sites and the content that is shared with them. Once the expiration date is reached, the external user will no longer have access to the site or content unless their access is extended by the site owner or a new sharing invitation is sent.

DLP Restricted Sharing (Private Preview Q3 CY19)

With this new update, it will be possible for organizations to block sharing as anonymous anonymous links of content flagged as sensitive by DLP (Data Loss Prevention).

OneDrive Restricted User Access (Private Preview)

It will be possible to prevent external users to create OneDrive sites and to access other users’s OneDrive sites.

To learn more about all the announcements for security and compliance, click here.

What’s New for SharePoint Server

There are two major announcements for SharePoint Server. support for SQL Managed Instances and support for Azure Stack.

SQL Managed Instances

It will now be possible to run SharePoint Server 2019 on SQL Managed Instances, allowing SharePoint to take advantage of the benefits of managed instances with SharePoint environments hosted in Azure. To learn more about SQL Managed Instances, click here.

Azure Stack

It will now be possible to install SharePoint on Azure Stack (Azure running On-Premises). To learn more about Azure Stack, click here.

To learn more about the announcements for SharePoint Server, click here.

Fluid Framework

Fluid Framework was first announced at Build and there isn’t yet a lot of information available. According to Microsoft, Fluid Framework is:

“A developer technology for building a new class of shared, interactive experiences on the web. It offers three key capabilities. First, experiences powered by the Fluid Framework will support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at a speed and scale not yet achieved in the industry. Second, it provides a componentized document model that allows authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks, use them across applications, and combine them in a new, more flexible kind of document. Third, the Fluid Framework makes room for intelligent agents to work alongside humans to translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more.”

One thing is for sure: it is a huge announcement and a possible game changer for multi-user collaboration scenarios with a lot of room for AI.

An impressive example shown at Build is a browser showing 9 browsers, each one with a text being translated to their own language!

Later this year, we will start to see new experiences taking advantage of Fluid Framework in Office applications and a SDK will also be made available for developers!

Other Relevant Announcements

Some other relevant announcements:

• New Capabilities for Microsoft Stream
• New Capabilities for Yammer
• Create Lists from Excel Files
• SharePoint File Storage Improvements

New Capabilities for Microsoft Stream

Now it is possible to securely record, upload and share videos using Microsoft Stream mobile app.

Additionally, it is possible to insert polls or surveys directly into videos with Microsoft Forms.

To learn more about Microsoft Stream announcements, click here.

New Capabilities for Yammer

Yammer will have a new feature that allows you to ask a question and then you or a group administrator can mark the best answer. It will be also possible to add intelligent, bot-like responses to frequently asked questions.

To learn more about Yammer announcements, click here.

Create SharePoint Lists from Excel Files

Several innovations were announced on the SharePoint side and specifically in SharePoint Lists but my favorite one is the possibility to create a SharePoint List from Excel. Users just have to choose the Excel file, the desired table and then confirm the columns and their data types in SharePoint. Easy and powerful!

SharePoint File Storage Improvements

This is not an announcement by itself but some interesting numbers on improvements that were made in the SharePoint File Storage over the last few years:

• Accessing data from Microsoft 365 is ten times faster than it was just two years ago
• User’s experience in Office 365 is three times faster than a year ago, with investments across architecture that accelerate your experience even when you are working far from your own data center
• Users can view more than 320 file types, without requiring dedicated applications, across Microsoft 365 web, mobile, and desktop applications and Windows 10
• Differential sync, coming to OneDrive, will synchronize large files significantly faster and considerably reduce network utilization by the sync process

Summary

If you want to know more about what recent updates in the SharePoint and Office 365 world, I invite you to read all about the latest announcements from the SharePoint Conference:

• SharePoint Conference 2019 web site (with video to the event keynote)
• Microsoft 365 innovations for the intelligent workplace post by Jeff Teper
• SharePoint home sites: a landing for your organization on the intelligent intranet
• New Yammer investments add engagement and compliance capabilities
• New Microsoft Stream mobile features, interactivity and more announced at SharePoint Conference 2019
• OneDrive announcements—SharePoint Conference 2019
• Turbocharging Microsoft 365 cloud user experiences
• Getting started with Microsoft Search
• Updates to SharePoint security, administration, and migration
• New Records Management solution and machine learning updates come to Microsoft 365 compliance
• What’s new for SharePoint Server
• Announcements for SharePoint developers
• Microsoft adoption resources center
• Optimizing business solutions with SharePoint and Office 365 at SPC19

To finish, I leave you the fantastic contribution from Luise Freese that summarizes the major announcements of the event!

To read the first part of this post series, 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 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 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 Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click 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 What’s New for SharePoint and Office 365 from SharePoint Conference 2019 (Part 2) appeared first on Blog IT.

From May 21st to 23rd, Microsoft has once again hosted SharePoint Conference, one of its biggest tech events, with many new announcements and revealing a lot of exciting new features in the Microsoft world, including SharePoint and Office 365.

Introduction

SharePoint and Office 365 have come a long way and it is nothing but amazing to see the constant innovation that Microsoft has been introducing to the platform over the years!

There are lot of new announcements being released at a very fast pace and it is challenging to stay up to date with everything that is being released!

This post will try to resume the latest announcements in the SharePoint and Office 365 world and what it means for end users, IT Pros and developers.

Hope you are ready for a ride, fasten your seat belt, because there are many new features coming (some of them may be already rolled out at the time of this writing). While it is impossible to talk about everything that has been announced, I will try to resume some of the biggest announcements in a two part series. These are the main topics I will discuss in the first part of this two part series:

• SharePoint Home Sites
• Microsoft Search
• What’s New In OneDrive
• What’s New for Developers

To read the second part of this post series, click here.

SharePoint Home Sites

One of the biggest announcements ot this year’s SharePoint Conference was without any doubt the new SharePoint Home Sites. This is a SharePoint Communication Site with steroids and it was designed to be the home site for your organization.

SharePoint Home Sites are basically a pre-built portal that is based on a Communication Site with many additional features. The Home Site has some new web parts (that are also available to any Communication Site) and is automatically configured as the news site for the entire organization.

The main goal is to promote employees engagement within the organization by bringing in a single place relevant news, events, content, conversations and video to deliver an engaging experience that reflects each organization’s most relevant information for the whole company.

This is how a SharePoint Home Site will look like:

SharePoint Home sites have the following benefits over traditional Communication Sites:

• A Great and Modern Design
• The SharePoint Home Site is configured as the default organization’s news site
• The information presented in the page is scoped to the entire tenant (using Microsoft Search)

The new SharePoint Home Site will be divided in two major types of information:

• Content that is relevant to the whole organization
• Intelligent web parts that show relevant personalized content (content targeted at the logged in user), making it a great experience for every user that can easily and rapidly access the most relevant information for them (once again powered by search based capabilities). Examples: My Frequent Sites, My News, My Recent Documents

From now on, creating new engaging SharePoint Portals will be a matter of minutes and not days or weeks since SharePoint Home Sites will be available out of the box with no need for any custom development.

In the near future, all new Office 365 tenants will be automatically created with a SharePoint Home Site as their homepage. For existing tenants, admins will be able to provision a Home Site using PowerShell (and eventually, using the Admin Center).

To learn more about SharePoint Home Sites, click here.

Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search was announced in last Microsoft Ignite edition (if you want to know everything about Microsoft Ignite 2018’s announcements, click here) and a lot has happened in this department since then.

Microsoft Search In Bing (Availble Now)

If you are using Bing and you are signed in with your Office 365 account, search results will bring together web results and organization results from withing your Office 365 tenant including People, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

Microsoft Search in Office.com (Available Now)

It is already possible to search from the Office.com portal and quickly find the most relevant information to you, including the documents you most recently worked on (all of this delivered by the Graph API).

Microsoft Search in Office Desktop Applications (Available Now)

It is already possible to have a consistent search experience from within Office applications (includes Desktop, Web and Mobile applications). The search experience allows you for example to search for a PowerPoint presentation from within a Word document and insert a specific slide directly into the Word document without opening PowerPoint!

Search results are also contextual and suggestions will appear depending on the part of the document users are editing.

Microsoft Search in SharePoint (Available Now)

Recently the Microsoft Search was included in Modern SharePoint sites and will allow users to quickly find News, Files and People. As in other Office 365 applications, the search box is presented at the top of the page.

The first time you click the search box, the search results will present suggestions and the most recent documents you worked on or you recently opened.

Microsoft Search in OneDrive (Available Now)

Microsoft Search is also available in OneDrive and lets you quickly find the information you are looking for from inside your OneDrive files and rapidly filter the search results.

Microsoft Search in Windows (Coming Soon)

Not yet available but soon it will be possible to search for information (Documents, People) in your Office 365 tenant directly from Windows 10.

Microsoft Search Admin Center (Available Now)

The new Microsoft Search Admin Center is already available and lets administrators to take a look into valuable insights from the information inside your organization, such as top queries, impression distribution by result type, etc.

Other Microsoft Search Announcements (Later This Year)

For IT Pros and developers, there were also announced some major and exciting new features coming later this year:

• Custom Refiners
• Custom Search Verticals
• Custom Display Templates for Custom Result Types

To learn more about the most recent announcements on Microsoft Search, click here.

What’s New In OneDrive

There is a LOT of new announcements in the OneDrive world! Below, are some of the most important announcements.

AutoCAD DWG Files Preview

It will be possible, to preview AutoCAD DWG files directly in the browser, without the need to install the AutoCAD desktop application.

Request Files From Others

This is one my favorite announcements for OneDrive! If you want to receive documents from others in a simpler way (and avoid for example email to do it), you will be able to Request Files in a simple and safe way. You simply select a folder you want the recipient to place documents into and click Request Files. The email that is sent to the recipient automatically fills in the URL of your OneDrive folder and all you have to do is to type in the email of the person you want to request files from. The recipient clicks on the link, selects and uploads the files and the files will be automatically uploaded to the requestor OneDrive folder!

Get direct links to individual PowerPoint slides (Web Only)

It will be possible to get a link to a specific slide in a PowerPoint presentation with the new Link to this Slide option. This option will only be available for PowerPoint Online. Recipients that click on the link will be taken directly to that slide.

Simplified Sharing inside Office Applications

Did you ever tried to ask for the contribution of someone in a Word or PowerPoint document that doesn’t have permissions on the document? Mee too. Not a problem anymore! From now on, if you mention someone in a document to ask for their contribution, a permission check will be made and if the recipient doesn’t have permissions on the document, you will be able to share the document and notify the user on the spot! Very cool stuff!

OneDrive sync client differential sync

Personally, my favorite announcement for OneDrive. Differential sync brings the ability to sync only the parts of large files that have changed, not the entire files. This will make the file synchronization process much faster for these files. Currently, OneDrive already supports differential sync for Office files and later this year, OneDrive differential sync will be supported in all file types stored in OneDrive and SharePoint.

To learn more about all the announcements for OneDrive, click here.

What’s New for Developers

If you want to know all there is to know about SharePoint and Office 365 development, take a look at the SharePoint Developer Community (PnP).

SharePoint Framework is taking more and more a place at the heart of SharePoint and Office 365 development to create modern solutions all over the world!

Below, are some of the major developer announcements from the SharePoint Conference!

Application Pages and Microsoft Teams Tabs

SharePoint Framework web parts and extensions were the first building blocks to help developers create engaging team and communication sites experiences but many times we want to develop whole applications using SPFx technology!

Since SharePoint Framework 1.7 was released, developers were able to:

• Build Web Parts in SPFx for Microsoft Teams
• Host Microsoft Teams Tabs as Application Pages and Web Parts in SharePoint

Recently, SharePoint Framework 1.8 was announced with support for Application Pages that allow developers to create full page solutions based on SharePoint Framework!

Later, it will be possible to extend support for Teams and SharePoint applications built through SharePoint Framework to mobile devices including Teams Tabs! Very cool!!!

SharePoint Online Provisioning Service

SharePoint Online Provisioning Service was in Preview for some time and it now made generally available.

A while ago, Microsoft released the SharePoint look book with lots of great examples of different designs and components we could have in SharePoint pages. With the SharePoint Online Provisioning Service, it is now possible to provision those components (currently from 10 different templates) in just a few clicks to your existing SharePoint tenant!

According to the SharePoint Online Provisioning Service Description, soon templates will support other assets, including Teams, Channels, Tabs in Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 assets.

New Developer Experiences

Announced at Microsoft Build, Microsoft is going to enhance Microsoft Graph connected controls. Additionally, take a look at Windows Community Toolkit (which includes controls for working with Microsoft Graph and Files) and at the new Microsoft Graph Toolkit for web experiences. This toolkit includes several controls such as controls to manage Microsoft Graph login, display of relevant people, calendar, and task information and soon more controls will be available such as web-based file browser controls.

SharePoint Framework 1.9 (Available Soon)

With the upcoming SharePoint Framework 1.9 (currently in development), it will be possible to develop library components, that are basically common modules of code that can be shared across multiple SharePoint Framework projects. With the new release of SharePoint Framework (coming soon), library components will be generally available.

To learn more about the most recent developer announcements, click here.

To read the second part of this post series, 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 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 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 Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click 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 What’s New for SharePoint and Office 365 from SharePoint Conference 2019 (Part 1) 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.

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

This post is based on upgrading a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019 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 2013 to SharePoint 2019 and all other SharePoint databases are created in the target SharePoint 2019 farm during its installation process.

If you want to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

There is another valid migration approach to migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 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 2013 to SharePoint 2019
  (details about the migration of custom solutions are outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2016 farm
• Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2019 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 2019 farm

Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2019 farm

IMPORTANT NOTE: Migrating from SharePoint 2013 directly to SharePoint 2019 is not supported. To migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 we must first migrate to a temporary SharePoint 2016 farm and then migrate to SharePoint 2019.

The migration is performed using the database attach upgrade method (the only supported method to upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 using a database upgrade approach).

In the upgrade process, for both the temporary SharePoint 2016 and the target SharePoint 2019 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 2019 farm, click here and here.

After having all custom developed solutions migrated to SharePoint 2019 (if there are any), you should follow the following steps:

• SharePoint 2016: 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 2016 farm

• SharePoint 2016 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 2019 farm. This can be achieved by the following T-SQL command: ALTER DATABASE <CONTENT_DB_NAME> SET read_write
• SharePoint 2016 Database Server: Backup of the content database(s)

• SharePoint 2016 (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 2016 farm

• SharePoint 2019 Database Server: Copy the database backup file from the temporary SharePoint 2016 database server to the database server that supports the target SharePoint 2019 farm
• SharePoint 2019: 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 2019 Database Server: Restore the content database backup from the temporary SharePoint 2016 database server. The restore must replace the content database that was created during the SharePoint 2019 installation.

• SharePoint 2019: If you have custom developed farm solutions, deploy all the migrated WSPs in the target SharePoint 2019 farm.
• SharePoint 2019: As a farm administrator, execute the first of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2019 farm (in this example the web application URL is http://sp2019): Test-SPContentDatabase -Name <Content_DB_Name> -WebApplication http://sp2019
  
  • 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 2019: As a farm administrator, execute the second of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2019 farm: Mount-SPContentDatabase -Name “<Content_DB_Name>” -DatabaseServer “<DBAlias>” -WebApplication “http://sp2019”
  • This PowerShell cmdlet attaches an existing content database to a web application
  • In my case, no errors or warnings were shown

• SharePoint 2019: As a farm administrator, execute the third of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2019 farm: Test-SPSite http://sp2019
  • 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 2019: As a farm administrator, execute the fourth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2019 farm: Repair-SPSite -identity http://sp2019
  • 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 2019: As a farm administrator, execute the fifth of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the SharePoint 2019 farm: Upgrade-SPSite http://sp2019 -VersionUpgrade
  • This PowerShell cmdlet will upgrade the site collections associated to the web application to SharePoint 2019 mode. Before this cmdlet was executed, the site collections were still in SharePoint 2016 mode.

After the migration is complete, your SharePoint web application is successfully displayed in your brand new SharePoint 2019 environment! The site is presented using the classic site experience, but from now on, you will be able to take advantage of the new modern experiences in your SharePoint 2019 environment!

To download the SharePoint 2019 migration PowerShell files, click here.

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

Related Articles

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 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 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 upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 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 2019 that has support for a hybrid scenario can be a valid solution to allow a gradual move to the cloud.

This post is based on upgrading a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019 using the database attach approach but is also valid if you want to upgrade to SharePoint 2016 (to learn more about upgrading to SharePoint 2016, click here and here). This post assumes that the we will only migrate the content database(s) from the source SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 and all other SharePoint databases are created in the target SharePoint 2019 farm during its installation process.

If you want to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

There is another valid migration approach to migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 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 2013 to SharePoint 2019 (outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2016 farm
• Upgrade to the target SharePoint 2019 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 2013 to SharePoint 2019 (details about the migration of custom solutions are outside of the scope of this post)
• Upgrade to a temporary SharePoint 2016 farm

Migrating Custom Developed Solutions from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019

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 2013 to SharePoint 2019:

• First, you should analyze the source SharePoint 2013 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 2019 without changing the solution architecture. This typically involves migrating server-side code from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019, 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 2016 farm

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• Migrating from SharePoint 2013 directly to SharePoint 2019 is not supported. To migrate from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 we must first migrate to a temporary SharePoint 2016 farm and then migrate to SharePoint 2019
• To to be able to migrate to SharePoint 2016 and then to SharePoint 2019, the 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 2013 to SharePoint 2019 using a database upgrade approach).

In the upgrade process, for both the temporary SharePoint 2016 and the target SharePoint 2019 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 2019 farm, click here and here.

After having all custom developed solutions migrated to SharePoint 2019 (if there are any), you should follow the following steps:

• SharePoint 2013 (test migration only): Export all WSPs from the SharePoint 2013 farm to file system. To export the WSP files, you can use this PowerShell script.
  SharePoint 2013 (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 2013 farm

• SharePoint 2013 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 2013 Database Server: Backup of the content database(s) (in read-only mode in the final migration)

• 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 source SharePoint 2013 farm in read-only mode, preventing users from changing any content

• SharePoint 2016 Database Server: Copy the database backup file from the source SharePoint 2013 database server to the database server that supports the temporary 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 source 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, add all the exported WSPs (without deploying them) in the temporary SharePoint 2016 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 2016: Execute the first of a series of PowerShell commands to associate the restored content database to the temporary 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 warnings 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 temporary 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 temporary 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 temporary 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 temporary 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.

To download the SharePoint 2016 migration PowerShell files, click here.

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 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 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 upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 Step by Step (Part 1) 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 a new SharePoint Server release was recently announced by Microsoft with improved hybrid support. To learn more about all the new features in SharePoint 2019, click here.

Before installing a SharePoint 2019 farm, it is important to be familiar with its requirements. To learn more about SharePoint 2019 hardware and software requirements, click here.

Installing a SharePoint farm can be a complex task and the installation process is composed by a series of steps:

• 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

All the above steps are time consuming and can be error prone if, for example, you miss to download any of the prerequisites.

Fortunately, it is possible to fully automate a SharePoint farm installation using PowerShell by using a script called AutoSPInstaller. The installation process can be divided in two major steps:

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

In this post, I will talk about the second part of the process: installing SharePoint and configuring the SharePoint farm.

AutoSPInstaller can be used to install a SharePoint farm in the following versions of SharePoint:

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

The example in this post is based on SharePoint 2019 with the following farm topology:

• 1 SharePoint 2019 Server
• 1 Database Server

Managed Accounts and Pre-Installation Requisites

This is a critical step to ensure a successful SharePoint installation. Before the AutoSPInstaller script is executed, all the necessary managed accounts must be created and the appropriate permissions must be properly granted to each account. If any of these permissions is not granted, you will probably encounter problems during the installation. From my experience doing SharePoint installations, creating these accounts with all the required permissions ensures a fast and successful SharePoint installation. Here is the list of accounts and required permissions before installation:

Important Notes: 

• 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
• After installation, the permissions for the SharePoint installation will have to be verified again and will be different from the above table. SharePoint configuration, service application and content databases will be created and some of the managed accounts listed in the above table will have to have permissions on some of those databases. For more details, please click here.

Download AutoSPInstaller PowerShell script

To download the latest version of AutoSPInstaller, click here.

The files should be extracted to C:\SP\Automation, assuming that the SharePoint 2019 installation files downloaded with AutoSPSourceBuilder were saved to C:\SP\2019.

This is the folder structure that AutoSPInstaler uses:

\SP\Automation\AutoSPInstallerLaunch.bat
\SP\Automation\AutoSPInstallerInput.xml
\SP\Automation\AutoSPInstallerMain.ps1\SP\AutoSPInstallerMain.ps1
\SP\Automation\AutoSPInstallerModule.psm1
\SP\Automation\AutoSPInstallerConfigureRemoteTarget.ps1
\SP\201x\SharePoint\<installation files & folders>
\SP\201x\SharePoint\PreRequisiteInstallerFiles\
\SP\201x\SharePoint\Updates\
\SP\201x\LanguagePacks\xx-xx\
\SP\201x\LanguagePacks\xx-xx\Updates\
\SP\201x\Updates\

In this example, the root folder of the installation is C:\SP.

Creating the AutoSPInstaller configuration file

The next step, is to configure the AutoSPInstaller input configuration file that can be done in the AutoSPInstaller web site.  The end result of the configurations set in the AutoSPInstaller web site is the download of an XML file (AutoSPInstallerInput.xml) that contains all the settings required to configure the SharePoint farm. The AutoSPInstallerInput.xml file contains among other configurations:

• 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)

The AutoSPInstallerInput.xml file should be placed in C:\SP\Automation.

Installing SharePoint

After the AutoSPInstallerInput.xml file is configured, it’s time to install SharePoint!

IMPORTANT: the following steps should be executed using the sp_admin account.

Follow the following steps:

1. Run AutoSPInstallerLaunch.bat from the command line (run as administrator).

AutoSPInstallerLaunch.bat will launch a PowerShell window that will install SharePoint and configure the farm using as an input the AutoSPInstaller XML configuration file (AutoSPInstallerInput.xml) previously configured using the AutoSPInstaller web site.

2. After the PowerShell window is launched, the following will happen:

• 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

The PowerShell script will start by validating all managed managed accounts configuration and if everything is OK, the SharePoint installation is started, beginning with the installation of all required prerequisites.

After prerequisites are installed, the script will install SharePoint.

The SharePoint installation assumes that all prerequisites were successfully installed. If any of the prerequisites was not successfully installed, an error similar to the following may occur.

To solve this error, there are two valid approaches:

• Run AutoSPInstaller from the beginning so that the missing prerequisite(s) are installed
• If the error remains, install the missing prerequisite(s) manually

If no errors occur or after the prerequisites errors are solved, the PowerShell script will continue to do its magic until all SharePoint binaries are installed.

After SharePoint binaries are installed, it’s time to configure the farm!

Configuring the SharePoint Farm

After SharePoint is installed, the script will ask if we want to proceed with farm configuration. To proceed, select “y” and click ENTER. The script will, among others, perform the following actions:

• 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

The PowerShell script will continue until the SharePoint farm is configured.

After the farm configuration is completed, the Central Administration will be opened and SharePoint is installed!

If you configured a web application to be created, the image below shows how a modern Team Site will look like in your SharePoint 2019 environment.

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is recommended that you don’t delete the Default Web Site. If you do, the “SharePoint Web Services” IIS site created during the SharePoint installation will be created with ID 1 and the SharePoint configuration will stop this site because it is trying to stop the Default Web Site that has ID 1. If you delete the Default Web Site, make sure you change the “SharePoint Web Services” web site ID to a unique value different from 1.

Multi-Server Installation (SharePoint servers)

If you want to install SharePoint 2019 in multiple servers there is a number of considerations that you have to take into account. Some of the most important decisions are:

• 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?

If you use MinRoles, these will supersede the individual service and service application selection for each server in the farm. These are the available MinRoles:

• Front-end
• Application
• Distributed cache
• Search
• Custom (allows for a more granular selection of what services are provisioned in each server)
• Single-server farm (the only configuration where SQL Server may be installed in the same server as SharePoint 2019, configuration not detailed here, reference the <Database> section in the AutoSPInstallerInput.xml file at the AutoSPInstaller web site)
• Front-end with Distributed Cache (merge of Front-end and Distributed cache MinRoles)
• Application with Search (merge of Application and Search MinRoles)

Each of the MinRoles automatically provisions a specific set of services and service applications. If you want to learn more about MinRoles, click here.

Once farm topology and service/service application distribution is decided, we are ready to install SharePoint 2019 in multiple servers. For the installation process, you basically have two options:

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

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

If you decide not to use MinRoles and go for a Custom installation (which allows for a more granular selection of what services are provisioned in each server), you must ensure that the AutoSPInstaller XML input file in all servers is configured as Custom.

When configuring AutoSPInstaller in the AutoSPInstaller web site not to to use MinRoles, you will typically have a configuration similar to the one below.

This seems correct but the generated XML configuration will have the following configuration in the <ServerRoles> section:

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

With the configuration above, each server will be installed with a single server role and you will only be able to join the first server to the farm. When you try to add the remaining servers, the AutoSPInstaller PowerShell script instead of adding the servers to the farm, will try to recreate the farm, which will result in the error below.

If you try to add the server manually to the farm, you will get the error below.

To solve this, you must edit the XML configuration to configure the servers as “Custom” and not “SingleServerFarm”, using a configuration similar to the following example (specific configuration depends on the number of servers and roles for each server):

• <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

In this approach, SharePoint will be installed using AutoSPInstaller on all servers from one of the SharePoint servers. The script will first install SharePoint locally on the server where the script is being executed and will then install SharePoint remotely on the other servers (all at once or one by one depending on AutoSPInstaller configuration file). The installation on the remote servers is performed using PowerShell Remoting and Windows Remote Management (WinRM). WinRM must be enabled for each of the servers where SharePoint will be installed remotely. To learn more about Remote Install (example for SharePoint 2013 but valid for SharePoint 2019 in what regards to remote installation), click here.

Install SharePoint individually in each SharePoint server

This option doesn’t require WinRM to be enabled on any of the servers but requires instead that the AutoSPInstaller installation folder (C:\SP in this post) is copied to all servers. Additionally, there are some important notes to consider:

• 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

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

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 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.

To learn more about all the new features in SharePoint 2019, click 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 you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 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 are involved in a SharePoint upgrade and want to learn more about the upgrade process, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to install a SharePoint 2019 farm using PowerShell and AutoSPInstaller Step by Step (Part 2) appeared first on Blog IT.