How to upgrade from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2019 Step by Step (Part 2)

This post is the second part of a two part step by step tutorial on how to migrate a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019.

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, 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.

To learn all about Upgrading a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, 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.