What To Know When Migrating Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM)

With SharePoint 2019 on the horizon, you may be considering upgrading. If you are using ExCM for your extranet needs, then you may wonder about the process and how involved it is. Hopefully, with the help of this guide, you will see that the ExCM migration may be the easiest part of your upgrade! If you are still leery, contact us about our migration assistance package and let us walk you through migrating ExCM.

Whether you are going to follow Microsoft’s detach/attach method for migrating, or you will be using a tool such as Metalogix or Sharegate, the process is mostly the same… there are just a few extra steps with Microsoft’s path.

The first step of your migration is to build out your new SharePoint environment. When building the new environment, you will use the same web app name, URL, database name, role and role provider, etc. Basically the same structure, just a different version of SharePoint. While you will have the same names, the content will be empty. For example; If you have an extranet at www.mycompany.com/site/home, the page will still exist, but there will not be any subsites or content on the site. At this point, you should be able to browse out to the root site collection and a page should load.

When you have the new version of SharePoint installed and looking like your old SharePoint environment, The next step is to install the correct version of ExCM in your new environment. Once installed, configure ExCM with the same settings as your previous version. If your new environment is using a new SQL server, name the database created during the setup Wizard the same as the old database. This way, once you have tested the installation of ExCM, you can simply delete this blank database and migrate the previous database containing all your extranet users over.

If you are not using a new SQL database, you will need to name your database something similar to the original database name (ex. Instead of ExtranetDirectory you may use ExtranetDirectory1) This way, once you have tested your new environment to ensure the install was a success, you can delete the ExtranetDirectory1 database and change your web.config file so that all references to ExtranetDirectory1 now point to ExtranetDirectory.

We have had many customers that have migrated from 2010 or 2013 to 2016 and whether they are using the detach/ attach method or a migration tool the biggest issue we have seen them run into seems to be an issue with the transfer of registration fields from the old ExCM to the new ExCM. This can be caused by having the wrong settings in the migration tool that prevent the content database from fully transferring the correct data. Whatever the reason the fix is pretty easy. After transferring the content data to your new ExCM environment you can delete the registration and then recreate it.

To help lead you in the right direction we have provided a couple of links to PremierPoint Solutions documentation on migrating from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 and SharePoint 2013 to 2016.

The primary thing to remember when migrating is to have a plan laid out and always make backups when possible.

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