Daubert Industries, a chemical company in the west suburbs of Chicago, originally engaged with DMC to help implement their SharePoint 2010 portal. After working together on the design of the portal taxonomy, adding content from their network drive, and evaluating SharePoint’s overall value to the organization, Daubert decided to move forward with plans to expand SharePoint’s use throughout the enterprise.
As the SharePoint evaluation period was wrapping up, Microsoft released SharePoint 2013. Instead of training users on SharePoint 2010, Daubert elected to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 first so that users would not have to learn the SharePoint 2010 environment and then a new environment shortly after.
As part of the upgrade effort, DMC’s Microsoft consulting services team took an inventory of SharePoint 2010 customizations and tested them on the SharePoint 2013 platform to confirm backwards compatibility. Next, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps were installed within a new virtual server environment. The farm was configured with appropriate settings for email, security and permissions, and converted to claims-based authentication. DMC leveraged PowerShell to update many of the SharePoint 2013 services. DMC then completed the final technical activity of the SharePoint upgrade process, which was to detach the SharePoint 2010 content database and attach it to the new SharePoint 2013 farm so the database schema could be upgraded.
Once the site was ready, training sessions were conducted to teach power users how to use the new SharePoint 2013 features and administer the new farm. Plans are now underway to build Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards derived from data managed by other enterprise systems.
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