Blog Post #2 of How I Successfully Upgraded eBay to SharePoint 2010 – Previous Blog in this series
One of the decisions I made as the Sr Architect of the eBay upgrade project, was to NOT do a database attach upgrade of the SSP. I viewed the whole process as not very reliable and we didn't want a bunch of junk moving foward to 2010. So, we went down the path of build it all from scratch. This presents some interesting problems and this blog post will focus on the UserProfile Service Application component of the SSP. In summary it entails:
- Custom properties added in 2007 must be moved to 2010 (definition and data)
- Custom profile privacy settings
- All connections must be redone (BDC, Active Directory)
- Migrate old custom user data
As part of the process, the first thing you have to do is to identify all the custom properties that were added in 2007. This is actually an easy part as you can simply run a query against the SSP database and the PropertyList table. Anything over a certain ID value is a custom property. This definitely gets you the list, but what do you do with the list? You COULD manually add each one to the UPS service application, or, you could write a lovely PowerShell Script to do the work for you. How do the scripts work?
- We built a custom tab delimited file of their names, values, descriptions, privacy settings and connection information.
- We create a script that reads the data and will setup the properties – this was HUGE time saving as the property editing page in UPS is one of the worst designed pages in all of Central Administration
- Setup all BDC connections using SharePoint Designer (this includes assigning the proper permissions to the UPS service application accounts to be able to execute the BDC and retrieve data)
- We create another script that will setup the property connections (after BDC has been created)
- Custom profile privacy settings
That gets the basics done, but what about the data of the users in the 2007 farm? Just so happens the SharePoint team though very hard about this one. As part of the SharePoint Admin ToolKit, you have a User Profile replication tool. This tool will grab the data in a target SharePoint farm (2007 or 2010) and move the data based on the account name of the user (not the recordid as that would change in each farm).
The only problem with this tool is that is doesn't like special characters very much. These would include the main culprit the 'appersand' (ie '&'). We had to edit all the properties in the production farm that had this in the PropertyVal (of the UserPropertyValue table) to remove it and put 'and' in its place. Once this was done, the tool was able to use it's error log to rerun for just those users. You could slowly find all the special characters and remove them to have the users data get moved over successfully.
The last step, and this really is the most important one, is that you ensure that all the privacy settings came over. We were told the Admin Toolkit would do this, but we found out that wasn't the case. It is very simple to get these values from the older 2007 farm by joing the UserProfile_Full and the UserProfileValue tables on recordid and getting the "privacy" column. Then all you have to do is to update the same values in the 2010 farm and BAM…you are DONE!
Enjoy,
Chris
Check out the next blog in this series – Changing your Host headers