As the saying goes, “Migrations happen!”. We know a lot of planning on your part goes into getting ready for a migration. And we also know that all migrations are not the same. While most migrations can happen in a month or two, the more complex migrations can take over a year or more for a full cutover!
As part of your standard on-premises support with Bamboo, we offer product upgrades to your products to new versions of on-premise SharePoint. If you are going from 2010 to 2013 or 2013 to 2019 or 2022, we’ve got you covered. If you are moving to SharePoint Online, we have been developing brand-new products that match existing functionality of our on-premises products. For customers on Bamboo support, we have discounted SharePoint Online Licenses for the products that match your existing Bamboo products.
This article discusses our policies to support your organization through these upgrades. Each of these topics outlines the best practices for ensuring your licenses are correct to support your migration.
Contact Us Early
First, please contact support early by creating a support ticket or by email at support@bamboosolutions.com. This will allow us to fully understand the timeline for the new farm well before migration weekend! The earlier we know about the migration, the smoother the transition to the new farm will be. We have seen many migrations and can help with the planning for the specific products you own.
The New Farm
We need to know the topology of the new farm. Our license model is to license every server that is running Microsoft Foundation Web App services on both the production and non-production environments. There may be a need for additional licenses of the products owned, so it is best to build this into your planning.
Dry Runs and Testing
Testing/Dry Run farms will need a non-production license. We will not support Trial or Demo licenses for testing your migration. Please let us know if this is something you will need.
Migration Period
As part of your active support, we allow you to run both the new farm and the current production farm for 60 days. As soon as we populate your account with the new licenses, support from the old farm transitions to the new farm, and the 60-day clock begins. We will continue to support the live farm at no additional charge for 60 days. Once the old farm is cut over, we will then issue permanent keys to the new farm. If a longer time is needed, we will need to add Support back to the production farm. This is called a Bridge Maintenance and is designed to “bridge” the period when both farms are running concurrently. The Bridge Maintenance cost is equal to your current year’s maintenance. We will provide a quote if needed.
Migration Support
Our products work on all versions of SharePoint; however, at times, migrated data or other environmental issues may cause pages not to load properly due to the migration. As part of support, we can advise on what may be causing the issue, but we cannot, under standard support, try to fix issues that arise from migrations.
We have over 20 Microsoft-trained consultants who, for an hourly charge can work on migration-related issues to help your team finish a migration successfully if additional migration support is needed. An extra set of hands is often what is needed during these migration events. We know our products, and we know SharePoint, so it may be faster to just bring us in for a couple of hours!
We can also support after-hours cutovers. Often, clients would like us to be on standby over the weekend in case something goes wrong with a go-live, and our expertise is needed. This, of course, must be scheduled in advance, and the time is billed while we are waiting for a potential call. Better to have us ready and not need us than the other way around.
Summary
Overall, our goal is to make sure that we provide a stellar support service during client migrations. While we do not like to put limits on what we can do as part of standard support, we do need to make sure our resources are meeting the commitments of what we promised in our standard support contract. As a reminder, our support information can be found here. With over 2,000 customers on active maintenance, we are proud that 55% of our open tickets are solved in under 5 hours, and 95% are solved in under 7 days.
