HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. – 66th Air Base Group Communications and Information Division officials here have announced they will soon upgrade SharePoint sites across the installation to SharePoint 2013.
The upgrade will replace SharePoint 2007. The upgrade is necessary because a number of capabilities of its current platform, including search, will not work because the amount of data has reached its limit.
“Users will certainly notice the difference between the two versions, but we are striving to make SharePoint 2013 look and feel like the current 2007 version to ease the transition for Hanscom-based users,” said Stephan Giorgio, 66th Air Base Group Enterprise Information Services Project manager.
Among the improvements expected in the latest version are ease of uploading multiple documents and enhanced search features.
“SharePoint is the acquisition community’s weapon system as it is the primary tool for collaboratively sharing information,” said William Ross, deputy director of the Communications and Information Division. “Many people think SharePoint is just a place to store and share documents; however, SharePoint is much more than that.”
Hanscom personnel have built many custom application solutions for SharePoint. Among those are suspense trackers and contract deliverables requirements list trackers. These custom applications took what was once static information and turned it into dynamic information.
“Where people once would track a schedule using an Excel spreadsheet, with SharePoint they can track schedules and use stoplights to indicate the status of items,” said Ross. “As due dates approach, the stoplights automatically change color. These dashboards provide situational awareness to senior leaders and help them manage their time.”
In addition, organizations can now measure their processes to see how well they are performing. SharePoint provides metrics as to whether each step of a process is ahead of schedule, on time or late.
This allows the process team to do a “deep dive” on the late areas of the process and adjust as necessary.
In order to transition, from October through December, SharePoint site owners and users must review what they have on SharePoint and delete old material. Personnel must move official files to the V drive and delete excess versions of documents.
During this clean up period, Air Force Materiel Command will build the migration schedule. Then in January and February, The AFMC support team will do the migration of all the existing data from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013. Because there are large amounts of data, the migration may take up to 12 months.
“Hanscom will review the migration schedule and will schedule SharePoint 2013 site-owner training to coincide with the migration for each organization,” said Giorgio. “During the migration, some users may need to use both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2013.
For further information, contact Giorgio at 781-225-1426.