Splitting 1 site collection into many

Question

I have an environment with a 600GB content DB running SharePoint 2007 under one site collection. The challenge is, how do we split this or convert this into several site collections? We are looking to move this to SharePoint 2016 with a proper site collection structure

thanks

Answer 1

First thing, you will require SharePoint 2010,2013 and 2016. because you cannot migrate directly from SP 2007 to SP 2016. I believe you must be having multiple SubSites under that one Site Collection. You can create another blank Site Collection, in that create blank SubSite and migrate that old SubSite to new blank SubSite (through STSADM import and export command promt). Migrate only that musch relevant SubSites which are related to Site Collection (Say IT Department).

Similarly create another blank Site Collection (say Account Department) and SubSite and repeat the above step.

Once all required Site Collections are created in SP2007, then migrate each Site Collection Content Database to SP2010, then to 2013 and then 2016.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

While you can "migrate" from 2007 to any new version, you can't "upgrade" by using database attach or Microsoft tools without upgrading through each version (2007 > 2010 > 2013 > 2016). You can find 3rd party tools to migrate content. (Do a web search for "SharePoint migration tools".)

Migration is generally preferred when you need to reorganize content into new structure of web applications, site collections and sites. Migration is also your opportunity to clean out the years of "junk" uploaded and never deleted by users.

Your biggest challenges will be with any customizations such as branding, custom pages or web parts and purchased third party tools. Splitting the 2007 site collection will probably create a large number of broken URLs from navigation links, links in lists and links stored in documents, and of course, end user bookmarks and favorites. While workflows generally survive upgrades, there will be manual work with migrations.

What else do you plan to at the same time? A move to formal metadata? Support for Office 365 hybrid? Are you using any of the "services" and are they still available in 2016? (Excel Services is not.)