Best practice to avoid feature missing issue during SharePoint 2013 upgrade

If you upgrade SharePoint 2010 content to 2013 , you might get many feature missing issue during content migration even those features have already upgraded and deployed on SharePoint 2013!  So, what is the reason and how to resolve it?

The main reason is the content from SharePoint 2010 has reference to feature that is inside 14 hive! As a result, the solution is to remove the reference on SharePoint 2010 before the content detach as I have already mentioned in Fab 40 upgrade blog.

There are many good blogs to explain SharePoint 2013 upgrade in detail steps or bestpractice. I’ve put together an TEN step migration SharePoint 2013 upgrade architectand design. You might notice one of the key step is clean up as we described in previous blog. There are many clean up tasks you MUST perform before the upgrade. In this blog, I would just focus two major clean ups – master page and webpart cleanups that will remove the reference on SharePoint 2010 14 hive to reduce missing feature issue.

1. The first step for this is to disable the features from all scopes (farm, web application, site, and web) that are refer to your master mages and webparts. 

This will remove the feature reference to features deployed to 14 hive. If you deactivate some webpart solution like Quest Webparts, it will automatically remove the webparts from webpart gallery. If you do not deactivate the Quest Webparts feature on SharePoint 2010, you will have issues like we discussed in previous blog.

2. The second step is to switch the master pages to out OoB V4 master pages. This will remove the dependencies to any features on 14 hive.

3. The third step is to remove the customized master page from master page gallery. 

If you do not remove the customized SharePoint 2010 master page from master page gallery, you will NOT be able to remove them on SharePoint 2013 easily that will cause upgrade issues in the future! 

In addition to the three steps above, you should follow the cleanup procedure published before to elimination potential upgrade errors. Make sure that your environment is functioning in a healthy state and that you clean up any content that you do not have to upgrade. Clean up any unnecessary components, unsupported features, orphaned sites or features, address any large lists and large ACLs, remove extraneous document versions, and replace using OoB features as in the below picture. 

You should generate the inventory and reports to determine the 2013 farm topology plus a performance baseline and information about the environment. One of the report you need to do is the customized master pages so you could following the three steps above to fix the issue.