The new Office 365 service is out of “Preview” and available to try and buy today. We received tons of actionable feedback resulting in new features customers want, improved performance, simple user experiences, more admin controls and the stability they expect. SharePoint Online (SPO) customers will soon be able to self-upgrade to the new SharePoint Online experience – a new user interface, global Office 365 navigation and a whole set of new features and supported scenarios. You can go here to read all about “What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10.”

This article focuses on the coming upgrade experience for existing SharePoint Online customers. New customers will receive these features without any effort on their part.

What to expect during upgrade

• Office 365 customers will be notified approximately four weeks prior to their upgrade and will have the opportunity to postpone for a minimum of two months.
• Review “What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10” to start to plan how your company will take advantage of the new SharePoint Online capabilities soon to be at your fingertips.
• Evaluate whether content and sites are “old” or “unused” – and if so, consider removing content or even whole site collections that are no longer necessary.
• Review the ‘Known Issues and Design Changes’ section below.
• Upgrade individual site collections as outlined below at your own pace – one at a time, or all at once to save time.

You can learn about all the Office 365 service upgrade options at the broader Office 365 Service Upgrade Center, including what you need to know about Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office client..

Site Collection(s) Upgrade

SharePoint Online Site Collection Owners will be able to choose when to upgrade – on their terms. They will be able to ensure due-diligence testing before committing to the new experience. Once you know your sites are working properly, you can perform all these activities all at once with the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Online.

 Your tenancy is currently running on the new Sharepoint 2013 platform in a state we call “2010 Mode.” “2010 Mode” refers to the previous SharePoint 2010 user experience for the SharePoint Online service. We’re excited to soon offer you methods to migrate the user experience to “2013 Mode” – or what we’ve been communicating as the new SharePoint Online; we do not version SharePoint in Office 365 – it is simply evergreen as SharePoint Online.

Once you receive your upgrade notification and are ready to proceed, you can approach SharePoint Online upgrade in three ways:

• Manually upgrade each site collection via the native admin user interface (UI) within each site collection’s site settings (Settings  > Site Collection Administration >Site collection upgrade).
• Test first, then upgrade– SharePoint Online will support the new SharePoint 2013 feature called “Upgrade evaluation site collections” which allows an admin and users to see your site’s content in a new, separate copy of the site collection running in the new SPO for thorough testing purposes. Once you are satisfied in your test results, you go back to the original site collection and commit to upgrade to the new SPO. Note, this evaluation site collection will be deleted, so any new artifacts you’re creating during testing need to be copied out before it is deleted.
  • And you have the ability to do individual health checks to ensure the reliability of your sites with guidance on how to resolve those issues.
• Upgrade in bulk after your thorough testing via Windows PowerShell – we’ve developed a unique ‘upgrade’ cmdlet to help admins be more productive in this work stream.
  • To get started, download the SharePoint Online Management Shell
  • For detailed documentation, see the articleIntroduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell.
  • To make it easier for the non-Windows PowerShell power users, we've designed a web-based tool named the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder.
  • Specific to the upgrade cmdlet (Upgrade-SPOSite), you can initiate the upgrade to enumerate across multiple site collections at once.
    
    

Note: for My Sites, there is only an action for the SharePoint Online Admin from within the SharePoint Online Admin Center, similar to the first bulleted action above “Manually upgrade” - navigate to the –my parent site, ex: https://contoso-my.sharepoint.com– not an individual’s My Site, and then enable site collection upgrade. Once upgraded, users will be automatically queued for upgrade the next time they visit their My Site. They will see a pop-up dialog box and they should leave the default selections as is and click OK.

To help plan and upgrade effectively, please see the new "Plan to upgrade your SharePoint Online environment to the 2013 experience" Office.com article for more detail.

Known Issues and Design Changes

1. If you require access ot your site via SharePoint Designer you will find that after the upgrade SharePoint Designer 2010 will no longer function against the new environment.  To address this change you will need to download SharePoint Designer 2013 and use it to manage your site going forward. (Download Sharepoint Designer 2013 here at no cost). Please review this KB article to get better insight into one scenario where you would see this issue manifest.
   1. For new business solutions, we encourage you to review the new Cloud app model (CAM) to discover rich, new build and deployment methods.
2. Office 365 dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) in October 2011 – please refer to the Software requirements for Office 365 page for more information.
3. If you have two public websites, one you created before this upgrade, and a new Public Website that is not yet in a published state – but showing in your SharePoint Online Admin Center. You can only have one live Public Website. To aid you in migrating your Public Website content, we will soon publish a migration app to help move your site from the old site collection to the new one; this will be published to the Office Store. Learn more here about the new Public Website innovation.
4. First time set up for “External Sharing” has changed. You now manage all setup steps from within the SharePoint Online Admin Center; one step to enable the intent to share externally, and then a second step to enable external sharing at the individual site collection level. We have also updated the overall sharing experience to make it super easy to share, for both inviter and invitee. Learn more here on how to manage external sharing for SharePoint Online.
5. Sandboxed solutions will get deactivated during upgrade. To restore this functionality, you simply have to reactivate them from within the solution gallery of the site collection to which they are deployed. You should also be aware of the newCloud app model (CAM), where you can now accomplish more robust solutions beyond the confines of Sandboxed Solutions.
6. Custom master pages get reset once you commit to the new experience, meaning all custom elements get reset to their unbranded state. Master page component requirements may change between releases of SharePoint, and if you’ve developed custom master pages you should be aware that you may be required  to update them manually before upgrading to the new SharePoint Online experience. Please review the “Branding issues that may occur when upgrading” article (phrased under the 2013 upgrade process which is relevant to this upgrade for SharePoint Online).
   Note: many customers who found it necessary to create custom master pages in the past may now be able to take advantage of the improved out of the box (OOTB) master pages. They are faster - leveraging the new Minimal Download Strategy (MDS). We also made an extra effort to provide a more professional design by leveraging the new theming mechanism and color schemes. Please take a moment to review theming in this new release. We have also provided an excellent blog post on “Making the most of SharePoint 2013 when you upgrade”. This blog post gives great insights into the new page feature enhancements and how to take advantage of them:
   1. If you customized your site using SharePoint Designer 2010, you will now be required to use SharePoint Designer 2013 to reapply any changes. If you are adjusting publishing pages (aka, a Company Portal design), you can also leverage other rich HTML tools like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, etc. to create these types of pages using the new Design Manager component. For additional information you can also review Steve Peschka’s related blog post.
   2. If you created a custom master page that you would like to maintain, you will have to rebuild the site. To do this you will use Visual Studio to load the custom master page, reconfigure your content and placeholders, and then recompile “for 2013”. You can then redeploy the updated site into your SharePoint Online environment.
   3. If you uploaded a customer template as a Sandbox Solution, it will get deactivated as referenced in #5 above and you will have to follow the same procedure as above in 6b.
7. In addition to the items above, there are several known issues that were previously postedherethat we are working to resolve. These issues are not broadly impactful and most have a corresponding knowledge base (KB) article with posted manual solution steps.
8. In the previous version there was an option to sign in a different user. This fuctionailty has been removed in this release. To accomplish ths same behavior in the new version you will have to sign out of all browser windows and close them. You can review this related Knowledge Base (KB) articlefor more details.

Test, upgrade, enjoy

The new SharePoint Online experience awaits you. Please take time to review the available documentation and the suggested steps to ensure a seamless transition for your company. Ensure you build in the right amount of time to test the new capabilities and look & feel before committing to it.

You are more in control than ever during your upgrade experience. With a little effort, you will be able to quickly determine the method that provides the right level of testing, allowing you to quickly move to the latest Office 365 has to offer. Let us know via the Office 365 Community forums how you are doing and what we can do to help.

Thanks,

The SharePoint Team