Existing SharePoint Farm Removal

[jafnva]

Hello,

We had a SharePoint Admin who was getting ready to assist us with cleaning up our existing SharePoint 2013 environment and upgrading/migrating to SharePoint 2019 but unfortunately for us has moved on to another job. So that leaves me to start this project. I have some limited experience with SharePoint and have a question regarding our current environment. We have a SharePoint 2013 Central Admin/Front-End server and a MS SQL 2012 back-end server. We are running at Windows 2012 R2 AD Functional Level and will be upgrading to Windows 2016 functional level soon. 

The current SharePoint is not being used by our users but they would like to start using it. The admin who set this up has been gone for some time and there is no documentation on how it was configured.

Can we just bring up a new SharePoint 2019 farm and remove the existing SharePoint servers or is the existing farm integrated into Active Directory to where we would need to follow a process to remove existing configuration that exists within Active Directory? Hopefully this makes some sense 

Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@jafnva if you want to keep the current content then you will need to migrate the content from SharePoint 2013 to 2019. There are two approaches you can take:

- Content Database migration (you must migrate to SP2016 and then SP2019)

- Use a migration tool to move the content e.g. ShareGate or similar tools can be do this

Microsoft has a guide for uninstalling SP2013 but you might be better just archiving the environment for a while, especially if you think you may need to get something back from it in the future. 

Uninstall SharePoint 2013 - SharePoint Server | Microsoft Docs

[#3]

Steve,
Thanks for your response. I'll confirm that we no longer need any of the data/sites and if that is the case I'll remove SP2013 then install SP2019.
Thanks again,
John