Upgrading MOSS 2007 To SharePoint 2010 Options

23 August 2010 | Edward Nelms | SharePoint 2010

I know alot of you have been wondering how you can prepare for upgrading your company or clients site from the old SharePoint 2007  to 2010. Fret not SharePoint Insider is here. First let me provide a quick start introduction to allow you to get comfortable with your options. It’s actually pretty decent what Microsoft has provided for completing this task successfully.

The first thing to do is an pre-upgrade check. SP2 included a new STSADM operation, preupgradecheck. This command allowed you to look at SharePoint 2007 databases and what provide insight on any possible problems for the upgrade to SharePoint 2010. The reports on the following key aspects of your farm:

  • Servers and amount of content

  • Search configuration

  • Features

  • Solutions

  • Site definitions

  • Alternate access mappings

  • Language packs

It will also alert you to the following possible issues:

  • Large lists

  • Orphaned data

  • Views and content types that use CAML

  • Databases with modified schemas

The results of the upgrade check are saved to an XML file and an easy to read .HTM file. The check is read-only, and it can be run multiple times as you clean up issues it discovers.

SharePoint 2010 offers the same at the content database level via PowerShell.  (yes get used to using PS with SP2010, it looks like it is here to stay with over 500 SharePoint specific cmdlets dedicated to it!)The PowerShell cmdlet Test-SPContentDatabase will look at both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 content databases and determine if they can be upgraded and added to a SharePoint 2010 farm. Keep in mind that preupgradecheck, Test-SPContentDatabase does not make any changes to your databases, so you can run it without messing up your production environments.

Upgrade Methods

There are two ways you can upgrade SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. You can do an in-place or database attach. The in-place upgrade actually does the upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 on your existing infrastructure. The second way allows you to attach SharePoint 2007 backups to a SharePoint 2010 Web Application and the databases will be upgraded automatically. (Nice :))

You have the ability to allow users to use read only databases for SharePoint 2007 while upgrading to SharePoint 2010 also. SharePoint will recognize that the database is read-only and will remove all UI elements that allow users to add or edit content. SharePoint 2010 will let you upgrade multiple databases at the same time also. So as long as your backend servers can handle the I/O load you can minimize downtime by doing more than 1 DB at a time. (Wait it gets even cooler than that….)

If that isn’t enough to keep the users happy, there is a second option. SharePoint 2010 supports redirecting traffic to an existing SharePoint 2007 farm during upgrade. This enables users to continue to use the same URL, but they are given a client-side 302 redirect until the content is available on SharePoint 2010.

Don’t forget about Visual Upgrade. Visual upgrade allows you to have your users using pages they are use to, while testing out (if they choose to) the SharePoint 2010 look. If there site administrator decides to finally commit to the SP2010 look, they can at anytime once there users have become familiar with the new look. This also allows designers the ability to fix or tweak anything they may not have converted as they hoped.

Well enough about that for now, just wanted all you administrators out there to know that there are some really good options to make your migration easier for your IT team and your users. Happy SharePointing. :)

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