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I know you'll see documentation recommending in place as an upgrade for the non customized environment or the upgrade for the small environment. This list is to convince you to not make that decision. These reasons apply on upgrades from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 and from SPS 2003 to Office SharePoint Server 2007.
1. There are better options which will assist you in preparing and planning to upgrade. If you don't have the money or aren't ready to invest in hardware seriously consider the gradual upgrade which will allow you to *see* the upgrade and roll back if you need to.
2. You will be DOWN during upgrade and unexpected things *WILL* happen. Any mistakes (such as forgetting to run prescan.exe) or failures (running out of disk space) could result in extended downtime or expense.
3. The simplest of environments have customizations. You may think that you have a simple deployment, but site templates, front page customizations, and web parts added via the Web UI are things you don't want to be suprised with. You'll appreciate the flexibility in gradual upgrade. Even if you can accomplish the task in a couple of hours on the weekend, gradual upgrade will save your bacon.
4. I know you didn't read all the docs and I know there are still *unknowns* left to be documented. IT Pro's and administrators that expect it to just work, will find problems and issues and support is busy. The product is still fairly new and product support is still ramping up. If you miss a step, run into a bump, you'll want the flexibility of gradual upgrade.
5. Upgrade is more complex than you think. I admit that the new version has a ton of new features and is something you should move to as soon as you can, but fitting the old product into the new you'll find some depricated features such as bucketwebs, and even in WSS lists such as discussions. You are going to want to see your data in the new site definitions before you cut over. If you make a copy of your environment on another server and run in place upgrade and all goes smooth... more power.
In place upgrade was designed to help people have a quick upgrade experience, but unfortunately due to unknown complexities such as what you'll find with prescan.exe, and what you'll discover if you make a copy of your environment and try to upgrade (such as unghosting, site templates, and even small third party web parts or UI). I don't recommend using in place upgrade unless you don't care what happens and can rebuild or you have first run in place upgrade on a mirror of this same environment.
More recommendations on upgrade from my blog or from the MSDN migration center.
Interesting pointers. Good post.
PingBack from http://www.virtual-generations.com/2007/05/01/sharepoint-link-dump-5-1-2007/
Between Shane's prescan post (view comments for more details) , Bill's prescan wisdom and a few of my
I wanted to point you to some recent content on upgrade and introduce you to some partners that otherwise
Although In place upgrade isn't the best migration strategy on a production server, it can prove very useful using virtual environment.
Using Virtual Server and its undo disk functionnality combined to in place upgrade, you can easily (and rapidly) test and stabilize your migration without impacting your production environment.
Gradual update is a long term procedure which forces the 2003/2007 cohabitation on the same farm/server and thus adds a risk/concern to your migration project.....
Upgrade und Migration How to Upgrade an Area based on a Custom Site Definition Upgrade Link-Übersicht
Before you dismiss this as a dev topic. Let me tell you why you should care about this as an upgrade
Direkter Download: SPPD-072-2007-05-07 [00:00] Intro Windows 386 Promo Video [00:00] Themen Interactive
Direkter Download: SPPD-072-2007-05-07 [00:00] Intro Windows 386 Promo Video [02:21] Themen Interactive
I just did the in-place upgrade (after making several types of backups for safety), and all our custom sites came across perfectly.
wm, glad to hear it. Glad to hear you had backups. One of my caveats was for those who knew what they were doing. Obviously you must have known what you were doing or I'm under selling in place upgrade :)
William Heurdier, I love your comment on using virtual server in upgrade. The undo disks sounds like a brilliant solution for being able to try a bunch of things and quickly rolling back when you need to.
Some would say there are only 3 methods for upgrade. I think there are about 7 and this has got to be one of the better ones.
Love it!
If you've followed my upgrade blog posts, you'll see a few posts on upgrade and the 3 methods are documented
Sorry it's a day late, but here it is: Kevin DeRudder points out that Audiences aren't just for