Deployed a pilot of WSS V3 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 and plan to upgrade? Pay attention...
Customers who wish to upgrade pilot environments to "Release to Manufacturer" (RTM) bits must upgrade to Beta2 Technical Refresh (B2TR). We will not be supporting direct upgrade from Beta2 to RTM. The only upgrade path is Beta2->B2TR->RTM.
Product support for Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 will not begin until after RTM. This is the path to receive support on your environment at RTM. Unfortunately product support will not take calls on environments during their upgrade to B2TR. Please do not call product support until after the product RTMs. In the meantime you can seek peer to peer assistance in the public newsgroups.
By request from support, we will need to keep the B2TR bits available for download after RTM is available, to ensure customers will be able to upgrade from their Beta2 pilot installs. When and where the B2TR bits will be available will be announced on this blog at the appropriate time.
The rest of the upgrade plan is unchanged.
• B2TR is going to be released as a patch, for full SKUs and for the language packs.
• Upgrading to RTM will require users to modify a registry key, uninstall B2TR, and then install RTM. This will be documented in B2TR and RTM.
Additional Details:
Ø How does the user deploy B2TR and use that to upgrade, if they haven’t already deployed beta2? Install the beta2 bits, then install the B2TR bits, then proceed with upgrade.
Ø Do users have to update registry keys to upgrade to B2TR? No, that’s an RTM thing only.
Ø What is the impact on the Search SKU? It is releasing for the first time at B2TR, as a full install. No need to apply a patch for that at B2TR. Upgrade to RTM will be the same as it is for the other products.
More details on this will be included in the setup guides and readme's of B2TR and RTM.
Thanks,
Joel Oleson
