Planning? We don't need no stinkin' planning...do we?
In the past 3 weeks, I have visited several customer sites. All four of these visits involved discussions on upgrading from WSSv2/SPS to WSSv3/MOSS. That being said, I saw 4 very different environments and 2 major methods of thought about planning their upgrades. The first method is to take a step back and plan out the upgrade. The second is to just do the upgrade with limited or no planning and pray it works.
One of these customers used method #1. They are currently using WSSv2 with no SPS implementation. Still, they are working on a solid migration strategy that includes 1-2 months worth of planning and testing before actually jumping the fence and making the move. This is not only the smartest way of preparing for the move, but the Microsoft recommended method.
Another customer wants to use method #2. Limited testing and almost no plan. Since their environment is larger and includes much more customization/branding, this is a really easy way to spike blood pressure and cause massive amounts of overtime. The one thing they have going for them is that they are also trying to migrate to new hardware at the same time. At least there will be a rollback strategy if things go south in the process.
Do I ever condone method #2? Very rarely (but yes). Take my first customer above. They have a very limited architecture, small content databases and almost no deviations from "out of the box". They could easily restore their environment into a virtual machine and run a test to see if anything breaks. Most likely it won't and they are fine. But it still wouldn't address any of the reasons they are moving to MOSS.
Moving from SPS to MOSS allows an organization to take a step back and look at what they have. They can determine what is good and bad in their current implementation and then channel what they want to keep across to the new system. They can rethink their topology (or taxonomy) and determine if there is a better way to do it. This allows for change that can benefit the organization and allow MOSS to increase productivity and usher in cool new features instead of carrying over some of the things that may be holding you back right now.
So...what is the moral of my blog here today? Plan, test, plan, test and test again. And as you test, make sure you take detailed notes of what breaks and how you fix it. Keep this handy and build a checklist from your lessons learned in testing. This will allow you to perform as smooth an upgrade as possible and make you a hero...or at least not stroke out in the data center at 1AM due to crashing SharePoint servers.
Happy travels...
