SPS 2003 upgrade to MOSS 2007

I’ve successfully completed several migrations from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007 with sites that have had various degrees of customisations. Mainly these have used the database migration approach. This was due to minimising the amount of downtime and to new hardware requirements.

Microsoft have whitepapers and information on technet for upgrading to SharePoint 2007, for more information go here http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/601874ea-86c9-4611-bdaf-abe17bbb68161033.mspx?mfr=true

Planning is definitely the most important stage of the upgrade process. You need to choose the correct approach. The approach maybe obvious but you need to weigh up the pros and cons of each approach before deciding.

Choosing the upgrade approach http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/53b8a28b-43c4-43aa-8854-d72d9b7b59c41033.mspx?mfr=true

Using the database migration I was able to stagger the upgrade for each of the site collections, so that user acceptance testing can be carried out and the migrated site approved by the stake holders. This also meant I was in full control of what content was to be migrated and at which point in time, reducing the impact on the end users.

One of the issues with the database migration is that you are actually adding the old SharePoint 2003 content database within the new SharePoint 2007 web application. This means you will now have two content databases for each site collection you migrate. You can specify site limits on the content databases in central administration so that the new sites will use the new database, but you will still have two databases to backup and manage etc.

The diagram below illustrates the normal process.




A way around this is to migrate the SharePoint 2003 site collection to a temporary web application. Once this has been completed and the target audience are happy the content has come across you can then setup content deployment to push the content from the temporary web application to the new site.

The diagram below illustrates this process.



Hope you find this useful.