SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 Upgrade Issues

I went through the process of upgrading a SharePoint Portal 2003 environment to MOSS 2007 in a VPC. Needless to say, the upgrade process was not quite that simple and not a very clean upgrade process by any stretch.

I also noticed that the user interface changed dramatically to support the new way of managing SharePoint. Well, I won’t bark too much about this, but this is definitely going to be a challenge for some people wanting to perform upgrades of the portal environment. Let's just say, if you are not use to the new administrative screens you probably will get lost fast. Therefore, my suggestion for upgrading is to hire a business partner like Knowledge Management Associates, Inc. to perform the upgrade process for you.

If you want to perform the upgrade yourself, consider the following to do items while upgrading:

1. Ensure that your current SharePoint Portal 2003 environment has been patched with Service Pack 2.  That is for both Windows SharePoint Services v2 and SharePoint Portal 2003.
2. Ensure that you are on the same windows domain.  If you are not, you will have to reset the site collections administrator account for each SPS 2003 portal site.  In addition, your application pool identity accounts in IIS would need to change.
3. Perform a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 backup of your portal site and build out a new instance of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on a new windows domain member server.  Set up the SharePoint configuration database such that it is of a different name than that of your production database.  This will ensure that if there is a failure in the upgrade process it will not damage your working SharePoint configuration database.
4. Restore the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal site onto the new SharePoint front-end web server (that is a member server of the same windows domain) as discussed above.
5. Move all of your customizations (e.g., "web part dwp files, assembly files, css files, aspx pages") to the new front-end web server and ensure that it is working exactly as your production server environment.
6. Ensure that your SharePoint content databases are fewer than 30 GB in size.  If it were over this size limit, you would have to consider splitting these databases into smaller chunks.  This will help increase the speed of the upgrade process.
7. Install MOSS 2007 onto the new front-end web server while SPS 2003 is still running.  In the installation wizard, perform an automated "in-place" upgrade and specify the server installation type.  Since my installation was in a VPC, I chose "Stand-alone".
8. When the install has been completed, you must run the "PreScan" utility.  You can do this by opening up a command prompt and changing the working directory to "[Hard Drive]:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin".  Then type into the command prompt "prescan /all".  This will perform a necessary prescan process for the upgrade.
9. Go to "Start" -> "Programs" -> "Microsoft Office Server" -> "SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard" and run through the wizard.  This would have completed the required reconfiguration. Note: This would have modified your current SharePoint configuration database.
10. Upon completion of the required reconfigurations, a web browser will open.  The browser will take you to the "UpgradeStatus" page.  This might take about five minutes to run.  So, grab a coffee and come back.  When the status field changes from "Job in progress" to "No job pending" then you should click on the "Continue" button.
11. Now, this is when the configuration process gets a little hairy.  There are many things to consider in this process.  Go to the site administration page for the portal environment and ensure that all of the appropriate configurations have been maintained.

What you might notice in this process is the following:

• The existing application pool account and web sites under IIS are still lingering around.
• There are still links to "SharePoint Central Administration" under "Administrative Tools" and links to "SharePoint Portal Server Data Backup and Restore",SharePoint Portal Server Administrator's Guide", etc. in your "SharePoint Portal Server" programs group of Windows Server 2003.
• Any custom web parts that you had prior to upgrading the portal environment will work, however, once the site has been upgraded you would need to go to the web part gallery of the top-level site and populate the gallery with those web parts.  MOSS 2007 disables them by default.  In addition, modify the newly created web.config of the IIS site to ensure that the web parts have appropriate safe-control entries.
• Any custom css file modification is seen when the portal has been upgraded successfully.  However, in the administrative view, the new WSS v3/MOSS 2007 look and feel is the default.

I hope this blog article peeked your interest. Again, I would not suggest doing it on your own without any guidance. Feel free to email me at james@kmainc.com if you are up to the challenge and want to get it up and running.