If you are about to embark on the long journey down the road of a SharePoint 2007 upgrade there are a few items you may want to considering before making the attempt.
After attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in 2009 I was filled with optimism as it was clearly demonstrated that Microsoft had been listening to its users and IT professionals deploying SharePoint 2007. There were numerous demonstrations and assurance given that the upgrade process would be much smoother if not painless than it was with SharePoint 2007. One of the major changes was that SharePoint 2010 would operate only on a 64-bit system, an improvement I am willing to accept. After hearing this I felt confident that my upgrade would go smoothly as I had already anticipated this when installing SharePoint 2007 in our environments on 64-bit capable systems with the latest SQL Server 2008 64-bit edition.
End result. Massive failure. After 2 days of tinkering I determined that an in place upgrade was not going to work and a new installation would be necessary. Both processes will be detailed below but to save you some time I would skip directly to the new installation method.
- System must be 64-bit
- Backup all DB's and take a snapshot of the VM if you are fortunate enough to have it running in a VM.
- Do not attempt an in place upgrade – this will almost certainly fail. I was glad I has my SP 2007 install in a VM and could snapshot before attempting this
- If you are using Forms Based Authentication, throw out your configs and read up on Claims Based Authentication. I will explain more below.
- A
New Naming Scheme
The comic below illustrates this point pretty succinctly.
There will be no more WSS or MOSS but in fact it will now be known as just SharePoint Server 2010
WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) has now become STS (SharePoint Team Services)
MOSS (Microsoft Office Systems Server) has not become SPS (SharePoint Portal Server)
Image from John Holliday's blog located here: http://www.sharepointarchitects.us/johnholliday
In Place Upgrade of SharePoint 2007
Here is the rundown of my environment so we can get those questions out of the way.
- Running in a Hyper-V image
- Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
- SQL Server 2008 R2 x64
- SharePoint 2007 successfully installed and patched to SP2
- FBA setup and running from local FBA DB
- SharePoint Search successfully setup and running
- 2 sites setup in SP 2007 with local and public facing entry points
New Installation Upgrade of SharePoint 2007
Enter Claims Based Authentication
If you were used to the old FBA (Forms Based Authentication) in the past making use of a custom database that contained users and roles then prepare to make the jump into Claims Based Authentication. In SharePoint 2007 SharePoint did not have its own authentication engine. Instead SP 2007 running FBA would pass the authentication token off to the custom DB, decode the password hash, if the value of the entered password and the decoded password matched return an
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