The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac : Upgrade

A New Upgrade Paper

Shane — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 03:59:16 GMT

This past week a new whitepaper was released on how to deal with upgrades of customizations. I was part of this paper from birth so it is kind of cool to see it make it to MSDN. Anyway, another nice resource for dealing with upgrades.

Part 1 -http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb954662.aspx

Part 2 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb954661.aspx

Shane – SharePoint Help

SharePoint MVP Book is here!

Shane — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:16:00 GMT

I just got my box full of copies. Too exciting.

For those of you not in the know 16 of your favorite SharePoint MVPS got together to do a book all about real world experiences with MOSS. Each one of us wrote our own chapter completely from our point of view. Makes for a very unique book with lots of great information. I recommend everyone buys ten copies. Just for some perspective on how different of a book it is: My chapter starts out with

"It was a dark and stormy night. I had just talked myself into sitting down long enough to take screenshots for my next blog posting when my phone rang. The call was from…"

I am sure it comes as a great shock to most of you but my chapter is actually on upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. Lots of the lessons learned from my Upgrade Class are reflected in the book. Anyway, I need to quit writing this and start reading the other chapters. Should be exciting, maybe not as exciting as Harry Potter was but pretty close. And whatever you do don't tell my English Teacher from High School. She would never believe you that someone let me be part of a book.

Shane – SharePoint Help

A very common prescan problem that stops you from doing your upgrade

Shane — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:30:00 GMT

I have gotten the same email from several people and the fix has been the same just about every time so I thought I would publish the conversation here. Hopefully some searching of the web will help save a couple of email stamps. ;)

Mr. Pugglesworth: What should I do if I want to find out if my SharePoint (WSS v2 or SPS 2003) is ready to be upgraded?

Shane: Use my post here to Download Prescan.exe and then use Joel Oleson's post for the exact syntax.

Mr. Pugglesworth: I ran prescan.exe and then I get these error messages in my prescan log. Can you help?

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Skipping virtual server: http://portal.company.com/. Server

state = NeedUpgrade. Most likely this virtual server is not extended

with WSS v2.

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Scan finished without failure.

07/05/2007 15:16:32

===============================Logs===============================

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Log file:

C:\DOCUME~1\puggle\LOCALS~1\Temp\3\PreupgradeReport_633192453889379947_L

og.txt

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Summary file:

C:\DOCUME~1\puggle\LOCALS~1\Temp\3\PreupgradeReport_633192453889379947_S

ummary.xml

07/05/2007 15:16:32

==============================Totals==============================

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of sites skipped (already scanned): 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of sites scanned: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of broken sites: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of webs scanned: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of broken webs: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of webs using custom template: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of pages scanned: 0

07/05/2007 15:16:32 Number of unghosted pages: 0

Shane: Usually that message only shows up when WSS truly isn't installed or your virtual server didn't get upgraded after you installed WSS SP2. Try this to confirm my suspicions:

Go to v2 central admin. Then click on Windows SharePoint Service on the left:

Now click on Configure virtual server settings.

Now please take a screenshot of the screen that looks like this and send it back to me.

This will help me tell you what to do next.

Mr. Pugglesworth: Here is what I get. Please help. :)

Shane: You have some form of this problem http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2005/11/02/74038.aspx

Essentially, you need to run stsadm.exe –o upgrade –forceupgrade from the 60 hive before you will be able to do an upgrade to MOSS. While this command is running your SharePoint will be unavailable so plan accordingly. Also, please make sure you have a backup before you start running stsadm commands. They are safe but very powerful.

The End

Hopefully this will help you out also. If nothing else I don't have to have this email conversation too many more times. ;)

Shane Young – SharePoint Help

My TechEd Sessions With Downloads

Shane — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:21:58 GMT

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity to speak at a few different events and conferences. Cincinnati and New York user groups, SharePoint Advisor, and the SharePoint Information Worker Conference are the ones I can think of. As a consultant you get to talk to tables full of people sharing your knowledge and of course being a trainer I get to talk to small groups almost weekly. So you would think speaking at another event wouldn't be all that exciting. Yeah right! Speaking at TechEd was awesome. I think the largest session had 400 people or so. I would like to tell you that I was really nervous and I had to picture everyone naked but it wasn't like that at all.

Joel Oleson and I decided to combine all of our sessions and co-present them. You can read his report here where Dustin is the hero but I am the Hiro. Anyway, it was totally cool. I don't know if you know either one of us but we are total goof balls and that is exactly how we presented. We had lots of fun. I am pretty sure we are the first ones ever to work a Paris Hilton joke into a 400 level session. But anyway. So quickly I will do a rundown of all of our sessions and provide a link to a pdf version of the slides.

OFC304 Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Upgrade and Migration Yeah, we had some technical issues with this one but it still managed to be rated as a top 10 session for the day and number 5 in the Office track overall. Not bad for my first TechEd presentation. If you are into upgrades this session was worth the price of TechEd admission alone. (Ok, not really but it was cool) Joel and I brought out some details of the upgrade process not spoken aloud anywhere else. And we had the guts to demo a gradual upgrade in real time. We are also working on an upgrade white paper that will finally bring together all of this content together in one place. Hooray! Don't forget to check out the SharePoint Upgrade site.

OFC207 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance Ok so I didn't present this session but I did sit in the audience and heckle. ;) Good stuff came up in this session. Governance and Information Architecture has been considered a voodoo black art in the SharePoint space for a long time. Well not anymore. Joel and his co-presenter Jennifer Hefner did a great job of exposing some best practices and new tools to help you out. Check out the Governance Codeplex site for a site recovery tool and a site lifecycle management tool. Fun stuff. And if you need help managing the creation of sites check out the Site Provisioning Assistant from SharePoint Solutions.

OFC222 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Administrative Architecture and Planning for Deployment, Part 1 This is a session the has been presented at SharePoint products for a while now. So instead of spitting out the same stuff again Joel and I decided to tweak the presentation and get some new info into it. I think it turned out well. The value though was the real world spin that we put out there on these topics.

OFC418 Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies 2007: Deployment & Advanced Administration Topics, Part 2 Admin goes 400 level? Yikes! I think this presentation was rewritten 3 or 4 times up until an hour before we gave it. We really struggled to try and make this thing live up to its billing. Especially since a couple hundred people followed us the half mile between the 2 sessions. Talk about poor planning our Part 1 and 2 were scheduled back to back. Which was perfect except one was in the North end of the building the other in the South. Ouch! We were huffing and puffing to make the trek. Anyway, some more new stuff in the slides. Worth a download and read. :)

It was really cool meeting everyone and speaking was awesome. Now I just need to get on the list to speak at one of the international Tech Eds. I here Barcelona and Australia are very cool.

Shane SharePoint Help

Download Prescan.exe

Shane — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:33:00 GMT

I was catching up on my blog reading today and saw Joel's great article on Your Friend Prescan.exe - How to Get it & What it Does - Part 2 and reminded how annoying it is trying to get your hands on prescan.exe. So what the heck. You can now download prescan.exe from that link. The Microsoft documentation has said since August that you could download it so I thought I would help them out.

Enjoy!

Shane – SharePoint Help

Upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 using the gradual approach

Shane — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:45:00 GMT

If you would like a copy of these instructions that are printable you can download the PDF version of Upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 using the gradual approach.

These are essential the same steps I uploaded back in the beta phase. Just updated to reflect the RTM version of the product.

Warning – these directions make it seem very simple to upgrade from 2003 to 2007. While at the core it can be an easy process in reality there is a lot of planning and decision making you need to do before you ever sit down with this guide. In class it is taking me hours of lecture just to present all of the options and reasoning to the students. How much time have you spent planning to this point? Here is a quick list of some of the topics we cover.

Which method are you going to use? Gradual, In place, or database migration?
Do you have a communication plan in place? For who? Your content managers? Users?
If gradual do you have a new URL planned and setup?
Is your hardware strong enough? The hardware specs have gone way up from v2.
What type of farm do you have now? Are you upgrading to the same farm type?
Do you have any custom site definitions? Have you created mapping files for them?
Do you have unghosted pages? Do you know what you are going to do with them?
Are you using 3^rd party web parts? Will they work with v3? What about custom web parts you wrote?

Anyway, you get my drift. This process is way tougher than just getting your portal upgraded. I am not trying to scare you I just would feel responsible if I didn't let you know some of the other challenges you will have. Ok. A couple of my quick points and then the directions begin.

This step by step guide will hopefully help you to go from a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with Service Pack 2 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The environment that I am using to create these instructions is as follows.

Windows Server 2003 Standard i386 running Active Directory and DNS
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with SP2
SQL Server 2000 SP4

Check out http://www.SharePointUpgrade.com for the latest information on upgrading SharePoint. If you want to contribute ideas or content please notify help@sharepoint911.com.

I am also using SNAGIT 8 from TechSmith for screen captures

The concepts, environment, and my learning curve have all come thanks to SharePoint Solutions. I am part of the team that has created and is delivering their Upgrading From SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 course.

For Microsoft instructions on upgrading from 2003 to 2007 check out Upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 .

Download Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
Install .NET 2.0 by running dotnetfx.exe that you just downloaded.
1. At the welcome screen click Next
2. At the EULA screen click I accept and Install
3. The install will now run for several minutes and will give you a message when it finishes
Download the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.0 Redistributable Package (x86)
Install .NET 3.0 Framework
1. Double click dotnetfx3.exe
2. Read the license agreement and click I have read and Accept
3. Click install
4. You will notice that the installer minimize to the tray. You need to wait until it finishes and you get message as such.
Once you click the message it will send some anonymous information back to the mother ship. Give it a second to finish
Now you need to download Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007(trial version). The trial version can be converted to a full installation anytime within the 180 day limit by just putting in a full license code.
Now you are ready to install MOSS
1. Double click the setup.exe file you just downloaded
2. Enter your product key or the trial key and click continue
3. At License Terms screen check I accept and click Continue
4. SLOW DOWN! At this screen it is very easy to make a mistake that will cause you a lot of grief so be careful.
5. First thing to do is to choose your upgrade approach. In my testing (a couple hundred upgrades to this point) I have found that gradual is the best approach to use. It provides maximum flexibility since it will let you run v2 and v3 sites from the same machine side by side. For these instructions we will assume you want to do a gradual upgrade. For more information on the options available check out Joel Oleson's post.
6. To do a gradual upgrade choose Yes, perform a Gradual Upgrade and click install now.
7. Now prepare to wait a few minutes while the bits are actually installed.
8. Finally you get the completion screen. Make sure the box is unchecked to Run the config wizard and click close.
9. Odds are you will get a screen that says you must Reboot to complete setup. If you do click Yes.
10. If you rebooted log back in when it finishes.
If the configuration wizard is open close it now. You will come back to it after a few more steps.
Using the command prompt navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN and run Prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /all
1. You can review the output here to find unghosted pages and what definitions your sites are using.
Close the command prompt
Now we can run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by going to Start> Microsoft Office Server > and clicking the link.
On the Welcome screen click Next
On the pop up about warning click Yes
On the language pack screen click OK. If you have any language packs to install now would be the time to do it. For more information check out this.
On the connect to a server farm screen you need to choose No, I want to create a new server farm and click Next
Now you need to specify the name of the SQL server and the account password that SharePoint will use. In our example we are SQL is installed on the local server so we will enter the server name and the password.
Now you can take the defaults here and click Next. If you wanted to specify the port that Central Administration will use you may do so now. You also have the option to choose Kerberos authentication instead of NTLM. If you are familiar with how to make Kerberos work it is the preferred method. If you have no idea what that is then NTLM will work fine and you don't lose anything.
At the Completing screen make sure things look good and click Next.
Now sit back and relax. This will take several minutes to process the 11 steps necessary. Once it finishes you will get a Configuration Successful screen where you can click Finish.
You will not be automatically taken to SharePoint Central Administration. Here we need to get your farm back to fully functional. The first step is to click on the Operation tab
Now click on Services on server under Topology and Services
If you look in the server role section will see several options. You need to choose Single Server in our example.
1. Now for the options at the bottom we need to get all of them Started. To the right of each one that you need to start you will set Start
2. Click start for Document Conversions Load Balancer Service
3. Click start for Document Conversions Launcher Service
  1. For the load balancer select your server name and click ok
4. Click start for Excel Calculation Services
5. Click start for Windows SharePoint Services Search
  1. Fill out your service accounts in the form domain\username and the enter password
  2. Accept the other defaults and click Start
6. If everything looks like below you are ready to continue
Now click on the Home tab

You are now ready to go on performing a gradual upgrade. I will save this process and explanation for another day. I am sure if you have gotten to this point you are as tired as I am. This was not a hard process just long and tedious. 

If you want to continue on then here is a brief outline of your next steps

Go back to the operations tab and click on site content upgrade status
Find your portal and click Begin upgrade
Once you fill out that screen you will be able to start upgrading sites
When you go to upgrade your sites remember you always have to upgrade the root site first
- Sometimes after you upgrade the root site you need an iisreset before you can upgrade another site

One more thing before I let you go. Did you read the warning above? You should go back and read that. There is still a lot to do, you just finished the easy part. 

Have fun!

Shane – SharePoint Help

Upgrading 3rd party tools

Shane — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:40:10 GMT

Jingmei Li wrote a handy little comparison of using Tzunami Deployer 2.01 and DocAve 4.1 Migrator for upgrading from 2003 to 2007 when the out of the box stuff just will not cut it.

Looks like both products have a trial download. Guess I will have to make time to play with these guys too.

Evaluate partner solutions that support migration from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007

Shane – SharePoint Help

Tech-Ed is letting me speak on upgrades

Shane — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:21:49 GMT

Can you imagine? Me neither. ;)

I am really looking forward to this as it will give me a chance to go back into my upgrading testing phase and see what new insight I can come up with. I have done several hundred test upgrades and several customer upgrades over the last 8 months or so. It all started when I was tasked to co-author Upgrading From SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 for SharePoint Solutions. And then of course I just completed a chapter on upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 in the real world for the upcoming book SharePoint 2007 MVP (even though I am not listed as an author).

Now I just need to come up with something cool to give away at my session.

Shane – SharePoint Help

MOSS - After an upgrade you can only create publishing sub sites

Shane — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:33:00 GMT

If you have upgraded your SharePoint Portal Server 2003 environment to MOSS 2007 you may have found a nuisance. Whenever you are in a publishing site (which replaced areas from 2003) and you click site actions > create site your only choice is Publishing site. Now if you have installed MOSS 2007 fresh you will find that when you click create site you have the option for any type of site.

Why? The reason for this behavior is the upgrade. Everything that you called an area or sub-area in v2 will be upgraded to a Publishing site in v3. And if you remember all the way back to SPS 2003 (you know 2 months ago) then you will recall that when you were in a portal area the only option you had was to create a sub area. So when the upgrade took place the behavior got brought over. Luckily now in MOSS we are not locked into such a regimented policy.

How do I fix it? So you want it to behave as it did in 2003? You came to the right place. To fix the problem:

Go to the home of your portal.
Click Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify all site settings.
Under Look and Feel click Page layouts and site templates
You will be taken to this screen:

Now choose Subsites can use any site template
Check the box for Reset all subsites to inherit these preferred subsite template settings
Click OK

Now you are in business.

Shane SharePoint Help

Consolidating Site Collections After Upgrading SharePoint

Shane — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:35:00 GMT

As you start to explore Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 you are going to find lots of new features and ways of doing things. One that has caused a bit of stir in the upgrading classes I have taught (to roughly 60 people already WOW!) is the fact that when you create a site through the site directory it becomes a sub site, not a separate site collection as it did in SPS 2003. My understanding of the reasons behind this is the rollup and aggregation web parts do not work across site collections. Also, the handy feature Manage Content and Structure is only valid within the same site collection. So that is great for new sites you create but what about when I upgrade?

In SPS 2003 all of our sites created from the site directory were separate site collections. So when we finish upgrading we are left with 1 site collection that encompasses our portal (and future sites we create from the portal) and then all of these upgraded collaborative sites that live each in its own site collection. What are we to do?

Well, thanks to some persistent students in my Denver class last week I have sat down and figured out how to rearrange things if you are so inclined. (Ok, ok I actually sent an email and had the answer sent to me but such is life, at least I am going to document it. Thanks Joel)

So just a couple of basics before we start.

My portal is located at http://portal.abc.local
I have a team site (standalone site collection) located at http://portal.abc.local/sites/hr

If I wanted to see a list of all of the site collections below my portal I can do that. The easy, out of the box way is to use stsadm.exe –o enumsites –url http://portal.abc.local

You will also notice from the screen shot that stsadm gives us more details in this version. ContentDatabase, StorageUsedMB, StorageWarningMB, and StorageMaxMB are all new pieces of information that could be handy in a pinch.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. How are we going to move HR to be part of the portal site collection? How about using stsadm.exe –o export

From the screen shot we can see at a minimum we will need to use the –url and –fliename options. So we probably want to run stsadm –o export –url http://portal.abc.local/sites/hr -filename HRsite.bak

Depending on the size of your site collection this command may run for several minutes. Once it finishes you will get a message saying Operation Completed Successful. Now we need to figure out how to get the site collection back in. To do this let's look at the command stsadm –o import

From this screen shot we can now see that we just need to do is import our previous file to a url inside our portal site collection. Something like stsadm –o import –url http://portal.abc.local/HR -filename HRsite.bak

Once again you should get a Operation Completed Successfully message. If you did then you should now be able to browse to http://portal.abc.local/sites/hr. Now don't forget to also go back and manually deleted your old site collection http://portal.abc.local/sites/hr once you are sure you have successfully moved everything. I will leave how to delete to you. It always scares me to give out instructions on deleting things because you never know who might only half way read this article and mindlessly delete something on accident. It happens!

Once you finish all of this moving around you will need to do a little navigation cleanup but nothing we can't do through site settings these days.

Shane SharePoint Help

Planning to upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007?

Shane — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 21:11:00 GMT

Me too. :) Of course I am guessing I will get to do it a few hundred times where as hopefully for most of you it will only be once or twice. I am not keeping track but I believe I have done about 50 upgrades in my test environments just trying to learn the in's and out's of the process.

And why would I spend so much bandwidth learning this process to the core instead of studying the whole product? Because SharePoint Solutions has contracted me to be part of the team to create a new course called Upgrading From SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 and it is going to be very deep. I am actually under the gun since the class is offered for the first time September 12th which seems like a long time from now (but I know better).

We are already writing a lab that will let you do a hands-on upgrade of a highly-customized SharePoint 2003 environment. This will be a great learning tool. Of course, I will not even mention how many technical challenges this has put me through. High end hardware and Microsoft Virtual Server is fun (or at least I keep telling myself that).

Anyway, lots more to come on this topic just thought I would give you guys my excuse of the month for not blogging as much as I should. :)

Shane - SharePoint Help

Upgrade error and prescan.exe

Shane — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 01:59:00 GMT

So you tried to run MOSS 2007 beta 2 install and do an upgrade but you got an error. The error said something like:

Failed to initialize SharePoint Products and Technologies upgrade.

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PostSetupConfigurationTaskException was thrown. Additional exception information: The pre-upgrade scan tool has not yet been run on all servers in the farm. You must run the pre-upgrade scan tool before you can continue with the upgrade process. Run the tool from the following path: c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin\prescan.exe. After you have reviewed any issues found by the tool, you can run psconfig.exe again to continue the upgrade process.

So you took the error message to heart, found the prescan.exe, double clicked on it and then tried to double click on psconfig.exe and nothing happened. Sounds about right to me. What the error message should have told you to do is:

1. Open a cmd prompt
2. Type cd\ and press enter
3. Type cd program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin and press enter
4. Now type prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /all and press enter
5. Now when it completes it will give you a log file to review for errors. Assuming you have no errors you can move to the next step. If you do have errors then deal with them. :) Aren't I helpful?
6. Type in psconfigui.exe and press enter.
7. Now go back through the upgrade process hopefully without error this time.

These are the instructions that Microsoft meant to include. :) Hope they help you.

Shane
SharePoint Help