Upgrading to SharePoint 2010

I attended a very insightful event held by Quest Software last week in Sydney. The first two sessions in the event were hosted by a shining star in the global SharePoint community; Joel Oleson or SharePointJoel who used to work for MS but now works with Quest. The best take-away from the event was Joel's advice on preparation required to upgrade a current SharePoint 2007 deployment to the next version of the platform - SharePoint 2010.

I wanted to share my notes from the event, including comments of my own, as I believe this could be quite useful to members of the community who did not get a chance to attend. There are, of course, no warranties attached to this material. I will update this blog of any new learnings gained from the Tech Preview release in the upcoming weeks.

SharePoint 2010 H/W and S/W Requirements

1. Only runs on 64-bit H/W
2. Application server platform must be Windows Server 2008. Does not run on Windows Server 2003.
3. Database server platform must be SQL Server 2005 or 2008. Will not support SQL Server 2000.
4. Internet Explorer 6.0 browser client is not supported. Browser client must be IE 7+, FireFox 3.11+ and Safari (version compatibility unknown but will test and update).
5. Office client does not have to be upgraded.

I found the mandatory 64-bit hardware requirement an interesting one because of the obvious costs to the enterprise. Also, several organisations that I work with still use IE 6.0 on the desktop, so there obviously has to be an SOE upgrade within the enterprise if SharePoint 2010 is to be used (another good case for application virtualisation, maybe?).

Considerations with Planning an Upgrade to SharePoint 2010

1. Organisations who have architected their current SharePoint 2007 Site Collections intelligently by assigning each Site Collection to a separate content database will be able to shorten their upgrade window as parallel content database upgrades are now supported.
2. Any Site Collections with more than 1800 windows security principals should be reviewed and reduced prior to migration. Note that "Domain\User" and "Domain\Group" constitute one Security Principal each. Any number of AD users can exist in the one "Domain\Group" and only one Security Principal object is used.
3. Locked Sites must be reviewed and unlocked prior to the upgrade. As you are probably aware, a site is locked automatically when it reaches it's storage quota limit. Additionally, a SharePoint admin can also lock a site. Locked sites are read-only sites. It is a good idea to review Site Collection quotas at this stage as well.
4. SharePoint information architects will need to review any Lists that hold more than 5000 items in indexed columns.
   
5. stsadm's backup and restore tools work well for content databases at or below the 15GB limit. Use database detach/attach for any content database that surpasses this.

Recommendations to Prepare an Upgrade Plan:
After the considerations above have been addressed, I.T. teams may want to consider the following upgrade steps:

1. Document the current SharePoint 2007 environment
2. Review all hardware and software assets (including 3rd party) in the SharePoint Solution with an emphasis on cost (don't forget to review your current licensing model).
3. Identify all customizations made to the SharePoint 2007 solution if you don't use SharePoint out-of-the-box in the Commodity Hosting model. I do believe that upgrading customizations could potentially be the biggest "gotcha". Joel's recommendation is to work with the 3rd party vendors to identify upgrade releases for their products (if any). If your developers have been involved in customizations, then ensure there is a clear plan to have an early code and feature compatibility review with a partner who is on the Tech Preview programme.
4. The following tools may be used to identify customizations and issues affecting the upgrade - WinDiff, Beyond Compare, SP Diagnostics tool and PreUpgradeCheck.
5. Upgrade environment to SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 2 or later (the PreUpgradeCheck tool mentioned above needs SP2+ as a pre-requisite).
6. Review any deployment of the Fantastic Forty Administrator templates. These could cause an issue with the upgrade and will be rejected by the PreUpgradeCheck tool.

Developer Preparation

1. Create a Windows Server 2008, 64-bit version copy of your current SharePoint 2007 environment. Ensure that SharePoint 2007 SP2 is installed.
2. Run the PreUpgradeCheck tool on this environment.
3. Address issues outlined in the above two sections.
4. Test the upgrade when the Tech Preview is released with a trusted partner (only certain Microsoft Partners get access to the Tech Preview).
5. Close any gaps in entities that could not be upgraded and build a strategy around this.
6. If your management definitely wants to upgrade, ensure that the development team are aware of what "not to do" in the coming months while your current SharePoint 2007 installation evolves.