SharePoint 2007 to 2010 Upgrade strategies

All you SharePoint enthusiasts and professionals a good news that many of you already might be aware is that Microsoft has released SharePoint 2010! Great, isn't it ?!! But how to upgrade yourself to SharePoint 2010 ??

Fine... not to worry... as there are two approaches for the same. This can be decided based on the the hardware capabilities of your server (in which the 2007 version is running). I will straightly point out to processors... ya '64 bit' processors!!

If you have got this already in your SharePoint 2007 box running Central Administrator in it then you should go for "In-Place" upgrade.

The In - Place upgrade is simple, as you don't need to do anything extra other than running your 2010 CD/DVD for install and upgrade. If a compatible hardware is found i.e. '64 bit' processor (along with other RAM and HDD requirement) the Setup automatically switches itself to the In- Place upgrade mode.

The advantage is your farm configurations and settings are restored and you don't have to do anything extra on it. A smooth upgrade. :-)

The other approach is 'Database attach' Upgrade. This upgrade process is for the machines which don't have 64 bit processors already. For these machines you will have move the concerned DB's to another machine with 64 bit processor on it and SharePoint 2010 already installed via it's CD. This is a mandatory step for above upgrade approach. You should also understand that SharePoint 2010 version supports only 64 bit machines.

Once the 'Sharepoint Configuration wizard run' is completed in the new machine, you attach your databases from your existing 2007 farm to this new Sharepoint 2010 machine.

You will have to setup the configurations manually as the config DB attach doesn't works. One thing you should note is that if you miss any of the configurations and any out-of-the-box implementations done in your existing server farm you will loose the same in the new server. So you need to take care of that yourself manually!

The Database attach upgrade process does not captures all these automatically as in case of In Place upgrade process. You will have to manually do it all once again.

My this post is focussed in only letting the users understand the two basic approaches for Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 upgrade and to know when to use each of these approaches. The details on 'step by step' guide for upgrade is already provided in the Microsoft group of sites based on version of SQL server you use.

Please find the link on how to upgrade here --> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263299.aspx

If you have a large server farm with mixed h/w configurations, then you should mix the above two Upgrade strategies and apply each of them on respective machine as required to make a mixed approach. The Microsoft people call Hybrid strategies.

More details on same below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262483.aspx#section3

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262483.aspx#section4

Wishing you all smooth and successful upgrades!