Real World SharePoint® 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs

Chapter 14. Upgrading from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 Using the Gradual Method

by Shane Young

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 Big Ideas! — you may have heard of them, but probably not. Their ideas are Big, but their products haven't caught up yet.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (MOSS 2007) had just hit the streets and Big Ideas! had heard enough about the new features to make them believe it was a must-have upgrade. The ability to enforce checkouts, workflow, more powerful search, item-level security, security-trimmed user interface, a built-in recycle bin, the business data catalog — these were big items that Big Ideas! had to have in their organization as soon as possible, and they wanted me to make it happen.

Step back for a minute to understand why Big Ideas! wanted someone to review their upgrade plans. Upgrading a major enterprise platform such as SharePoint isn't like upgrading a favorite screensaver. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money to make sure the upgrade process scales through the whole range of SharePoint users. Small organizations that only use a single server install must have a way to move their megabytes of data to a new system, and Microsoft itself needs a path to upgrade its terabytes.

Three different plans for upgrading were built into the MOSS 2007 installation, and each one is right for certain situations:

• In-place ...