SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 24. Upgrading from SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Introduction

In the previous chapters, you have learned about all the different features of MOSS 2007. In this chapter, we show you how you can upgrade your current environment to MOSS 2007. As we all know, this seemingly simple process can be a real headache if we don’t follow the right steps. This chapter will be completely directed toward system administrators, as they are the ones responsible for the upgrade. In this chapter, we discuss the various scenarios that might occur during an upgrade in your environment.

Depending on the size of your company, you will be coming in from a single server or a large server farm environment and will want to either stay the same in size or expand/reduce. There are three possible scenarios that are available for us to upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Office SharePoint Server 2007, as follows:

• In-place upgrade

• Gradual upgrade

• Database migration

An in-place upgrade is used to upgrade all SharePoint sites at one time, which is suitable for single-server or small deployments. A gradual upgrade allows finer control of the upgrade process by allowing one or more sites to be upgraded at a time. Both in-place and gradual upgrades take place on the same hardware on which your previous version is installed. A database migration allows you to move your content to a new farm or new hardware.

Before we start diving into the upgrade scenarios, we need to understand the road map that Microsoft ...