Smoothing SharePoint Upgrades

June 7, 2011

After a whirl of conferences, I was catching up on my reading. I was interested in J. Peter Bruzzese’s article “Don’t Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Until You Read This”  suggests, this is not an update for the faint of heart. Our experience at Search Technologies was that SharePoint upgrades have been reasonably straight forward.

His warning suggests:

You may like to be hands-on with your own environment, installing all your own servers and such, but the upgrade to SharePoint 2010 should either be treated with the utmost care or turned over to an expert who’s done it a bunch of times and has it down to a science.

He continues by saying it took him “a week to research and test in-place upgrade process and the database-attach migrate process before throwing down the ‘hire somebody else’ gauntlet.”

So there it is.

His caution comes complete with neon blinking lights. His article cited some well known experts; for example, Spencer Harbar, Microsoft Enterprise Architect and Don Holmes, Intellium consultant and trainer. The article suggest that any “headaches” that you encounter “depends more on your current environment than on SP2010 itself.”

We agree.

They claim that this upgrade “is far less of an issue than upgrading from SPs2003 to Moss2007.”

We have some suggestions. First, check with specialists. Please, consider Search Technologies as a potential resource. Second, work through Microsoft’s documentation paying particular attention to customization notes. Microsoft’s installers are thoroughly tested, but it is impossible for any vendor to upgrade every possible configuration of SharePoint. Third, make certain you have a back up, installation discs and their keys, and any other information that Microsoft provides licensees, certified engineers, or certified SharePoint developers. Often a hiccup can be addressed easily when these essentials are at hand.

For more information, contact us via our Web site at www.searchtechnologies.com.

Iain Fletcher, June 7, 2011

Search Technologies

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