Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint 2010

This document explains the SharePoint 2010 migration approach and the important points that we should consider during and after the migration.

Upgrade approach:

There are two basic approaches to upgrade: in-place and database attach. With in-place approach we can install SharePoint Server 2010 on the same hardware of MOSS 2007 and with Database attach approach we can upgrade the content on a different farm.

Since we wanted to setup new multi-farm for SharePoint, we have chosen the second approach.

Database attach upgrade:

With this approach the content for the environment will be upgraded on a separate farm. The result is that there is no need to upgrade any of the services or farm settings. Upgrade the databases in any order and upgrade several databases at the same time. While each database is being upgraded, the content in that database is not available to users.

We can upgrade multiple content databases at the same time, which results in faster upgrade times overall than an in-place upgrade. You can use a database attach upgrade to combine multiple farms into one farm.

Whereas the server and farm settings are not upgraded. We must manually transfer settings that we want to preserve from the old farm to the new farm. Any customizations must also be transferred to the new farm manually. Any missing customizations may cause unintended losses of functionality or user experience issues.

Major changes should consider during or after upgrade:

1.     Search:

In SharePoint Server 2010, the Search service uses three databases:

1. Search administration database (new): contains Search administration settings that were stored in the SSP database in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

2. Search Service Crawl database (new): contains crawl history information that was stored in the SSP database in SharePoint Server 2007.

3. Search metadata database (reused Search database): contains the metadata for search.

2.     User Profiles and Taxonomy:

Two services are now used for user profiles and taxonomy information: the User Profile service and the Managed Metadata service.

During a database attach upgrade, user profile and taxonomy data from the SSP database is upgraded when the SSP database is attached, but the database is not copied and renamed. You can copy the taxonomy data into a Taxonomy database for use by the Managed Metadata service after upgrade is complete.

3.     Master Pages:

A site owner can now apply branding to their site, independent of other sites, and administrators can specify whether the system pages in the _Layouts folder are rendered by using the site master pages provided by site owners or by default master pages available across the system. Also, it is possible to use Windows PowerShell to specify a customer master page to system error pages, login pages, confirmation pages, and other non-site-specific pages.

4.     HTML Markup changes in rendering:

There is a change in HTML markup generated for the SharePoint from 2007 to 2010 version. For cross browser support they have replaced the tables with Div and ul, li etc. So, this is a very good thinking and change from SharePoint team which likes by all other browsers.

We need to make sure all our customized styles should be converted from Tables to Divs.

5.     Visual upgrade:

Once we are done with SharePoint site migration to SharePoint 2010, we will see the same layout and UI as previous site. The UI is not really migrated to the SharePoint 2010 UI [V4]. So, what to do to migrate UI too to SharePoint 2010 format?
Now, we can see a new item in the site actions menu named "Visual Upgrade" as shown below.

When we click on the Visual Upgrade option, then you go to a page we can see three options to preview how it looks like in v4.

1. Here, the option 1 means, display the same UI as the v3 UI. i.e. Your SharePoint 2007 UI.
2. Option 2 is, Preview the site in V4 mode, but, don't save it permanently. So that you have chance to take a look at the site in V4 mode and if you think UI is not well formatted then revert the changes back to V3.
3. Option 3 is, permanently change the UI to V4 mode. If you select this, then you can't change the UI back to V3 mode and the option "Visual Upgrade" under site actions will go away

6.     Assemblies/References:

 Any custom code assemblies need to now be assembled in Visual Studio as x64 (64-bit) or “any”, not as x86 (32-bit).  There is no scenario in SharePoint 2010 that would warrant a 32-bit assembly, as SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only.  AssemblyBinding entries in the web.config file will use binding parameters in SharePoint 2010 to redirect references from the 12 hive to the 14 hive.  This will use <bindingRedirect oldversion=”12.0.0.0” newversion=”14.0.0.0”> to redirect any assembly IDs from 12 to 14.

7.     Content type hub:

SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept called the 'Content Type Hub'. It is a centralized application where users can create different content types and publish them. As it would be defined as content type hub, every application could use it with a single configuration. The advantage is it would be centralized and could be shared among different applications.