Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today Written by Joel Oleson Sr. Architect Quest Software White Paper © Copyright Quest® Software, Inc. 2009. All rights reserved. This guide contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. The software described in this guide is furnished under a software license or nondisclosure agreement. This software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose other than the purchaser's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc. WARRANTY The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Quest Software makes no warranty of any kind with respect to this information. QUEST SOFTWARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF THE MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 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Updated—August 24, 2009 CONTENTS CONTENTS ......................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1 PREPARING FOR SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ......................................... 2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS .......................................................................... 2 SHAREPOINT SERVERS ........................................................................... 2 SQL SERVERS...................................................................................... 3 CLIENT DESKTOP REQUIREMENTS ............................................................... 4 DEVELOPER DESKTOP CONSIDERATIONS ...................................................... 5 RUNNING THE STSADM COMMAND PREUPGRADECHECK .................... 6 STSADM –O PREUPGRADECHECK ............................................................... 6 IDENTIFYING CUSTOMIZATIONS ................................................................ 10 TOOLS TO HELP IDENTIFY CUSTOMIZATIONS................................................. 10 INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND DATA CLEANUP ....................... 11 REVISIT INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE........................................................ 12 TOOLS TO ASSIST IN CLEANUP AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE REORGANIZATION 12 SERVICE OFFERING CONSIDERATIONS ........................................... 13 CONCLUSION - YOUR CALL TO ACTION ............................................ 14 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ................................................................ 15 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ........................................................................ 16 ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. ...................................................... 17 CONTACTING QUEST SOFTWARE ............................................................... 17 CONTACTING QUEST SUPPORT ................................................................. 17 INTRODUCTION All of the buzz about the technical previews of Office and SharePoint has many IT professionals looking to the first half of 2010 with excitement. Many are asking, ―What can I do to prepare for SharePoint 2010?‖ Even though many details about the upgrade are yet to be revealed, there is much that can be done today. The SharePoint product team has provided guidance on a number of items that can help organizations prepare, and Service Pack 2 includes a key tool that can provide additional insight and configuration information. 1 PREPARING FOR SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS System Requirements The following are the system requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 SQL Server 64-bit SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008 Client Internet Explorer (IE) 7 or higher, or Firefox 3.x for Editing and Design Safari - better browsing experience No support for IE 6 More details are available on the SharePoint Team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing- sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx SharePoint Servers Over a year ago, it was announced that SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0 would be the last versions to support 32-bit. While most rack-mounted servers produced in the past few years are 64-bit capable, most installations today are running on Windows Server 2003 in 32-bit mode. This is insufficient for SharePoint 2010; you must run 64-bit Windows Server 2008 in your production environment. Small businesses running single-server installations on 32-bit hardware will require upgrades. What about virtualization? Unfortunately Virtual Server and Virtual Desktop both support only 32-bit images. Windows Server 2008 Hyper V or alternate software will be required to host an image that supports the virtual images commonly used in SharePoint development, testing and production environments. SharePoint Service Pack 2 Update or Later One of the first things you can do to prepare for SharePoint 2010 is upgrade your current installation to the latest service pack. Upgrading to Service Pack 2 or one of the newer cumulative updates will provide you with significant features to help you prepare for SharePoint 2010. PreUpgradeCheck – This STSADM command provides guidance on upgrade requirements and determines if an upgrade will fail, without 2 making any changes to the current environment. This command is explained in more detail below. Read-only databases – Read-only databases provide uptime flexibility for both build-to-build (b2b) and version-to-version upgrades. By offering read-only databases to users as the other databases are being upgraded, you can provide access to data during the upgrade. For more information about using read-only databases during an upgrade, see the Migrate Databases Technet article at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263299.aspx. Parallel upgrades – In the past, databases had to be upgraded in serial fashion; only one database could be upgraded per server at once. Some companies were able to use more hardware to overcome this limitation. Now you can upgrade many databases simultaneously, which dramatically increases the speed of b2b or version-to-version upgrades. Upgrade strategies will not be discussed in this paper. EnumAllWebs – This command provides the entire site collection and information hierarchy of your environment. This XML output can be used as a site map or for inventory. DeleteSite and Deleteweb – These two STSADM commands have been enhanced in SP2 to include the force command to remove problematic site collections and webs (sites or sub sites). Orphaned sites and webs can be removed using the stsadm –o deletesite –force command. VariationFixTool – Using EnumAllWebs, you can get the GUID for the sites with variation issues. This new tool command in STSADM will allow you to fix up your sites with variations that have become out of sync. More detail on SharePoint SP2 can be found at this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=148374 SQL Servers You can also begin to prepare your backend systems. For performance reasons, SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit for your web infrastructure, as well as for SQL Server. It also requires SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008. SQL Express 2005 or 2008 continues to be an alternative, but I caution my clients that the lack of management tools with SQL Express makes it difficult to identify issues. SQL Server Standard or Enterprise is the recommendation for the most scale, performance and manageability. You might choose your version based on your need for clustering features. 3 Client Desktop Requirements Browsers In a very exciting move, the SharePoint team clarified their browser strategy: a standards-based browser like IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.x will be required to author content in SharePoint 2010; IE 6 will not be supported. In addition, SharePoint 2010 will offer an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows operating systems. This move is not only a big win for corporations with mixed environments; it also means a richer editing and design experience. Although you will still be able to design pages that can be viewed using IE 6, it is not supported, and now is the time to plan to upgrade your client browsers to standards-based browsers. You might be interested in Google Chrome, but at this time nothing has been stated about that browser. Better Together: Windows 7 and Office 2010 Enterprise Desktop Considerations In fact, this is a good time to evaluate desktop requirements for your environment as a whole. Many organizations are still running Windows XP and Office 2003 (or even older versions of Office), and should be planning for an upgrade to Office 2010 and Windows 7. Office 2010 provides the greatest innovations for editing Office clients since Office 97, as well as the richest SharePoint integration yet. I find that the 90% approval given by attendees at Microsoft’s World Partner Conference is spot on: Windows 7 is the best operating system ever, offering security, compatibility, and stability.