In the Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 there were 3 popular methods.  In Place, Gradual, and Database Attach.  In place was a scenario that many of us took as a no starter and many of us even went so far as to say NEVER do it.  Now the message is there are two methods for upgrade.  In place and Database attach.  Despite the fact that gradual upgrade as we knew it is dead, what we got from gradual upgrade we still have.  What do I mean?

There is NO supported method to run both the 2007 and 2010 bits side by side.  That’s true.  So definitely not side by side installations.  There is also no Central Admin UI for upgrade groups of sites with gradual method.  So why would I say, it really has just taken a new form.  Essentially the new gradual upgrade is visual upgrade.  The mistake that was being made was people were not comfortable with the upgrade process so they would lay down the new bits on the box and then not upgrade the sites immediately, they would determine which web applications they would first start with and run some concurrency with an old and new web application and do a few sites at a time.

With the major two step punch of Binary upgrade completely out of band with Visual Upgrade, being not mutually exclusive, also meaning that we can run the binary upgrade and then run visual upgrade on two different time lines.  We now still have a very similar path.

Essentially you’ll do the binary upgrade using one or the other method above.  Once complete you’ll run the visual upgrade a few site collections at a time.

So hence the process really hasn’t changed much if you were doing gradual before.

How is SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Better?  At least three things around control have gotten better:

1. You use to have to have both products installed to have the option to upgrade a few sites at a time.  Now you can do it by simply upgrading the binaries due to the site structure and features of SharePoint 2007 being included/shipped with SharePoint 2010.
2. The redirector stuff was a mess. Users were always confused “Which URL, which one gets updated.”  “Is it read only or are the sites being synchronized.”  Attempt to trying to maintain 2 different web applications was messy.  Some of us figured out how to lock read only, but a few really struggled with upgrade.  With the visual upgrade you don’t need to maintain 2 different web apps, they use the same one.
3. Do No Harm – the binary upgrade which is essentially what most IT folks think of as the real upgrade, is designed to take a No harm no Foul mantra.  If the binary upgrade breaks anything that is in the known world of the SharePoint binaries that’s a bug.  If it’s outside of the products own features, solutions, and site definitions, then the PreUpgradeCheck should identify those issues.

I’ll be putting out a few articles on upgrade so watch for more in this series…

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