I was recently working through the information that is published and reading up on the latest content on upgrade.  More has been written.  As I’ve worked through the information I came across tidbits here and there that I believe are essentially to planning the real options that are available.

It’s true that not everyone will want their site administrators to decide when the upgrade for their sites will happen.  These options will come in handy when you’re trying to combine the binary upgrade and the visual upgrade.  If you know what you’re doing this may really simplify your upgrade.

Visual Upgrade Options in In-Place Upgrade

Did you know when you upgrade there is actually a choice to push visual upgrade in one step?  It’s not in the wizard, but is available in the command prompt. The visual upgrade feature is not available in the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard if you are performing an upgrade on a stand-alone server with built-in database. However, the Visual Upgrade feature is available in this case from the Psconfig command-line tool. You can then use the syntax: psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade [–preserveolduserexperience <true|false>].

Visual Upgrade Options in Database Attach

Well what about in database attach?  Is there options if you use that?  YES!  During a database attach upgrade, the choice to update to the new user experience or stay in the old user experience is accomplished by using either:

• The Updateuserexperience parameter of the Mount-SPContentDatabase Windows PowerShell cmdlet.
• The preserveolduserexperience parameter of the addcontentdatabase stsadm operation.

To get the status of Visual Upgrade:

At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command:

$sc = Get-SPSite http://machinename/sites/collectionname | $sc.GetVisualReport() | Format-Table

Manally Apply or Block Visual Upgrade Across a Site Collection

To set all sites in a site collection to the upgraded UI you can click Update All sites as seen in the visual below, or if you want to block visual upgrade from being applied there is an option to HIDE Visual Upgrade.

1. Under Site Settings, click Site Collection Administration

2. Click Supported User Experiences (Figure 6).

Rollback the Visual Upgrade

You can also choose the previous look and feel for a specific site. Under Site Settings, click Title, click Description, and then click Appearance

References:

• TechNet: Manage visual upgrade (SharePoint Server 2010)
• Making Your SharePoint 2010 Customizations Visual Upgrade Aware

Programatically Get and Set the UI version

If you have dev skills you can programatically set or get the UI version. 3 is the old user interface and 4 is the new interface when using the SPWeb.UIVersion property. You use the SPWeb.Update method to save and apply the change.

The SDK has a lot more information about Upgrading the UI and methods you can use.

SharePoint 2010 SDK

• VisualUpgradeWebs method - Upgrade the user experience of all Webs in a site collection
• GetVisualReport method - retrieves a list of reports that contain all of the visual upgrade data for each Web in a site collection.