We have been contacted regularly by people wanting to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. We all know there are many advantages of upgrading to SharePoint 2010 such as highly effective search solutions or enhanced user interface but there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself before you can upgrade.
Based on our experience in upgrading various systems to SharePoint 2010 we have put together a short questionnaire of the most important questions that you need to ask yourself before upgrading to SharePoint 2010.
- Do you have Windows SharePoint Services v3, MOSS Standard, or MOSS Enterprise?
- Describe your current SharePoint 2007 environment in terms of servers and their roles, and version levels (eg Windows Server 2003 SP2, SQL Server 2005 SP2)?
- Are you currently running on x64 or x86 servers?
- How many users do you have on SharePoint?
- Will you be moving to new hardware or reusing your existing hardware?
- Does your hardware and software meet the minimum requirements for SharePoint 2010 (PointBeyond can advise if necessary)?
- How many web applications do you have?
- How many site collections do you have and what types of site are they (collaboration, publishing, My Sites, etc)?
- How many content databases do you have and how large is each one?
- Have you made customisations using SharePoint Designer (if so what)?
- Have you deployed any in-house developed or third party customisations (if so what)?
- Have you integrated any external systems with SharePoint and if so how?
- Have you made any other changes or deployed any other software to the servers?
- Do you wish to use the upgrade as an opportunity to reorganise and/or “spring clean” your content?
- Do you have any restrictions in terms of amount of acceptable downtime?
- Do you have a disaster recovery environment? If so please explain what it comprises.
- How is SharePoint accessed (as an intranet, extranet, internet) and are you using Windows authentication or another mechanism such as forms?
- What browser and Microsoft Office versions are in use by your client machines?
- Will you keep the 2007 UI initially or move straight to the 2010 UI?
- Is there anything else that you can think of that could have a bearing on the upgrade?
Hopefully by asking yourself these questions you will be well on your way to a trouble free upgrade. Please keep in mind that depending on how you are using SharePoint there may be other questions that you will need to ask. Feel free to leave your comments and even add additional questions to this list.
Excellent
Manick