DevConnections - Customized Site Template and Definition Migration
I attended a great session by Rick Taylor this morning on migrating from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007. We've done some migrations and when dealing with customized implementations it is no picnic. In this session he talked about some of the pain points.
If your implementation was based off one of the Fantastic 40, this is going to be a tough pill to swallow: Fantastic 40 application templates are not supported for upgrade. Does this mean you can't upgrade? Of course not, it just means don't call Microsoft for help.
If you've been looking into migrating you probably already know there are 3 types of migration: In-Place, Gradual, and Content DB (or a hybrid of Gradual and Content). He, as do we, recommends doing the migration several times in a test environment before messing with production.
The basic strategy when migrating a customized implementation is Locate, Evaluate, and Upgrade. He pointed out a few tools for locating customizations including PRESCAN, SharePoint Configuration Analyzer, and WSSCrawler. He also mentioned a Prescan Parser but I couldn't find it (if I see him tomorrow I'll ask him).
When evaluating it is very important to determine the value of the customization: is it useful? is it being used? A key factor from a design standpoint is whether it is supportable going forward. The type of migration approach depends on whether you want to keep, remediate, or redo the customizations: Gradual for keeping, DB for remediating. Redoing the valuable customizations is often the decided approach in our experience because of all the new functionality available in 2007.
He spent a decent amount of time going over the mapping file and also talked about the justification of resetting the site definition. It probably is apparent from this post, but it was a great mix of high level guidance and detailed examples - it was one of the best sessions I attended.
-Joe