Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Upgrading/Migrating.. the story continues!

Together with a colleague of mine we are trying to upgrade a large Sharepoint 2003 environment to 2007. And ofcourse, as always, this is not a typical straightforward configuration. This environment uses the Shared Services feature (aka the SSP of 2003) and the thing why I'm blogging is the use of user profiles. Now we (or at least I) didn't knew the exact details until yesterday when we found a document about this subject. So if you see the image below you are seeing the difference between a MySite and a Public Profile site, I always thought that these two pages were linked to each other therefore implying that an user who has a public profile page always had a MySite as well. But this is not true, so when migrating you've to migrate the user profiles and the MySite.

Figure 3. SharePoint Portal Server (Office 2003 version) MySite Structure

 

Apparently in the huge migration document (Perform a gradual upgrade with shared services) that guides you through the upgrade process, it only states the following about upgrading/migrating the userprofiles :

- Configure profiles and audiences to be synchronized between SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Office SharePoint Server 2007

So piece of cake huh? We just configure the profiles and audiences to be synchronized.. easy! ;) Luckily there is another document (Upgrade large SharePoint Portal Server 2003 intranet portals to SharePoint Server 2007) that describes this process, although it's not referenced anywhere in the upgrade guide, it clearly explains how to upgrade/migrate the existing user profiles and personal sites. In short you've got to do the following :

  1. Install Sharepoint 2007
  2. Assign services to the server
  3. Create two webapplications to host the SSP Admin site and the SSP MySites (so don't create a SSP first(!!))
  4. Use STSADM with the restoressp command using the 'old' Sharepoint2003_PROF database
  5. Migrate the parent portal that hosted the personal sites
  6. Migrate the personal sites
  7. You're done! (migrating the profiles and personal sites)

 

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