At this point, you might be asking why we were still running WSS 3.0. Simple, it met user needs and worked well. While full-blown SharePoint offers a lot of rich features, the bulk of our demand was for a robust document library and workspace and project sites. The free version of SharePoint accomplishes all of that. I could not justify the cost.

What I will be recommending is the in-place upgrade of SharePoint Foundation 2010. There are alternatives and I encourage you to read up on them, but what I needed was a smooth migration of my existing document libraries, sites and user rights. The in-place upgrade accomplishes all of this with the only downside being that the production site has to be down during the upgrade. The entire upgrade itself can easily be done in an hour, so schedule two to be safe.

The Tough Part – Getting everything to a 2008, 64-bit server

My instance of WSS 3.0 was using a Server 2008, 64-bit server as the application server, but a Server 2003 server with SQL 2005. In order for a smooth in-place upgrade, you will want your WSS 3.0 instance running on all 2008, 64-bit machines.

This means testing. If you are already on a fully 2008, 64-bit environment, go ahead and skip this part.

What you will need:

1. A workable installation of WSS 3.0, but they are out there on the Internet. I was able to find it on MSDN. This was the trickiest part! Small version differences will mean that your back up will not restore to this version.
2. Download Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, also from MSDN.
3. 2008, 64-bit servers to test with. Do your best to duplicate your production environment.
4. A copy of a recent back up of SharePoint.

If you are not backing up your current SharePoint instance, stop here. Get your production environment backing up immediately. This is not only good practice, but you will need the backups to complete this migration.

Moving on, I created a duplicate of my application server (I cannot recommend virtual servers enough!) and then used the new database server. I installed WSS 3.0 and restored from my back up, which I have detailed here. This gave me an exact replica of the environment I would be using.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Here’s what we will be doing, first in the test environment and then production:

1. Verifying that we have a valid backup of our data
2. Uninstalling our current version of SharePoint
3. Re-installing WSS 3.0, but this time to the all 2008 environment
4. Restore your data from your back up
5. Installing the SharePoint Foundation 2010 prerequisites. This will add components that would have been installed had you upgraded to SharePoint 2007.
6. Run the SharePoint Foundation 2010 in-place upgrade

I ran through this process several times. I wanted to be comfortable with the process and to beat it up a bit to see what shook loose. Happily, it’s a pretty straightforward process. Move to your production environment when you are ready.

Post-installation instructions

I ran into two issues after my installation: search did not immediately work and I needed to create a backup job.

Assign the site to an indexer to get search to work
This blog post explains it very well.

Use Powershell to back up the farm
Create a job using Powershell to back up your data. Details on creating the backup are on Technet and from there, you schedule your Powershell code to run by creating a job.

 
Everything always happens at once. That rule continues to prove itself. This week, we added three new sites to the Clermont County network.

Clermont Citizen Corps
We inherited this site from a team of volunteers and it really was not getting frequently updated. The first step was to determine an in-house team to manage the site and we then tied it to FEMA’s “Resolve to be Ready in 2011” campaign to help build momentum.

Insect Issues
Recent outbreaks of issues with the Asian Longhorn beetle, bed bugs and the Emerald Ash Borer have spurred a lot of questions from the public. In an effort to make finding information easier, we created a new site at Bugs.ClermontCountyOhio.gov that will serve as both a source of new information as well as a resource to our other sites.

Treatment Alternatives for Street Crimes
The TASC team had been talking about putting up a website for months. Once they had a bit of content together, I convinced them that it was better to launch a small site and get the ball rolling than to continue to debate what would be on a potential, abstract site. The ball is rolling!

My favorite strategy for getting my ideas implemented successfully is to get buy-in from the “thought leaders”, people in positions of power whether in terms of the organization or as power users who can set a great example. Nothing builds momentum like the people considered to be “in the know” advocating your idea.

Early on in the process of developing a social media policy, a couple of things became clear:

• There are not a lot of good examples in existence to base ours on.
• There is a lot of confusion about what social media is and how to use it properly.

So I developed a clear, easily understood message (http://tomdoepker.com/2011/02/10/social-media-policies/), and then used an opportunity presenting to over sixty of the elected officials, department heads and technical leads during a records retention training to cover the importance of having a policy in place and how it could be used successfully.

The above video is of that presentation. (Note: Pressing play will skip you to my portion of the presentation, which was the final piece of a two hour training.) While I am not the world’s greatest presenter, it really has served to get the County on board with our policy as well as to bring in new agencies with some exciting new ideas as to how we can better use social media to communicate with the public.

Working with the Sheriff’s Office’s software development team, I developed an online survey. Officers enter their report into the system and then reports are randomly flagged to request feedback from the complainant. The complainant receives an email with a custom-generated link, which takes them to this page, where I collect the report information as well as their feedback and submit that to the sheriff’s office. The survey can also be filled out by any complainant, so long as they have a valid report number.

Another example of working to move paper processes online.

I attended the Google Apps Summit recently and was definitely impressed with what I saw, though I am fully aware that I was at a sales pitch. All the same, their team made some really strong and interesting points deserving of further review.

My organization is considering a switch from being a Microsoft house to introducing some of Google’s services and I have been named to the analysis committee, which means that I have some research ahead of me.

Here are the highlights from my notes during the initial seminar:

Interesting Points from the Sales Pitch

• New features and releases are immediately available
• Access from any device, anywhere
• 80% of current IT resources are spent simply maintaining a “digital dial tone” (this was a Gartner Group statistic the Google Sales Team cited) instead of actively pursuing new initiatives
• Cost. I am not sure of the cost per user to provide Exchange Services (their estimates were $300-600) and Google offers their email and other apps at $60/user/year.
• Scanned documents can be added to the cloud and would be searchable.
• Data would not exist on machines, but in the cloud. Laptops can be stolen, servers destroyed and all data would still be accessible from any PC, tablet or smartphone with a data connection.
• Security features. I would recommend further, more specific talks with the Google representatives, but the high-level overview of their security, additional features from their Postini offerings as well as offerings from outside vendors sounded promising.
• Interoperability. Works with Exchange (can with import PST email archives or even use an Outlook front-end), Active Directory, Cisco phones, Blackberry and more.
• A large and easily scalable amount of storage. Google’s base offerings are very generous in terms of storage space (i.e. Email users get 25GB of email storage) and additional space can easily be purchased and seamlessly added.

Other Interesting Points

• New college graduates are geared to cloud computing and it seems like a solid bet that technology will shift to it with the advent of tablets and smartphones. It is of course still accessible via laptops and desktops.
• Adopting Google Apps would mean that we would be entirely reliant on Google’s survival as a company, but we are already that way with Microsoft.
• Google does not collect business user information, more at www.DataLiberation.org
• Two-factor security authentication is available if desired, though from a third-party.
• The Google Apps marketplace offers a resource akin to the Android or iTunes Apps stores, and it seems likely that some very helpful solutions will emerge from here.

Doubts

• How well does it really integrate with an existing Microsoft set up?
• I have heard bad things about the “Groups”, that isn’t all that it should be. If you’ve got an opinion, let me know! My specific interest would be something I could use as a document library and knowledge base.

While it seems like a really viable replacement for Exchange-based email, I’m not yet ready to sign off on it as a replacement for Office. If you have experience using Google Apps in your organization, please let me know what you think of it.

Update

November 23, 2010: Google now offers an add-on that will allow you to sync your Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. (via Mashable)

Launching in beta today, Google Cloud Connect is an add-on for Office that syncs documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 with the “Google (Google) cloud.” In other words, it takes data on the desktop and makes a backup copy in Google Docs (Google Docs), gives it a unique URL and constantly syncs the data with anybody else that might be sharing the same document.

That’s pretty big, in many ways a very viable replacement for using something like SharePoint as a document library.