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.

I’ve never been a big fan of SharePoint, but it had become obvious that installing WSS 3.0 would allow me to get a very functional document library and knowledge base online for internal users in a very short time frame. I recently heard that the second rule of the Army is, “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.” It rung very true.

So now I have it and I needed to redesign it. There were two main suggestions I found online about redesigning SharePoint:

1. Surrender to SharePoint Designer
2. Do not edit “core.css”

First, SharePoint Designer is a descendant of FrontPage. That’s enough to convince a seasoned web developer not to use it. Second, I was careful and backed up files before changing them. I could easily revert back. Third, all changes were made in a development environment and thoroughly tested before being released to the wild.

User-testing helped me to design the version of a SharePoint installation that we both want and need in Photoshop, but changes to a Cascading Style Sheet weren’t going to do it.

To get the results I needed, I edited several of the master pages and user control pages, the “core.css”, two images as well as adding a theme-specific style sheet and images.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices

• Set up a test environment and restore a recent copy of the SharePoint back up. Test your design changes here. Obvious and worth it.
• Create your own theme, but choose the one that looks the most similar to copy. There are plenty of places that will tell you how to create your own theme by copying an existing one, renaming it and then making your edits so I’ll skip that. By choosing one with a similar color scheme to your goal, you can save yourself a lot of time searching through tons of code.
• Don’t be afraid to make changes, just make sure that you have a back up. Some of the design changes I made forced me to edit the master and user control files. What really surprised me was that some design changes could ONLY be made by editing the “core.css”.
• Import a Style Sheet. Use it as much as possible. (It’s worth noting that many sources online recommend this. They also say not to edit the master pages, but then say you have to add the code to import this new CSS file to the default.master. Confusing.)
• Use GIFs over PNGs for images. PNGs looked great in everything but Internet Explorer. Only GIFs survived cross-browser testing.

Where Are All The Files You Will Need?

• Images: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
• Cascading Style Sheets: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES
• Default.Master: Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL
• Other Helpful Code Files (Notably Application.Master): Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
• The Themes: Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES
• SPTHEMES.XML (Defines the themes available): Local Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033

Related Articles

• SharePoint Research
• Migrating SharePoint
• Getting Site Search to Work

We are running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as both an intranet and a document library for a reasonably small (less than 1000 seats) user base. We use a two-server set up with one for the front-end and another for the databases.

For various reasons, we transferred the web front-end to a new server. The transfer was successful, but the search functionality no longer worked.

The Error

Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content.   (0×80041205)

The Fix

Many thanks to Sven Gillis’ post here: http://svengillis.blogspot.com/2008/10/access-denied-when-crawling-moss.html

The solution was to disable the loopback check on the servers hosting SharePoint. Adding the hostnames served to the BackConnectionHostNames list in the registry on the SharePoint servers wasn’t enough, the loopback check had to be completely disabled.

Disable the loopback check

Follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. n the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

I needed to migrate a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) front-end application from one server to another.

Issues

• Attempts to install another just another front-end failed, giving us a “Failed to connect to the configuration database” error.
• The Central Administration (CA) site will need to be moved as well.
• Need to minimize any down time to users.

The Solution

To first install an entirely new version of WSS 3.0 on the new server. Then we restore current data from the latest back up on the currently running WS 3.0 instance.

Section 0.1 – Before you get started

1. Set up test URLs for both your WSS 3.0 site as well as the admin site
   • For example, http://SharePointTest and http://SharePointAdminTest
   • Verify the user name and password for the account used to set up your current instance of WSS 3.0.

Section 1.0 – Install a clean version of WSS 3.0

The goal of this phase is to set up a brand new version of WSS 3.0 to which we can restore data. Make sure to use the same user credentials to create this new site as were used to create the existing WSS 3.0 instance.

1. Install SharePoint as a new instance of a Web-Front end
   • Choose the “Advanced” installation
   • Choose “Web Front End”.
   • Under “Data Location”, you choose where to save your data.
2. In the “SharePoint Configuration Wizard”,
   • Choose “No, I want to create a new server farm”
   • Put your new DBs on the same server as the live ones
     • DB names do not have to be the same as the live versions to restore.
     • We chose to use a naming convention that would group our DBs together.
   • Use the same log in credentials used to create the current live application.
   • You can specify a port number, but it doesn’t seem to matter whether you do or you use their default. Best practices seem to be to have a URL like http://SharePointAdmin already set up to use for your administration site.

Section 1.1.1 – Configure the new WS 3.0 instance – Set up site search

To get the site ready for the restoration, you have to set up the search services and create the web application.

1. Run the CA web site. This will either have popped up after the configuration wizard or can be found under “Start/All Programs”.
2. Select the “Operations” tab across the top of the site
3. Select “Services on Server”
4. “Windows SharePoint Services Search” should need to be started. Click the title rather than “Start” to configure it.
5. For both the “Service Account” and the “Content Access Account User”, use the same administrator account you used to install the application.
6. Leave everything else as its default.
7. After the “Operation in progress” screen, you will still likely have to start the search service.

Section 1.1.2 – Configure the new WS 3.0 instance – Create the web application

1. Select the Application Management tab.
2. Select Create or Extend a Web Application.
3. Click on Create a new Web Application.
4. For “Create a new IIS web site”, give your new site a unique name. Preferably the test URL you created in Section 0.1.
5. In the Select a security account for this application pool, again use your administrator account information.
6. Specify your “Database Server”.
7. Specify your “Database Name”.
8. Under “Select Windows SharePoint Search Services Server”, there should only be one option for you to select. If there is more than one, choose the target server you wish to use as your site host.
9. Restart IIS. (The command-line code is: iisreset /noforce)

Section 2.0 – Restoring SharePoint

Create a directory on your target machine and copy the latest version of your SharePoint back up to it. In the same directory, create a .bat file with the following code:

c:
cd\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin
pause 111

stsadm -o restore -url http://YourTestURL -filename PathToTheBackUpHere -overwrite
pause 333

1. Doubt-click your newly-created .bat file.
2. The process should take some time, depending on how much data you are restoring.
3. After receiving the “Operation completed Successfully” message, open your new WSS 3.0 site to verify that the data is now there.

Section 3.0 – Clean Up

• Redirect traffic from the old WSS 3.0 instance to the new one.
• Turn off and uninstall the old instance of WSS 3.0.
• Monitor for any problems.

We have decided to roll out a customized version of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as our intranet and document library. Much of my time recently has been concentrated on research, which leads me to a book recommendation: Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed by Michael Noel and Colin Spence. It does a great job of detailing what SharePoint can do and offers some sound recommendations of how to do it.

The one big surprise: there is no real mention of the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (the full, paid version) and WSS 3.0 (the free, limited version). For that, I had to turn to the web, where I found the following two comparisons that I found very helpful:

• http://www.sharepointprovider.com/moss-hosting/compare-wss-moss.asp
• http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6150512.html?tag=rbxccnbtr1

Our initial needs analysis showed us that we will only need WSS 3.0, but the links above were terribly helpful in getting us to that decision.