Rich Finn

This seems to have come up a lot for me lately: We have a client who wants to know what it takes to upgrade from WSSv3 to MOSS. What do they need to do to make the MOSS Features available in their current WSS sites?

Having been primarily only working with MOSS, I haven't done much with just WSS and have never run through the upgrade process to MOSS.  There was very little documentation out there other than some forum posts, so today I ran through it for the heck of it and was impressed, but unsurprised, that it was pretty smooth.

To begin, I installed the slipstreamed WSS+SP1 available from Microsoft downloads onto a fresh Windows Server 2003 virtual.  I set it up using SQL 2005 instead of SQL Express, which was a little lazy on my part, because I should have run through what it would take to move the SQL Express stuff over to SQL 2005. Oh well.

I set up my web application with a site collection at the root based on the standard Team Site definition.  This site then got two sub sites.  All three sites had a single Word document in it's Shared Documents doc library.

Then, I installed MOSS+SP1 from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Here's the steps with some screen shots that I thought were of value:

1) Ran install of MOSS.  Pretty straightforward.  Extracted files, entered key, selected server type, installation of bits and securing of resources, etc, etc...

2) Ran configuration wizard. Says 'This wizard will upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies'. Config wizard is aware of config db. Runs through nine tasks without hanging on anything for too long, and then completes.

3) Opened Central Admin. On the Operations tab:

When clicked:

Check and click OK:

Completed pretty quick:


One thing to note here - this just enabled the Enterprise SKU Features, I think because I entered an Enterprise key from MSDN, so none of the Standard Features were activated. FYI...

4) Started new services:

5) Created SSP - nothing special here

6) To get Search lined up, I created a Search Center site at the root of the site collection, and changed the site collection search settings to use the new search center I just created:

That was pretty much it. Like I said, impressed, but not surprised.