Examining Alternative Approaches and Third-Party Migrations

Although the in-place upgrade and database attach upgrade approaches are the only two direct Microsoft supported migration scenarios, various other approaches can be used, including the following:

• Third-party migration tools— These tools typically do not have limitations to what versions can be migrated from and also allow for splicing and splitting of site collections and content databases, something not supported in the Microsoft approaches. They also typically handle exceptions better.

• STSADM exports or backups/restores— Although STSADM, the command-line tool, can only export or back up/restore to the same version, it can be used to export SharePoint content to a farm of the same version level and then run the upgrade process on that farm. You can use this same concept with database restores as well.

• Manual content move— Some organizations simply prefer to build a new SharePoint 2010 environment and then show their users how to move content from the old farm to the new farm. This is particularly useful if there is a great deal of abandoned or useless data in the older farms.

Determining which approach to use is critical during the planning phase of an upgrade or migration project.