What are you doing to prepare for SharePoint 2010?

Question

What best practices are you following to make sure that the eventual release of SPS 2010 doesn't cause major rewrites of your applications?

Answer 1

Planning not to install anything on systems that has even the tiniest risk of shutting down business processes? If it isn't broke don't fix (or update it)

If you are head strong on installing it then Virtualisation is a good way of transferring all your applications and data in a safe way from one system to another and ensuring any major issues don't affect your working systems.

Answer 2

1. Start by ensuring new hardware is 64-bit. Deploying 64-bit is our current best practice recommendation for SharePoint 2007.
2. Deploy Service Pack 2 and take a good look at the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Checker that’s shipped as part of the update. The Upgrade Checker will scan your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment for many issues that could affect a future upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
3. Get to know Windows Server 2008 with SharePoint 2007, this post is a great starting point.
4. Consider your desktop browser strategy if you have large population of Internet Explorer 6 users.
5. Continue to follow the Best Practices guidance for SharePoint Server 2007.
6. Keep an eye on this blog for updates and more details in the coming months.

FROM Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog

Answer 3

I think most people are probably not going to upgrade existing 2007 installations to 2010. Unless there's a very compelling reason. Like Jamie's said, why fix what's not broken? Especially when the fix might just cripple everything. Especially as a bug in SP2 causes existing installations to expire 180 after SP2 installation.

If you have a customer that must have MOSS 2010, I would think the safe thing to do would be to install it side-by-side as opposed to upgrading. SharePoint is such a behemoth with so many ways of doing things that I am afraid an upgrade will not work in 80% of the customized installations out there.

Answer 4

Good question OP. This was always going to be an issue with SharePoint 2007 apps.

We are still migating from 2003 > 2007, so not really the "typical" company, but yeah just reading lots of blog posts from msdn and other 3rd parties, and playing with the beta.

I think our approach will be the same as with 2003 > 2007. Apart from migrating sites (using custom tools) our applications will be re-assessed in dev and retested prior to deployment to prod. I can see some major re-writes coming with the changes to things such as workflow.