Move a SharePoint 2003 site to a SharePoint 2007 Server

Question

I have 2 SharePoint servers, an old pilot SP 2003 server and a new SP 2007 production server.

One of the sites in the 2003 server is invaluable and contains a couple of advanced custom lists and document areas that would be a real pain to manually transfer over.

I've looked everywhere for a solution to EASILY move or copy the site from the 2003 server over to the 2007 one but hit many brick walls.

Has anyone ever achieved this? I'm starting to think the ONLY way maybe to upgrade the 2003 site to 2007 and THEN do the move.

I'm aware of stsadm but as far as I can tell this only works if the portals are the same version?

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

Like you said there are several commercial solutions out there:

1. Metalogix
2. AvePoint
3. Quest

Each has its own pros and cons.

My personal recommendation is to do an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 on a test server with a copy of your content database. Then you can use STSADM to move the data or you could think about just moving the entire site collection by copying the content database.

We had to do something similar but our data had to come out of SharePoint 2003 and MS CMS. We looked at the commercial tools, but decided to build our own migration tool in the end.