SharePoint 2010 gradual upgrade migration method

SharePoint 2010 gradual upgrade method will be useful for large organization in which if they want to migrate some of the site collections from same web application to SharePoint 2010 and if some site collection they want to keep in MOSS 2007 or if they want to migrate remaining ones after sometime.

Microsoft introduced new commands in stsadm addzoneurl into SharePoint 2010 which will redirect any specified incoming request to MOSS 2007 site instead of SharePoint 2010 site URL if URL doesn’t exists into 2010 environment. This method is called “AAA redirect”.

Here is one example for gradual upgrade migration:

Suppose if we have 50 site collections into http://sp.webapplication.com/ web application URL and on a first phase we just want to migrate/move 25 site collections from 2007 to 2010 version, may be it is because of time concern and some other factors. In this case we can logically divide content database structure and we can only migrate 25 site collection/content databases to 2010 version and for remaining 25 site collection we can execute STSADM commands for adding zone url, which specify that if user is requesting any site collection url that is not exists into SharePoint 2010 environment then redirect user to SharePoint 2007 site collection  URL automatically.

Here are some reference links which talks about how we can use SharePoint 2010 gradual upgrade migration method and how we can redirect user from 2010 to 2007 URL if URL doesn’t exists.

http://www.procentrix.com/Community/AmarM/post.aspx?ID=3

http://communities.quest.com/community/sharepointforall/experts-blogs/blog/2010/03/16/gradual-upgrade-in-sharepoint-2010-part-2

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee720448.aspx

Features\ExcelServerSite\Microsoft.Office.Excel.WebUI.dwp is referenced in the database, but is not installed on the current farm

I was getting above error while migrating contents from 2007 to 2010, as per this MSDN links we can ignore this error while migration.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/539c4086-0bfe-4c87-9b0a-c4d65642340f/

Challenges and limitation while saving list as template from SharePoint GUI

I have found some limitation when I was tried to create new list from existing list template from SharePoint GUI, suppose we have 2 list and one list has lookup column associated with second list column, now we are saving or exporting both list as template and including content to migrate both list from one server to another server, when we are creating new list from saved template, at that time, we are not able to see lookup column values into first list and we are getting error “One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields”

 

Resolution:

I need to go into first list and again map lookup column from second list column, because while migrating list from SharePoint GUI, it didn’t keep column relationship mapping. By using 3^rd party tool like AvePoint for list migration, we won’t face such type of error. We can also write custom code to migrate list from one server to another server.