Friday, August 26, 2011

SharePoint 2007 to 2010 Upgrade Errors and Resolutions: Part-1

I am writing this post because I want to make life easy for someone out there facing similar errors. I will cover my findings in a series of two posts and the first one is here.
Recently I have done SharePoint 2007 to 2010 upgrade and faced few unique errors which took quite a bit of time for resolution. I find that these resolutions are not mentioned in forums or other blog s. So I’m posting the resolutions on my own Blog. The solution mentioned here is around the “Database Attach” upgrade method.
Before you proceed with the upgrade first make sure that you equip your server farm with all the customizations. Equipping all the customizations before the upgrade on the target SharePoint 2010 server farm in a proper way will reduce the errors while upgrade and makes it easy for you to understand the true road blocks. I have few tips to reduce your burden while you prepare your target SharePoint 2010 Server farm. However, I am not explaining each kind of customizations that you may have since it is too tedious and beyond the scope of this post. Below are few useful notes about various customizations that you may typically have on your Server Farm.

Application Templates:
Knowing the fact that your organization has heavily used “Fab 40 Appliction Templates” in the existing 2007 environment, you must be wondering how to upgrade the Farm on hearing Microsoft that they have no plans to release “Fab 40 Application templates” for SharePoint Foundation 2010. Well, you don’t need to be panic. Khalil from “Tech solutions” has created these templates and offering them free of charge for the community, you can find the same available for you here. Though you have downloaded these templates and Installed them on the 2010 farm you must be getting a lot of error logs that say “missing features” and “missing setup file” when you run the “Test-SPContentDataBase” command from SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.
What you need to understand here is that though the Templates released by “Khalil” offer similar functionality as that of the Microsoft Application templates they are different from the originals.
The resolutions is
• Navigate to “Solution Management Page” on Central administration page of the 2007 farm.
• Identify all the Application templates uploaded to the Farm also note the details of the Web Applications to which these solutions are deployed to.
• Download those Templates which are used on your server farm and the “Application Template core” from the Microsoft download page here.
• First Install the Application Template core and then the Appliction Templates.
• Deploy them either Globally or only to the appropriate WebApplictions on your SharePoint 2010 Server Farm.

CodePlex Solutions:
Governance:
Make sure that you are using the same release of this Tool as that Installed in your SharePoint 2007 Server Farm. If the version you are using on your SharePoint 2007 Server Farm is not available to download among the release versions offered on the “Governance” project space of the codeplex, make sure that you Identify all the files related to this module from the “12” hive and GAC on any one WFE(Server hosting Windows SharePoint Services WebApplication service) of your SharePoint 2007 server Farm. Copy these files to their respective locations on the WFE’s(Server hosting the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service) of the 2010 Server Farm. If there are any features among these files make sure that you install these features once you copied all the files to their respective locations.
In our case we are using an earlier version of the Governance application which is not available among the release files from Codeplex. So I have to manually copy the binaries\files from the 2007 servers to 2010 servers and Install the features. We planned to replace this application to its current version after we upgrade from 2007 to 2010.

Search Builder:
If you are using “Search Builder” Application from Codeplex on your SharePoint 2007 Server Farm you have to note that there is no release yet available for this application on SharePoint 2010 platform.
To avoid errors relating to this application during upgrade you may follow the below steps
• From “Solution Management” page make a note of the Web Applications to which this solution deployed to.
• Download this application’s 2007 release from CodePlex, make sure the release version is same as that deployed on your SharePoint 2007 Server farm.
• Install the downloaded application binaries on your 2010 Server farm and deploy them to the Web Applications that map to your SharePoint 2007 Web Applications on which the application is deployed to in your 2007 server Farm.

In House Customizations:
If your organization is yet to develop 2010 versions for any of the In house built customizations such as Custom Solutions\Site definitions\Field definitions\Features\Event Handlers\WebParts \UserControls \Resource Files existing in the SharePoint 2007 environment and you have to test the Upgrade, just make sure that you Install/copy and deploy the 2007 binaries to your SharePoint 2010 environment prior to test your Upgrade.
If your organization has already built the necessary components for the SharePoint 2010 Platform, you can deploy the 2010 version binaries on to your target SharePoint 2010 Server farm environment.
Third Party Solutions (which do not have 2010 release):
Follow similar steps as that mentioned for “Search Builder” above.
Few Specific errors with their resolutions will be presented in my next post.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Access Denied Error when running Test-SPContentDataBase



I faced "Access Denied" error problem when I try to run the command "Test-SPcontentDatabase" with both the required params Name& Webapplication.

In My scenario, my SharePoint 2007 content Database is not residing on the same server as that of my 2010 farm configuration database. Also both the SQL servers are appearing as part of the farm when I visit The Servers in the Farm Page.

When I ran the command "Test-SPContentDatabase" and visited the Event Viewer, I found a event with event Id: 3760 saying

SQL Database 'WSS_Content_' on SQL Server instance 'sql2008' not found. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.

Cannot open database "WSS_Content_" requested by the login. The login failed.
Login failed for user .


From the above error, I understood that the SharePoint is trying to find the database on the wrong Server (the hosting the Configuration database). Obviously It cannot find the database. Then I tried the same command with the Parameter "-ServerInstance" and it worked like a charm... :-)

Update: Today when I was doing SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 upgrade i got the same issue and this time even after specifying the ServerInstance Parameter. The error message is:
“Test-SPContentDatabase : The server instance of the database could not be found.”
Get-SPContentDatabase -ConnectAsUnattachedDatabase -DatabaseServer -DatabaseName