This is a summary of Sean Livingstons presentation: SharePont 2010 upgrade part 2: Advanced Scenarios presented at the SharePoint conference 2009.

This was the second part and I actually didn’t see the first one. Sean Livingston is Program Manager and responsible for the upgrades. This session did not for obvious reasons include that much demos. But to mention a couple of things, we promised that MS makes everything to make this upgrade as seamless and transparent as possible. Most important in this is the resumable upgrade that makes it possible to continue the upgrade in case something is not working as it could. For instance, if you have a site that for some reason fail to upgrade, it will not fail the whole upgrade but rather log it and continue.

We encouraged us to run the Upgrade Check released in SP2 and updated in the CU april, run Windif on our servers so that we really know how our environment looks like. If we have custom site definitions features or modifications to the DB we will probably run in to problems during an upgrade to 2010.

If sites fail and the end user tries to access the page they will get an error message. But what they have added is a Correlation ID so that the end user can send that to you and you will be able to quickly find this in your logs to troubleshoot it.

We also looked at a scenario to upgrade an environment with a parent => child relationship. The recommendation for this is to set up a parallel farm to use for Service Applications, migrate the content and set up a synch to the 2007 version. Search will not be working so this needs to be set up on the new 2010 Service Application farm. Then you can migrate each child farm on a farm to farm basis. Finally you can remove the old SSP machine or maybe upgrade it to use in the new “parent farm”