Upgrading Windows SharePoint Services
This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.
This section provides information about how to extend the process of upgrading sites that have been heavily customized in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services from version 2 to version 3. The most common customizations made in version 2 involve Web Parts, site definitions, or customizations made in Microsoft Office FrontPage.
Windows SharePoint Services provides an object model for defining upgrade actions, and a schema for defining upgrade definition files. The object model provides a means to execute custom upgrade code from the unique upgrade processes required by the external server application. Custom applications can wrap Windows SharePoint Services upgrade methods and drive the upgrade process. The upgrade definition schema makes it possible to create files that map existing files and resources in the previous version to features in the new version.
Warning
Windows SharePoint Services does not support extending database schemas, and its upgrade code assumes that they have not been modified. Installations that violate this assumption may experience data loss after Windows SharePoint Services upgrade code runs. Parties affected are responsible for reading in their unsupported data prior to the SharePoint upgrade code, and re-inserting it after upgrade.
In This Section
Architectural Approaches to Upgrade
Using the Object Model to Upgrade