The Office 2007 Service Pack 2 are here and for the server products (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) we have a new STSAdm command called; preupgradecheck. This command allows you to check any WSS 3.0 SP2 based installation for potential issues that may prevent an upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 4 (WSS 4.0) or SharePoint Server 2010. For full reference of the command check out KB960577.

The pre-upgrade check command uses a set of rules found in the 12\CONFIG\PreUpgradeCheck\WssPreUpgradeCheck.xml file to check your farm or you can use a custom file.

This is how it looks like on a WSS 3.0 SP2 machine when run:

preupgradecheck

You will see a summary of all steps while it checks your installation for a few minutes, and when done you can open the HTML log file to dig deeper into your potential problems. There are three categories:

  • Passed (in green) - This is when everything looks fine
  • Information Only (in yellow) - You have to check the log file for more information. The log file may have references to KB articles that you have to read to fully understand what to do to make the upgrade smooth. All manual upgrades are noted here, such as customized fields, CAML views (which are replaced with the new XSLT-based views), custom site definitions (will require a special Upgrade Definition file) etc etc
  • Failed (in red) - This is when there are something that really prevents you from upgrading, read the log file to get the exact reason.

The sample image above contains two failed steps; one is about referenced features that are missing, which needs to be installed to perform an update. The second one is about the OS prerequisites, this sample is taken from a 32-bit Windows 7 which obviously is not a correct machine since only Windows Server 2008 x64 is supported on the next version of SharePoint.

It’s well worth running this command on all your installations even though you don’t plan any upgrade right now. The articles contains a great deal of information on how you can make sure that you finally can upgrade your installation smoothly. All articles does not seem to be available yet though…