Migrating SharePoint 2003 to MOSS
Since MOSS, or SharePoint 2007 Portal Server, was released many companies are looking to upgrade their existing SharePoint 2003 servers. The main problem is SharePoint 2003 was built with FrontPage technology and not completely on .NET. MOSS uses only ASP.NET, so the upgrade path is not so straight forward.
There are two very detailed articles on Microsoft's MSDN site that may be used as guidance to plan and try a managed SharePoint migration, Part 1 and Part 2. There are also many other Blog posts and articles available around the Internet that describe either how migrations may be done or go into details of various problems with migrations. After digging into these articles you will either become extremely intimidated with the prospects of porting over your existing SharePoint infrastructure, or just suggest to the higher ups to not do it. Of course the actual choice is to plan on a very resource intensive trial and error project. With lots of backups and restores, it is not a rewarding task to migrate SharePoint portals.
Sure you can try to upgrade on your own, but if you have ever just opened a page in the portal with FrontPage if creates an unGhosted page, which means the upgrade will be painful. Other common issues are the common SharePoint upgrade SQL timeout, which is where the upgrade process takes so long doing it through the web interface will timeout. So you have to do an upgrade from the command line using STSADM. Also any custom web parts will also need to be dealt with, which is not fun either.
Speaking of STSADM, it will be where you spend a lot of your time in an upgrade. That and creating many XML mapping files to map any customization, lists and document libraries to your new portal. I could go on and on, but there is a better way.
I was fortunate enough to get certified with some great SharePoint utilities late last year from Quest Software. One of their tools is the Migration Manager for SharePoint. This tool gives you a very easy to use graphical interface that honestly allows you to drag and drop items from your existing portal to your new portal. No fuss, no muss, it automagically manages all the behind the scenes work.
The tool allows you to simply port an existing portal over, retaining your current structures. It can also be used to easily manager a complete reorganization.
As with all the Quest SharePoint tools it comes with the SharePoint Administrator. This can be purchased by itself, but you should go ahead and get at least one of the other tools, such as the Migration Manager or the Backup and Restore utility. I will talk about these tools soon too.
The moral to this story is do not try to migrate on your own. Evaluate this tool to see how much effort and costs it will save you.