Migrating a SharePoint 2007 Blog to 2010 (Part 2)

Welcome to the 2nd of a 2 part blog series on migrating a SharePoint 2007 blog to SharePoint 2010. This is a continuation of a previous post where I migrating Joel Oleson’s blog which we host to here at Rackspace to SharePoint 2010.

Recap of the upgrade steps:

· Acquire another server

· Install SharePoint 2010

· Perform a “preupgradecheck” on the old server

· Install any prerequisites on the new server

· Migrate the Content DB

· Apply the new look and feel

· Apply Joel’s theme

In the previous post I took you through as far as Migrating the Content DB where we attached Joel’s 2007 content database to a newly built SharePoint 2010 Foundation Server (note the new naming conventions).

Apply new Look and Feel

So at this point everyone is excited to open a browser and take a look at the new site. The only problem is that once the browser opens and renders the site – there isn’t any change to how the site looks…what’s up with that?

In this new version of SharePoint, Microsoft has shipped all of the CSS and Masterpages from 2007 to help ease the transition of sites in 2007 to 2010. In fact what they have also done is increased the delineation of SharePoint responsibilities from the IT Pro and the rest of the SharePoint user base. The beauty of this is that at this point my role as the System Admin is complete – Joel’s blog is now running on 2010 – mission accomplished. It would be at this point that I would had the site over to Joel and his designer to decided when they wanted to apply the 2010 look and feel.

Being that it is my role to help Joel with these things as well (and it helps me with more info for blog posts), I went ahead and completed the process. You see inside: Site Actions > Site Settings under “Title, Description, and appearance” there are these radio-button choices at the bottom of the screen:

• Keep the previous SharePoint user experience.
• Preview the new SharePoint user experience, but let me return to the previous user experience.
• Use the new SharePoint user experience, and don’t ask me again.

Note: If you are tracking along w/ your own DB and following my steps, you may find that you can’t log into your site collection… why you ask? Because if you have built your new farm in a new domain – you have just restored content from an old domain with old domain users. Go add yourself to the Site Collection Administrators in Central Admin.

Apply Joel’s Theme

Once you select “Use the new SharePoint Experience…” you will see an immediate change as your are dropped back in Central Admin – you have the new admin features and layout available! As you go back to your home page, you will see the new theme applied as well.

Now Joel’s page has the new look and feel but all of his styling is gone. This is because the default.master is being fed from the “uncustomized” version of the page which is located on the WFE. To get Joel’s styling back, all we have to do is open SharePoint designer and re-apply the page created by Heather Waterman.

Once that’s done, you are good to go:

So there you have it: Migrating a SharePoint blog from 2007 to 2010. In future posts I’ll dig a little deeper into each of these areas – this post was meant to give you the “big picture” of the process.