Help with old site

[kellyrt]

I have a sharepoint 3.0 site and want to covert it to sharepoint 2010. What is the best way to get the documents from the old site imported into the new site?

[Jay Mueller]

Long story short, yes you can upgrade WSS to SharePoint 2010. How you'll do it depends on a couple of things. If you want to upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the next version of WSS, with a different name), you can do either an in-place upgrade or a database attach upgrade (I'll describe them both below). If you want to upgrade to the SharePoint Server 2010 product, your only option is the database attach upgrade.

The in-place upgrade allows you to install the SharePoint Foundation 2010 bits on your current WSS v3 server and upgrade it to Foundation, keeping all of your customizations, configuration settings, and content in place and moving it to SharePoint 2010. This is only possible if your environment meets the requirements for SharePoint 2010 (hardware must be x64, WSS v3 patch level must be at least SP2 or greater, and there's a few others), if it doesn't you'll have to do the database attach upgrade.

The database attach upgrade allows you to take backups of your existing WSS v3 content databases, build a new SharePoint 2010 farm, then restore those backups into SQL Server instance for that new SharePoint 2010 farm. SharePoint automatically upgrades the sites in the databases to SharePoint 2010's database schema and setup, then its up to you to perform a visual upgrade of each site in those databases. Keep in mind, this only migrates the content, you'll have to manually implement any customizations, third-party products, or other configuration changes you've made to customize your WSS v3 environment, so that any sites that are dependent on those customizations function properly.

There are also some hybrid approaches available, as well as third party products that can help the migration process, but those two paths are the primary approaches recommended by Microsoft. For more information, I'd highly recommend taking a look at the information posted here: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287998%28office.12%29.aspx , it's Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Resource Center on TechNet.

[saron]

Thanks so much for posting all of the awesome info! Looking forward to seeing more posts!