Planning the migration and communicating the plan
It is always a much better experience for everyone if the migration is understood on paper before the actual event takes place. To this end, I would recommend reading through the migration steps in these chapters and then going back to the beginning of these steps to further evaluate the impact upon the users.
There will be moments of down time as the server is rebooting and the network is reconfiguring, and while files, data, users, and settings are moved between systems. It is not possible for me to put an actual time on this as it all depends on how much data there is to move. My first migration took me 5 days, spread over two weekends, while my second migration took a little over a day.
If you have a vanilla SBS 2003 system then all stages will be very simple, but if you have a number of line-of-business applications then you will also need to plan on how to move these.
I can't provide guidance on these applications, but they normally consist of one or more of the following items and will need steps to migrate them that are provided by the suppliers:
- Program files that will need to be re-installed on SBS 2008. Ensure these are compatible with a 64-bit Windows Server 2008.
- Web files. These may need to be copied from the location on SBS 2003 to a similar location in SBS 2008 and then have the web site properties migrated.
- Database files. These are normally very simple to stop, move the files and restart after SQL has been reloaded on SSB 2008.
- Windows SharePoint Services can be migrated using the information for CompanyWeb as a template.
Informing the users
Once you have understood the steps for your particular migration, you will need to inform the users when their system will not be available and what will be changing. Most changes will not require user intervention as you can make the SBS 2008 server appear to have the same name as the SBS 2003 server from the point of view of network shares and web sites, but printers and new policies may require some education.
If the system is going to be unavailable to users, you will probably be limited to working in the evening and at weekends to reduce the impact on users.