SharePoint PreScan Utility Hiccups

I haven't had any chances to work on doing an upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 until now. So in order to get myself up to speed I decided to begin testing with my companies old 2003 implementation since we have already moved to 2007, we had just decided to do a complete rebuild from scratch instead of the upgrade.

The first thing I do is run the PreScan Utility, you can find it here http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8a00b1f-6f45-42cd-8e56-e62c20feb2f1&displaylang=en.

I got an error which stated "Skipping virtual server: . Server state = NeedUpgrade. Most likely this virtual server is not extended with WSS v2. "

To me this seems strange as I thought the Virtual Server was already set to be SharePoint. So I google the issue, here is the KB from Microsoft for the different prescan errors and solutions http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937291.

In my case I just needed to do the upgrade as whoever set up the portal server originally had not done this. To do this you would use the stsadm utility.

1. Open Command as an administrator
2. Change the Path - cd "\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Bin"
3. stsadm -o upgrade -url http://serverbeingupgraded

Run the Prescan utility using the config xml, this config file maps the site templates correctly, if you run the prescan with out this you will get back notifications that SharePoint is using a lot of custom templates, which may not be the case.

1. Open Command as one of the SharePoint admin accounts
2. Run the utility
prescan /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /v http://serverbeingupgraded

Getting the results below is good, if any of the items marked in blue come back with something other than 0 you will want to look into things a little deeper, and will most likely have to recreate your custom templates for use with 2007.

03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of sites skipped (already scanned): 0
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of sites scanned: 50
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of broken sites: 0
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of webs scanned: 125
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of broken webs: 0
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of webs using custom template: 0
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of pages scanned: 6145
03/25/2009 10:36:55 Number of unghosted pages: 315 (5.13% of total).

Unghosted pages are not necessarily a bad thing and there is a way of reghosting.

For more info on this visit Joel Olsens blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/04/13/don-t-be-afraid-of-prescan-part-1.aspx