If you've read my last post at Accessing SQL 2008 Express, you'll be up to date on our upgrade plans.  We've restored the database to our new environment, and we're ready to attach it.  Before starting that there are a few caveats:

• We still haven't gotten our production web server updated with SP2.  I know we should, and we will shortly, but in the interim I used a content database from our development server.  You need to have SP2 installed on MOSS before you can upgrade to SP2010
• Once you've got the content database restored, you attach it with an STSADM command.  To run that successfully (see the post above for the details) you need to run the command prompt as administrator.  Failing to do that gives you a "Access denied" when you run the STSADM -o addcontentdb command

Other than some complaints about missing features, that upgraded fine.  I wasn't ready to try installing 2007 features, so we just copied the required branding files that are normally installed by a feature (we'll do that properly later), edited the web.config to get all the controls loaded, and the site came up nicely.

Of course we're still running in the version 3 user experience, so now the task is to update the master page to work with the new user experience.  James Brett is one of our web developers, and that's his task now.  I'll post the results of that once they become available.

So we've had SP2010 Beta 2 installed for about a week now, and it's time to get our site upgrade into it again.  We've got a seminar on web content management (WCM) in SharePoint 2010 next week, and having an upgraded version of our site and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario (HSFO) done for the presentation is a big part of it.

So it was time to look back on my previous blog posts on upgrading to SP2010, and figure out how to do it again.  For those of you that read my SharePoint 2010 Upgrade post back in October, you'll know that I'm a big fan of the content database migration approach.

To start with, I needed to get access to the SQL 2008 Express installation on the standalone installation that we did for Beta 2.  Now I know that we should do a full farm installation, but to start with this seemed easier.  However there are no management tools for SQL installed with SQL Express, so I had some challenges.

I got the email from Microsoft that the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta is now available.  This is an early release for members of the Technical Preview (which we are), but I believe general availability will happen tomorrow (November 18th).

The download wasn't too bad.  A couple of hours and I had images for SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, Office Professional, Project, Visio, SharePoint Designer, and the Office Web Applications.

There is no upgrade path from the Technical Preview to the public beta, so our first step was to get a new clean server setup.  I love HyperV for this kind of work.  We have a development server with quad quad-core procs, 64 Gb RAM and lots of disk.  We can spin up 25+ servers on the one box for development and testing work.  Mark Campbell from my team fired up a clean Windows Server 2008 SP2 image, got it all patched up for me, and I was set to go.

For the second time the last few years I had a chance to present to Nick Bontis' MBA class at McMaster as part of his KM Showcase.  Both Nick and his KM class have built a great following, and it's always fun to join the other presenters and give our perspectives on Knowledge Management.

Normally Michael Herman from my team gives this talk (he and Nick have known each other back to Michael's days at Microsoft.  Michael is at the PDC, so I subbed in for him.  You can read more about the PDC on his blog at http://mwherman.blogspot.com/.

Joining me to present were a mix of individuals:

• Amit Bole - Accenture
• Ashley Beattie - Department of National Defense
• Martin Cleaver, Connie Crosby & Stephanie Barnes - Knowledge Workers Toronto
• Julia Garboll - RIM - BlackBerry

All the talks were great.  In particular Martin, Connie, and Stephanie were talking on their successes building a KM community in Toronto called Knowledge Workers Toronto (http://meetup.knowledgeworkers.org).  Martin also runs a Wiki group at www.torontowikituesdays.com.  If you're interested in learning more about KM and networking, you should check one of them out.