Run the pre-upgrade scan tool (Office SharePoint Server)

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

• Issues that are reported by the pre-upgrade scan tool

• Install and run the pre-upgrade scan tool

You must use the pre-upgrade scan tool to scan your sites, and then fix any errors before you perform an upgrade. If you have not successfully run this tool and you attempt to upgrade your environment, when you attempt to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard, the wizard will exit and prompt you to run the tool. We highly recommend that the server administrator run the pre-upgrade scan tool before the upgrade, and resolve any problems that can be resolved before scheduling the upgrade.

For more information about issues or errors reported by the pre-upgrade scan tool, see the following blog entries on the Microsoft Web site: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=106424

Issues that are reported by the pre-upgrade scan tool

For each SharePoint site, issues reported by this tool include the existence of the following objects:

• Customized site templates   You need to know which site templates have been customized for a particular site so you can verify the customizations again after the upgrade.

• Orphaned objects   Objects such as list items, lists, documents, Web sites, and site collections can be orphaned — that is, the objects exist but are not associated with a particular site. Because orphaned objects do not work in the previous version, they won’t work after the upgrade. If you perform an in-place upgrade, the orphaned items will still exist but will not work. If you perform a gradual upgrade, orphaned items will not be copied to the new site. We recommend that you clean up any orphaned objects before upgrading.

  Tip

  Members of the Administrators group on the front-end Web servers can recover orphaned items before the upgrade by following the steps in Knowledge Base article 918744, Description of a new command-line operation that you can use to repair content databases in Windows SharePoint Services (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=69958&clcid=0x409).

• Custom Web Parts   Report the existence of custom Web Parts to the appropriate site administrator or developer before upgrading, to give the administrator or developer time to investigate.

  Note

  Heavily obfuscated custom Web Parts may need to be rebuilt and redeployed after the upgrade.

• Sites that are based on languages or that use controls that are not installed   If the database contains a Web site based on a language template pack that is not currently installed on the front-end Web servers, or a Web site that uses controls (such as the Microsoft Office Web Components) that are not currently installed on the front-end Web servers, install the missing language packs or controls before upgrading.

Use the information gathered from the pre-upgrade scan tool to determine:

• Whether to perform an in-place or a gradual upgrade.

  Determine upgrade approach (Office SharePoint Server) provides information to help you decide which type of upgrade to perform. It is important to consider the report generated by the pre-upgrade scan tool when making this decision. Generally, if you find significant issues, use a gradual upgrade rather than an in-place upgrade so you can resolve the issues.

• Whether to upgrade some or all site collections that contain customized sites.

• Which sites need to have customizations reapplied or redone after upgrade and therefore might take longer than others in the review stage.

  Important

  When you run the pre-upgrade scan tool, the metadata on all lists and libraries in your sites is updated. This means that lists and libraries in the environment will show that they have been updated after the pre-upgrade scan tool is run. The dates for individual list items and documents are not changed by this process.

Install and run the pre-upgrade scan tool

1. Download and install the pre-upgrade scan tool from the Microsoft Download center (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92383).

   Note

   You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to run this tool.

2. On the command line, change to the folder that contains the two files, and then run the following command to scan all servers in your server farm:

   prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /all
   

   You can use the pre-upgrade scan tool to scan all Web sites in your environment (by using the /all parameter) or to scan a specific URL (by using the /v URL parameter). If you do not supply a scoping parameter, all Web sites will be scanned.

   Note

   Templates used by SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can be incorrectly identified during the pre-upgrade scan as custom templates unless you use the preupgradescanconfig.xml file when you perform the scan. This file contains additional logic to identify the portal site templates as standard templates used by SharePoint Portal Server 2003 rather than as custom templates based on Windows SharePoint Services 2.0.

   If you have already installed the new version but have not yet run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard, you can run the pre-upgrade scan tool from the following folder: %PROGRAMFILES% \Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN.

   Running the scan can take several minutes or a few hours, depending on the amount of content in your environment.

3. After the scan has completed, a summary report is displayed in the command-line window.

If there were any errors or if any upgrade issues were found for your sites, you can review the full report to see the details. The report is named PreupgradeReport_uniqueID_Log.txt (where uniqueID is a number string) and it is located in the temp directory on the computer of the user who ran the tool (for example, %SYSTEMDRIVE%:\Documents and Settings\User1\Local Settings\Temp). There is also a prescan.log file in the same directory; this prescan.log file notes the time or times when the pre-upgrade scan tool was run.

After you run the pre-upgrade scan tool, you can review the reports to find and troubleshoot issues (search for "error" in the report to find the issues). You can also share the relevant pre-upgrade scan test results with other members of the upgrade team. For example, you can report issues such as customized site templates or custom Web Parts to the appropriate site owner, Web designer, or developer before scheduling the upgrade to give them time to investigate the issues and take preliminary steps. For example, a designer or developer might decide that it would be prudent to rebuild a heavily obfuscated Web Part before the upgrade occurs. Site owners can then verify any customizations that have been done to their sites, including site templates and changes to core Active Server Pages Extension (ASPX) files, and can note any potential issues.

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

• Upgrading to Office SharePoint Server 2007

See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Office SharePoint Server 2007.

See Also

Concepts

Preupgradecheck: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server)