At a loss for other, more pleas­ant sub­jects to blog about, I will instead write about my neme­sis, that being that has brought naught but pain to my life. I speak, of course, of Microsoft Sharepoint.

To upgrade one’s ver­sion of Win­dows — Vista to 7, say — is by and large a pretty pain­less expe­ri­ence for the home user. Office, like­wise — there’s no dread that your Office 2003 files will be com­pletely unopen­able in Office 2007. So why is the poor sysad­min not afforded the same easy upgrade path?

In order to move an exist­ing Share­Point Ser­vices 2 web­site to a new net­work with Microsoft Office Share­point Ser­vices 2007, one must:

1. Learn more than is healthy about the work­ings of Share­point and IIS (2 days, d10 SAN)
2. Back up the orig­i­nal site to disk (using stsadm.exe not smigrate.exe, as the lat­ter is bro­ken) (5 hours, 13 GB)
3. Install Win­dows Server, IIS, SQL Server and Share­point Ser­vices 2 on a new machine (1 hour)
4. Con­fig­ure said IIS, SQL and Share­point (1 hour)
5. Restore the Share­point site from disk onto the new machine (>8 hours, >120 GB, d10 SAN, fails unre­cov­er­ably when out of disk space)
6. Per­form an in-place upgrade to Share­point Ser­vices 3 (Sev­eral hours, 40 GB, may fail unrecoverably)
7. Back up this site to disk (5 hours, 15 GB)
8. Con­fig­ure MOSS 2007 on the des­ti­na­tion server (2 hours, 24 Google searches, d10 SAN)
9. Restore the disk backup to the MOSS 2007 server (5 hours, 40 GB, may fail right at the end if pre­vi­ous step per­formed incor­rectly, d100 SAN if this occurs).
10. Man­u­ally recre­ate per­mis­sions on every Share­point site since all the users are now part of a new domain (8 hours, d10 SAN)
11. Per­form a rit­ual to offer Great Cthulhu the souls of Microsoft’s Share­point devel­op­ment team (d30 SAN, remark­ably quick by comparison)

I began this task on Tues­day after­noon as a mildly knowl­edge­able Share­point user with vir­tu­ally no admin expe­ri­ence. By Thurs­day after­noon, I may have been our company’s most expe­ri­enced Sharepoint-wrangler. On Fri­day morn­ing, I started the above pro­ce­dure. We are now on Step 5. 200 peo­ple are expect­ing to have Share­point access tomor­row. They have not a snowball’s chance in R’yleh.