About a year ago, I wrote a couple of articles (here and here) that discuss the merits of using Search Server Express 2010 instead of SharePoint Foundation. It really boils down to the fact that you get more stuff, and it’s still free. As opportunities for Foundation arise, we have been installing SSE and our customers are quite pleased with the result.
I recently had the opportunity to perform an in place upgrade of a WSS 3.0 site that we had built a few years ago to Foundation, and I of course decided to use SSE instead. As it turns out, the upgrade wasn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped.
Normally, when you perform an in place upgrade from WSS to Foundation, you first install the bits, and then run the Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, which in turn detects the pre-existing WSS installation and offers to upgrade it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen with SSE. The Wizard only prompted for a new or existing Farm.
The next step was to uninstall SSE, and to Install Foundation, once this was done, the Wizard did detect the existing installation, and properly upgraded the entire farm. Once this was done, I thought “why wait?” and I went ahead and laid down the bits for Search Server Express and then for Office Web Applications.
Everything seemed alright, but when I tried to start the services on the server, they simply weren’t there. It also wasn’t possible to create the corresponding Service Applications for either SSE or for the Office Web Applications. After much head pounding, I decided to uninstall everything, OWA, SSE, and Foundation (CAREFULLY as outlined here..), and then Install SSE alone, joining it to the Pre-existing farm.
Once that was done, everything showed up properly, and I was able to properly start the appropriate search services, and OWA services, and to create the appropriate service applications.
So as it turns out, order of operations is pretty important in this scenario. If you want to upgrade from WSS 3.0 to Search Server Express 2010 (using the in place upgrade approach), you’ll want to follow these steps:
- Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 on your server
- Run the Products Configuration Wizard, and perform the upgrade
- Uninstall SharePoint Foundation from the server, removing it from the farm
- Install Search Server Express 2010 on the Server
- Run the Products Configuration Wizard, and re-join the existing farm
- Test the site to ensure that it’s functional
- (optional) Install any appropriate Service Packs and/or hot fixes for SSE
- (optional) Run the Products Configuration Wizard to update the databases (if step 7 was performed)
- (optional) If desired, Install Office Web Applications, and any appropriate Service Packs for OWA
- Run the Products Configuration Wizard to complete the OWA installation
- Start all necessary services, create the necessary service applications (search is a big one….)
- Create a basic Search Center and configure your site collection to use it.
Hopefully this helps any other folks in the same situation.