Upgrade OCS2007 Public Beta to OCS2007 RTM

We use OCS2007 Public Beta (PB) for a couple of weeks. Absolutely the most wonderful new product in my perspective.

As described earlier RTM is released and customers needs to upgrade Public Beta to RTM. Of course this is only for customers who deployed PB in the production environment. Public Beta is only supported in test environments. In our case we know that the Schema wasn’t changed at all from Public Beta bits. So we deployed it right away :-)

You can use these steps if the following is true:

1. You migrate from Public Beta to RTM eval (180 days) bits.
2. You do not need to backup users contact lists.
3. You are not migrating from existing pools.

In this post I will describe the steps to take for upgrading to RTM.
1. Backup your Active Directory and System States of your OCS2007 servers.
2. Backup your RTC databases (same for Standard and Enterprise deployments).
3. Submit your transaction logging in the RTC database.

4. If your OCS servers are running on Virtual Server 2005 (R2/SP1) snapshot your VHD's.

5. ATTENTION: there is no possibility to extract your contact list or custom groups. This is only in our case because we do not migrate users between Enterprise Pools. Due to schema changes (PB >RTM) this database cannot be re-used. It must be dropped and a new one created.

Public Beta:
Db schema version is 24
Db sproc version is 50

RTM:
Db schema version to 26
Setting Db sproc version to 56

6. Remove your current Enterprise Pool by clicking Remove Pool. Check "Force removal of Enterprise Pool". After removal your current users will be moved to "Unassigned Users".

7. Stop and disable all Office Communications Server services. After disabling restart your OCS server(s).

8. Remove through Add and Remove Programs “Office Communications Server 2007 Public Beta”.

9. Extract the OCS2007RTM evaluation bits (180 time bombed version) to your local hdd drive.

10. Open lcscmd and proces the following commands:
1. D:\setup\i386>lcscmd /forest /action:SchemaPrep
2. D:\setup\i386>lcscmd /forest /action:ForestPrep
3. D:\setup\i386>lcscmd /domain /action:DomainPrep
**Example: is my installation path. Make sure all commands are completed successful.

11. Create a new Enterprise Pool and configure it. You can reassign your old EE-pool certificate.

12. Add your OCS2007 server roles back into the configured pool and reuse your previous created Service Accounts. Of course you can create new SA-accounts if you want.

13. Start all OCS2007RTM services.
14. Check your login procedure with MOC and check your DNS (SRV) settings. Make sure you run the validation wizard for all your Edge Roles.

There you go.

OCS2007 legal upgrade path

Just for the record but very important for installing Office Communications Server 2007 in your production environment.

At this moment there are 2 OCS2007 bits available:

(1) bits located at MSDN (MSDN product key)
(2) bits located at the Microsoft download site (180 days time bombed)

When installing the MSDN-bits in your production environment there is NO supported upgrade scenario available. This means uninstall your complete environment and reinstall with the correct RTM bits (licensed version)

When installing the RTM-bits evaluation (180 days time bombed) in your production environment there is an legal upgrade path to RTM Full licensed. After 180 days you will upgrade the RTM eval bits with the RTM full licensed bits in an in place upgrade (your configuration settings will be saved)

Additional information on RTM availability:

RTM full licensed bits are only available for TAP participants and customers with an enterprise agreement. Should your organization not have a current enterprise agreement in place with Microsoft, General Availability of the OCS 2007 and MOC 2007 RTM software is scheduled for September 2007.