Updated Guidance on SharePoint 2010 Upgrade and the FAB 40 application templates

I’ve been telling people that Microsoft would be providing some guidance, and some of that guidance has come. Samantha Robertson a technical writer on the SharePoint team who is the author for much of the upgrade content on 2007 and 2010 on TechNet often without credit has posted some guidance.

Her post is titled “SharePoint 2010 Products: Upgrade and the Fabulous 40 Application Templates”

It’s broken down into a couple of categories.  The information on…

Upgrade Guidance

1. What to do with the .stp files – STP is no longer an supported extension for template files.  The new format is the .wsp which is the same as it was for the solutions.  Now we have client solutions, and even saving a site as a template in SharePoint will generate a .wsp file.  Samantha includes the steps for recreating your upgraded site as a 2010 wsp site template.

2. What to do with the .wsp (solutions) – The server solutions in an in place upgrade if they are there should upgrade as is.  Some have issues, Samantha has explained these and points to the SharePoint setup forum (Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management, Call Center, Help Desk, IT Team Workspace, Knowledge Base, and Physical Asset Tracking and Management)

Removing the Template Dependency

While it sounds like .stp files are the harder ones to deal with in reading her post, the opposite is true.  The .wsp files are the ones that contain custom site definitions.  Sure these can be recompiled and redeployed, but if you don’t care to create new sites based on those templates you can simply remove the template file, the stp and move on.

In a previous post “Remove/Deactivate a missing feature for a cleaner upgrade” I address how to detract a feature if you are no longer using them, such as may be the case where a sample site was created using the template, but no longer needs it.

To Remove a Template

This will enumerate the custom templates in a farm

stsadm.exe -o enumtemplates

To remove a template you’ll need the template title, I encourage quotes.

stsadm.exe -o deletetemplate -title “template title”

If you have multiple languages installed you may need to specifiy the language id such as 1033 for English.

stsadm.exe -o deletetemplate -title <template title> -lcid <language>

 

She also links to a great resource put together by Khalil who has recompiled the Fabulous 40 2007 app templates into updated solutions for 2010.  While not yet complete he’s still working.  This is a key resource for people trying to maintain sites for people that are looking to do a database attach.  If you’re building clean 2010 farms, this is truly a blessing.  Thanks Khalil.

3. Fab 40 Templates [upgraded by Khalil] for MOSS 2010

While I was hoping to see more guidance from Microsoft at least we’ve got something to work with.  Thanks Samantha and Khalil!