I have not thought about an upgrade from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 is quite a while as most if not all of my customers have already made the move to 2010. However one of my colleagues asked if I had done one recently and well… not in a while.
There are really two main parts to any upgrade. The physical upgrade of one version of the product to another. And then the configuration within that product to make everything sing and dance.
The hard part if the singing and dancing so lets tackle the upgrade first.
Although Brian Harry has an awesome post on this I wanted to pull together the experiences that I have had over the years into one place that I can reference.
Upgrading from 2005 to 2008 was a very painful experience. So much so that the team at Microsoft spent a lot of time and money on making the experience as slick and easy as possible. TFS 2010 upgrades are a dream and with TFS 2012 I have been speechless at the smoothness of the upgrade experience.
Doing something with the Team Projects that you now have in the new version of the product are another matter and a much more complicated one. There are a number of ways to handle this and if you are moving to TFS 2010 then they are all manual:
My best documentation of my experience of implementing #7 was as part of a 2010 to 2012 upgrade, but the process is the same.
In TFS 2012 after the upgrade there is an option on a per-Team Project bases to perform and automatic enablement of the new 2012 features. While this is awesome it does not change the process template hat you are using and instead injects only the bits requires to get the new features working. And it is not available for TFS 2010!
A TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 upgrade takes no more than a day at the most, but the real hard work is in getting the Process Template to where it is useable for the customer. Take the time here to make and understand the choices.
How did you get on upgrading TFS 2005/2008 to TFS 2010/2012?
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
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