SharePoint 2010 Public Beta to RTM Upgrade

Besides my running SharePoint 2010 Resource Guide series, today I want to post here some very important information around this topic!

I recently noticed several requests on “Upgrades and Supportability from public Beta 2010 to RTM”.
Therefore I may share this Information again and post it here for all of you facing the same question in mind!

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FAQ: Supportability of SharePoint 2010 Beta to RTM Upgrade

In November 2009, we released SharePoint 2010 Public Beta to the download center. So far many customers and partners have already downloaded and evaluated the new features of SharePoint 2010. We also made it clear that the upgrade from SharePoint 2010 Beta to RTM is not supported for the public. A limited set of customers who have a “go live” license will be supported by both the Product Group and CSS through upgrade in addition to internally MSIT hosted SharePoint properties. The product group is already connected and working with all of these customers and new customers will not be added to this list.

Q:  Why upgrade is blocked for SharePoint 2010 Beta to RTM?
A:  Information collected during Office SharePoint Server 2007 upgrade indicated residual objects and data that persisted from previous pre-release versions of the product and as such would over time result in problems surfacing in those environments ….as mentioned previously, a supported path is limited to a specific subset of customers …  Cleanup required is unique to various circumstances in the environment and there will not be steps published to enable you to do this on your own.

Q:  Will content database attach work to work around the upgrade blocker?
A:  Database-attach upgrade or in-place upgrade cannot be used to bypass the block put in place to prevent the upgrade from pre-release to RTM versions of the product.

Q:  What is a “Go-Live” license? Can my customer get it?
A: A “go-live” license represents an agreement signed between Microsoft and the customer surrounding pre-release to RTM upgrade of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and as a result both the Product Group and CSS are committed to assisting the customer throughout the upgrade process.  New customers will not be included at this point and time.

Q:  Will there be a new Beta/RC released to the public?
A:  No.

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I thought it is important to share this with you! So if you are testing on the public beta bits and thinking of upgrading your content to RTM, bear in mind that this is not supported and you need to completely uninstall your entire SharePoint farm to ensure that no evaluation bits remainign on the system prior to reinstalling RTM!

The current timeline of RTM is planned for publishing approximately around april 2010. I’ll post the release date soon as it’ll be fixed!

Steve Chen, Sr. Support Engineer, SharePoint