Earlier today Microsoft announced the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. This is a big milestone for Microsoft and much anticipated.
The key dates for folks are:
- April 27th - Release for SA/Volume Licenses Customers
- May 1st - General Availability
- May 12th - Launch Party (to participate in the launch go to: http://www.the2010event.com)
So what do you do if you have already installed the beta and kicked the tires a bit. Well in traditional fashion the folks at Microsoft have made it impossible to have an upgrade path from the Beta bits to the RTM bits. See the following post form a third party source:
http://blog.fpweb.net/sharepoint-2010-pre-rtm-to-rtm-is-not-supported/
In Microsoft's defense, this should be expected as this is the normal mode of operation for pre-RTM bits. For those that have done more than the OOB, chuck it up to experience with the new platform.
The reason behind this decision is, during 2007 Beta->RTM upgrade process, some customers got garbage left (orphaned objects, for example) inside their installations. This caused a lot of support issues in the past and even today they are still coming. When support engineers got a call and dug into the customer's envoriment, after spending a few hours they finally found it was caused by those garbage left. It is a general understanding that Beta software is not supported by CSS for general public as there're not enough bandwidth and resources, so to avoid the problems that would hurt you someday in the future, we decided to make clear that this upgrade should be avoided, unless you have the go live license and are supported by CSS for this process.
Like I said, migrate the data from a public beta farm could be possible for some content. For example, you can write a program that reads the list items in Beta farm to a database table or XML and then put them to a list in RTM farm, keep metadata and permissions. However I cannot answer you if you use a specific API to export data is a correct way or not, that depends on how you use it. There could be 3rd party solutions from microsoft partners.
Jie Li - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010general/thread/b9817862-fd35-413a-b018-ce5c500b6760
