PrescanTool - What does it do ?

Written by KbNk

Monday, 06 July 2009 19:50

Before you can do migration of portal or site collection from SPS to MOSS you have to run program called PrescanTool. What it does and what it changes, modify,touch ?

Read bellow.

You must use the pre-upgrade scan tool to scan your sites, and then fix any errors before you perform an upgrade. If you have not successfully run this tool and you attempt to upgrade your environment, when you attempt to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard, the wizard will exit and prompt you to run the tool.

You cannot avoid of running this tool.

The pre-upgrade scan tool can be used to scan all Web sites in your environment (by using the /all parameter) or to scan a specific URL (by using the /v URL parameter).

Syntax:

prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /all

This will scan all the sites including portal. Microsoft's statement about this tool is it is read only and will not touch anything anywhere. But it does..

What does Prescan Touch in the database?

It will modify ALL timestamps of LAST MODIFY date column for all libraries and lists to current date. So if you are using LAST MODIFY date of lists or libraries for some reporting or something other, prepare your customer that this timestamp will change to current date and time. ( you will see "0 minutes ago" for all lists you run prescan on. It will of course count every other minute,hour,day since you run it, It won't stay on 0 min..)

After the site upgrade the list and library timestamp will change anyway. But this information can be usefull if you want to run tool some time in advance or several times.

It also touches following. (found on web):

1. Tp_fields column in the lists table to persist the list schema. This is to facilitate v2->v3 list upgrade

2. Bitflags column in the sites table to indicate a site collection has been scanned.

Flips the bitflags field in the sites table in the content database to 262144 if it is ready to be upgraded.

This is something that should make you no problems. But here are some other points I have found on the web:

It parses and saves List definitions with the associated Lists. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2 already incorporates this feature whenever a list is modified; however, this process should be completed for all Lists, so prescan calls the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 2 method to persist that data.
PRESCAN.EXE will report on common issues that will result in a failed upgrade; therefore, running PRESCAN.EXE, addressing reported issues, and resolving those issues, and re-running PRESCAN.EXE to verify those fixes is a best practice when planning a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 upgrade.

KbNk