Migration from Sharepoint 2003 to MOSS 2007

I had a hell of a time getting this to work. I tried initially an in-place upgrade. I have a single server farm, with the database hosted on a separate machine running SQL 2005 SP2.

I am running both my sharepoint server and database server in vmware virtual machines. Using snapshots on both the database server and sharepoint server, I tried unsuccessfully many times to try the in-place upgrade.

In the end I had to drop the in-place method (altho it was supposed to have worked) and used the Database Migration method instead.

These instructions are good for that:
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/johnwpowell/archive/2007/07/12/migrating-sharepoint-portal-2003-database-to-sharepoint-2007-using-content-database-migration.aspx

When I was finished, my sharepoint server had two websites in IIS - the old 2003 and the new 2007. I disabled the old 2003 site. I then had to go into moss2007 central admin > operations > alternate access mappings. I put my central admin and my public site in the Default zone.

I then went through every link in the Central Admin Operations and Application Management tabs and configured/set everything. Everything in my environment is using the same sharepointadmin credentials, as I had read of conflicts with database permissions, application pool services, etc. So... to simplify, in my simplified environment, all services run using the same credentials, and that user is also a site collection administrator.

More on this later...