The SharePoint Infrastructure Update - what we're recommending

On July 15, 2008, Microsoft announced an Infrastructure Update for Office Servers.  There were a number of issues with the release, and our SharePoint team recommended that the update could be applied to simple farms with one web front end server and custom development, for more complex farms, it was advisable to wait for a rollup of subsequently issuefixes.

That time has arrived.  The cumulative update was announced on September 29, 2008, and has received the blessing of our senior SharePoint resource. 

The update includes the new Enterprise Search features that were shipped in Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express (which had not been part of MOSS 2007), including the Federated Search capability, a unified administration dashboard and several Search performance updates.  It will also fix some known issues, such as the post-SP-1 issue where a workflow cannot be triggered by incoming email to a list or library. 

We are strongly recommending that our clients create a development Sharepoint environment which mirrors their production environment, so that the cumulative Infrastructure Update can be tested there before touching Production.

Please note that the update is not a single process, but involves several steps which depend on your environment and which must occur in a particular order, listed below, which is taken directly from the SharePoint Team Blog:

To keep all files in a SharePoint installation updated, we recommend customers to follow the path below:

1. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1

2. The 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1

3. The Windows SharePoint Services Infrastructure Update x86 x64

4. The Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update x86 x64

5. KB 953397: Excel Server Security Update x86 x64

6. KB 955586: Document Lifecycle Workflow Update

7. August Cumulative Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Global)

8. August Cumulative Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Local)

9. August Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office Servers

After applied all these updates, run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard or “psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b” in command line. This need to be done on every server in the farm with SharePoint installed.

The version of databases should be 12.0.6327 after all these updates.