Dear all, Currently my company is using SMS 2003 in our environment. Took a long time to understand it’s in and out’s. Now it appears my company is making a strong push to switch over to SCCM. I have a few questions on best practices on how to do this. My company has made the decision that they do not wish to upgrade our existing two servers (primary site & secondary site) and would like to come up with a new plan that does not involve touching the existing SMS servers, or at least upgrading it (hardware or software). They purchased two new servers. They want fresh installation for the SCCM. I have read sources that cover side by side upgrades and how we can upgrade our SMS 2003 clients on the user’s machines. However I would like some opinions and suggestions on my situation. Regards, Mohammed – Technical Support

As Torsten said, the answer depends upon your goals. If you truly want a plan that "does not involve touching the exsisting sms servers" I see no way to preserve any data that is on those servers. Is that your goal? If so then you are essentially starting from scratch. My suggestion is that if you want to start from scratch you advertise a pacakge to all your clients to run ccmclean on them and then get rid of everything and start over. I seriously doubt however that is really what anyone wants to happen. If you want to preserve info from SMS you need to doa side-by-side or in-place upgrade. You have new hardware so that leaves only side-by-side. Here's info on how to do that:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632845.aspxand some other helpful links:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb633195.aspxhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693622.aspxJohn Marcum | http://www.TrueSec.com/en/Training.htm | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum