We are in the midst of a fairly large migration from SharePoint/MOSS 2007/3.0 to SharePoint 2010. We have several content databases on an existing MOSS 2007 farm that have been migrated; and fairly successfully migrated so far. I’ll post more on that soon.

In addition to this farm, there was one rogue server we had running SharePoint for a contact center. This instance was running completely outside of the scope of any corporate IT support structure and need to be migrated so that it could be supported appropriately. I found that it was running SharePoint V12.0.0.6545. As I went to backup the database, I found the connection string (SERVERNAME\Microsoft##SSEE) inside of central administration and attempted to connect. To my surprise, I was unable to.

It turns out that this instance is actually running SQL Server Embedded Edition, which means that I needed to put this in as the connection in SSMS: \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query. Apparently this is frowned upon, unsupported, etc., but I needed to get into the database to see what was there.

Now to do the actual migration/upgrade to the 2010 farm. More on that later.