We’ve seen several customers who needed their IT staff to take charge of a portion of the overall migration while allowing users to copy information over for their own sites, too. This most often happens when there is a well-established portal (or set of portals) that needs to be brought over to the SharePoint Server 2007 environment in a single effort—usually over a weekend.

The expectation isn’t that IT will migrate everything from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to SharePoint Server 2007, but that it will take charge of the migration of certain datasets, usually widely consumed portals or team sites. The rest of the content is left to the user to copy over within a prescribed time period.

Other than the in-place upgrade, you can actually combine the gradual, content database, and user copy methods to create a more customized migration approach. For example, those site collections with unique customizations can be routed through the gradual approach to ensure that the pages look, feel, and function as expected after the migration. Other site collections in other databases could be moved over and attached to new Web applications in SharePoint Server 2007 without doing harm to your gradual migration approach. You’ll simply have to keep note of which information has been moved by which method because a database move will not be noticed by the gradual upgrade software. Finally, the content in some site collections or even entire database sets for a Web application can be moved by users if the scenario details will allow it.

Which approach you use will depend on a plethora of factors that need to be placed into a matrix, weighted, and then used as raw data for a final decision.