Whilst browsing the  (as part of my revision for the 70-667 exam) for SharePoint 2010 I noticed that the “upgrade” command explanation is slightly ambiguous and thought I would document my thoughts in case someone else finds this useful.

Whilst most of the information makes sense, Technet’s explanation of the “inplace” parameter isn’t exactly clear:

[-inplace <v2v|b2b>]

If specified, the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard will perform an in-place upgrade. If v2v is specified, an in-place version to version upgrade is performed. If b2b is specified, an in-place build to build upgrade is performed.

Great – that doesn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know.

I resorted to my old friend  for a decent explanation – and it didn’t let me down (cheers  and ):

• A v2v upgrade is used for upgrading from one product version to another (e.g. MOSS 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010).
• A b2b upgrade is used for upgrading from one build to another within the same product version (e.g. SP2010 RTM to SP2010 SP1).

Now that makes a lot more sense to me! Hopefully Microsoft will update the article to reflect this in due course.

Just for the sake of completeness (the command line reference actually gives a decent example), here are two related example commads using the -inplace parameter:

Upgrading product version:

psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace v2v -wait

Applying a patch:

psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait