SharePoint University

We currently doing a side by side deployment of Sharepoint 2007.  We need to copy a very large document library from our 2003 site over to the new 2007 one.  The documents in this library are critical to our business and we can not afford to be without them, so we would like to copy the data over while leaving the 2003 site up until the new one is ready.  What is the best way to do this?  WebDav seems to be too slow and error prone.  I have considered using the object model, running an app on the 2003 server to open each file and use a webservice on the 2007 server to save them, but its seems like there has to be a better way.  Anyone have any ideas?

I am not aware of any mechanism which will take the document as well as the metadata with it like versions, different attrributes of the document etc.  It is advisable to upgrade the site to MOSS which will take the document library with all the data. 

Read my earlier post on this subject http://www.sharepointu.com/forums/t/530.aspx

Basically it involves creating a "My Network Place" to each of the document libraries (the source library on your SPS2003 server and the target library on your MOSS2007 server).  Once you have them setup you can simply drag-and-drop the files (or copy-paste) from the 2003 library to the 2007 library and bring over whatever folder/subfolder structure intact.

You can alos do this with the explorer view, but in my experience it's a bit kludgy and can time out on occasion.  We're currently using the My Network Place option for migrating multiple thousands of docs from an old intranet SPS2003 box to a new WSS 3.0 box and have yet to experience any problems with this method.

Hope this helps,

- Dink