Upgrading to Sitecore 9 update-1 (rev. 171219)

Notes from upgrading from a 9.0 initial release

I just upgraded a stadalone (vanilla) install of Sitecore 9.0 initial release (rev. 171002) -installed with SIF- to update-1 (rev. 171219). All went fine, no real issues but a few small tips might help...

Note that we had installed our initial version with SIF

If you have used SIF-less (a UI Wrapper for Sitecore Installation Framework) remember that your result will be the same as it uses SIF underneath.

Sitecore configuration files

When installing Sitecore with SIF, some of your parameters are set inside the Sitecore configuration files. This will give conflicts when upgrading to update-1. Luckily the Sitecore upgrade wizard is now smart enough to tell us this. I had conflicts in:

•  App_Config\Sitecore.config: The 'dataFolder' variable has been manually modified (weird?)
• App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.DefaultIndexConfiguration.config:  the url to our Solr instance was in here
• App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Master.config
  App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Core.config
  App_Config\Sitecore\ContentTesting\Sitecore.ContentTesting.Solr.IndexConfiguration.config: <param desc="core">...</param> is in there and changed to $(id) instead of the name of the core - so if that doesn't match the name of the index it won't work anymore. Note that this is only changed for some indexes like master and core, not for others like web.
• Web.config: the search provider was reset to Lucene - had to switch back to Solr

An mentioned Sitecore will warn you about these changes so no worries - just make sure that you do review the configs after the upgrade or you will get errors.

EXM install

EXM is "new" in this release (not really new, but it wasn't available in the initial release) and comes packed within the Sitecore box now. During the upgrade process you will need to deploy the EXM databases. It won't tell you how to set your SQL user though (or it assumes that we use the dbo - do not!). I tried to figure it out (see StackExchange).

My conclusion for the user in the connection string -at the moment- is: 

• read/write rights on both databases
• execute rights on the exm.master database