Installation and Upgrade > Upgrade Guide > Before Upgrading > Upgrade Overview
  
Upgrade Overview
This section gives an overview of the upgrade process. It is intended to give the person who is performing the upgrade a high-level perspective of the steps required to upgrade a Windchill solution.
The following steps summarize the Windchill upgrade process:
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Make sure that the value of the Visibility column of the Life Cycle Templates is not set to Hide. This is to avoid Upgrade Manager failure during the LoadNewData phase. For details, refer to CS369714.
1. Apply latest Critical Patch Set patch according to the source system release level.
2. Run upgrade-mandatory Windchill Diagnostic Utility (WinDU) tasks on the source system and fix all reported issues.
3. Export the database and LDAP. Exports must be taken at the same time.
4. If your upgrade includes vaults, copy the vaults for the master site as well as for any remote sites from the source server to the target server.
5. Set up the target system and verify that the target system is fully functional.
6. Apply the customizations on the target system.
7. Import the database taken in step 3.
8. Run the Upgrade Manager.
9. Execute final upgrade steps.
10. Validate the upgraded solution.
PTC has consolidated all online resources for customers upgrading Windchill in the Overview of the Upgrade Procedure for Windchill Products article.
You can also find documentation for the Windchill Diagnostic Utility here. Click the link for the Windchill Diagnostic Utility and download the latest documentation from that page.
Prior to starting your upgrade project, PTC recommends that you visit the Windchill Help Center and refer to the Windchill Read This First for your target release. Call Technical Support if you have any questions about the upgrade.
Also, for any source system temporary patches, investigate any SPRs in the web tools to see if they are resolved.
Upgrade Considerations
For 11.0 F000, M010, and M020 source servers, any Serviceable and ServiceKit attributes that are null in the source system, will be assigned the following default values:
serviceable = true
servicekit = false
This is because these attributes must have a value due to Arbortext Content Delivery requirements. If these attributes are set to null, theArbortext Content Delivery functionality will not work.