Upgrading Sitecore – 8.0 update 4 to 8.1 update 2 issues

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This week I’ve worked on a Sitecore upgrade from version 8.0 update 4 to version 8.1 update 2.
Overall, following the documentation provided by Sitecore it was pretty smooth. I did run into a couple of things worth sharing.
One of the first things I ran into was an issue with the Update Installation Wizard. Every thing went smoothly with the upgrade to 8.1 (initial release) using Update Installation Wizard 1.0.0 rev. 150930 as outlined in the upgrade documentation. The documentation for 8.1 update 2 lists Update Installation Wizard 1.0.0 rev. 160203 as a prerequisite for installing the update. Upon running the installation wizard, both analyze and install options were blocked by an error stating ‘History path is not set’. I spent some time looking at logs and didn’t find anything helpful. As a test I rolled back the Update Installation Wizard from 160203 back to 150930. After doing this, I was able to proceed with the upgrade without error.
Everything seemed to be alright with the upgrade, but upon logging into the Sitecore instance, my content items had a Required License Error in them:

Our instance isn’t using the Sitecore Commerce Connect module so this one stumped me for a few minutes. Starting with 8.1 update 2 configuration files for Sitecore.Commerce.config and Sitecore.Commerce.ExperienceProfile.ReportingServer.config are included by default in the /App_Config/Include directory. Since we aren’t using this module in our instance, I disabled these 2 files by appending the ‘.disabled’ extension to them. Upon next view of the content items, the ‘Required license is missing’ error was gone.
Next, was the Web Forms For Marketers upgrade to go along with the Sitecore upgrade. For the most part everything went smoothly following the upgrade documentation. After the update, though, launching Sitecore threw a server error pointing to Sitecore.Forms.Mvc.Pipelines.Initialize.AddCustomMetadataProvider.

During the update a config file called ‘Sitecore.MvcForms.config.Web Forms for Marketers 8.1 rev. 160304’ was placed in the /App_Config/Include directory. I compared the contents of this file with the ‘Sitecore.MvcForms.config’ file and found a number of differences. Copying the contents of the new file into ‘Sitecore.MvcForms.config’ resolved this particular issue. Maybe I’m just special and this doesn’t happen to anyone else, but I figured it was worth mentioning.