I'd say the only thing that needs to get done prior to an upgrade is getting a backup of your DB and catalogs, just in case you run into errors. If that's not too important, run the upgrade...it's simple and straight-forward.
Harry is right though...if you can upgrade to a much newer version, do so. You will either need to do a multistep upgrade to get to BEWS 12.5 which is the current latest version, or alternatively do a clean installation.