URL Changes And Site Map Redirects

[RMATVMC]

We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler.

My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?

[Chris.Menke]

Don't worry too much about the sitemap.  When your new URLs are up, upload your sitemaps with the new urls and you're good. Between your redirects and sitemap, Google won't have a problem knowing about the new URLs--how long it takes to crawl all of them may be a different story.