Joe's Blog

I just finished up another class on Microsoft Office SharePoint Sever 2007 (MOSS) which is built upon Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS).  MOSS adds capabilities to the “free” WSS for a licensing cost.  I’ve been giving these classes for 15 months now and one of the areas students find most interesting is the multiple deployment scenario’s available in SharePoint. 

 

The Web Servers, Databases and MOSS Shared Service Providers (SSP) that make up the working parts of a SharePoint installation can be distributed across a bunch of different servers, not only for configuration changes but also staging development.  To this end there is always the question of how do you physically move Site Collections or individual sites.  I am writing this blog as a central location to cover the different methods of moving site configuration and content.  Here are the different options and links where you find more information on them.

 

1. Export and Import either a Site Collection or Site, the export is performed by using the command stsadm.exe -o export -url <URL> -includeusersecurity .  You can then import into a blank site by using stsadm.exe -o import -url <URL> -includeusersecurity.  The content database that holds the data to be exported must be put into an offline state during the import.  This can be done right through the Central Administration tool.

 

2. Backup and Restore the Site Collection, the backup is performed by using the command Stsadm.exe -o backup -url <URL>.  You can then restore the Site Collection with Stsadm.exe -o restore -url <URL>.   Note that this only works with Site Collections and the Site Collection being restored cannot exist beforehand.

 

A good link for more info on options 1 and 2 is http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/16a7e571-3531-4a4e-baa7-f348a9f9d1d11033.mspx

 

3. An option for developers is through the use of SharePoint Extensions for Visual Studio which can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19f21e5e-b715-4f0c-b959-8c6dcbdc1057&displaylang=en. With these extensions you can download a Site Definition into a VS Solution.  You can then modify the components of the Site Definition and then redeploy this Site Definition to any Site you want.  This is on an individual site basis and you can also use the Setup capabilities built into Visual Studio to redeploy.  You would use this approach if you are only deploying the site structure and not the content.  A good reference for this is http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530301.aspx#WSSDevToolsTechs_P2_DeployingWSSSolutions

 

4. To automate the process, usually working within a staging scenario, use a Content Deployment job.  This job defines a source site collection to be copied to a destination site collection. The entire source site collection can be copied, or a subset of sites can be copied.  By default this is an incremental copy.  There is even an option to Quick Deploy of individual pages; however, this is a MOSS only capability.  Here’s a link on this method.  http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/16a7e571-3531-4a4e-baa7-f348a9f9d1d11033.mspx