I’ve been assisting a customer migrate some sites from a pilot MOSS 2007 farm to their production farm, the plan was to use stsadm export/import to move a handful of sites across. The export of the sites worked fine, the problems started when we tried to import them into production.
When attempting to import each of the sites the following error was received – Fatal error " Allowautomaticaspxpageindexing attribute is not declared" it turned out that they had kept their pilot environment up to date and it was running SP2 J the problem was that their production environment was still running SP1 L. It’s not recommended to use stsadm export/import between farms that are at different build levels. The simple solution would be to upgrade production to SP2 and retry the import, unfortunately this wasn’t an option. It was also critical that the content was migrated. After much scratching my head and coming up with a totally un-supported solution of hacking the export CMP file (which is basically just a CAB file) I had to find a realistic approach to migrate the content that wouldn't get me in trouble!
I then thought that I’d give SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard (SPCDW) a whirl - http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard. Although it’s possible to migrate entire sites using this, as it uses the same method as export/import to migrate content (PRIME API) this wasn’t an option as it would generate the same errors. The approach that I took was to use the tool to export each of the lists from the sites that needed to be migrated – these were primarily Wiki Page libraries and then imported them into production and it worked like a dream. The only issue is that things such as web part pages and the customised quick launch that they had were not brought across, the effort involved in re-creating these far outweighed the pain in having the sites on a pilot system that was starting to creak!
The process that I used was as follows.
· Create a site in production with the same template as pilot
· Used SPCDW in the pilot environment to export all of the lists that contained data that needed to be migrated for a site. The tool allows you to select specific lists from the source site – cool!
· Used SPCDW in production to import all of the lists
· Repeat process for each site to be migrated
· Manually re-create customisations to the look and feel
Not an ideal approach I know but if you're desperate it’s always an option!