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Friday, January 02, 2009

SharePoint: Migrating Sites from MOSS to WSS 3.0

Sometimes, we need to move back to old days. Last week, I got across a situation, where I had to migrate MOSS site to WSS 3.0 environment. Earlier I thought, backup - restore will do the job, but it was not that straight forward task.
Many of the Features available to MOSS sites are not available to WSS 3.0 and the existence of these features in the host site causes migration effort to fail. Among the Features that should be deactivated on the host site prior to export are:
Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site and Standard Site Features, which can be deactivated through the SharePoint Products and Technologies user interface by navigating to: Site Settings -> Site Features
However, there are many Features, not visible through the SharePoint Products and Technologies user interface that will cause import failures in this scenario including Features such as:
  • BaseWeb
  • AnalyticsLinks
  • DataConnectionLibrary
  • SlideLibrary
  • RelatedLinksScopeSettingsLink
To deactivate those Features, use the SharePoint Administration Tool (STSADM) deactivatefeature operation prior to the export
STSADM -o deactivatefeature -name BaseWeb -url [url-of-site] -force
STSADM -o deactivatefeature -name AnalyticsLinks -url [url-of-site] -force
STSADM -o deactivatefeature -name DataConnectionLibrary -url [url-of-site] -force
STSADM -o deactivatefeature -name SlideLibrary -url [url-of-site] -force
STSADM -o deactivatefeature -name RelatedLinksScopeSettingsLink -url [url-of-site] -force

10 comments:

Jay said...

Perhaps turning off MOSS-specific functionality is a good strategy for general development. Develop content and custom application _layout pages, controls, etc. and test it out on MOSS, knowing that it will work in WSS3.0.

What do you think of that strategy?

Nanddeep Nachan said...

Hello Jay,
Nice to hear idea from you.

I have listed the list of MOSS specific features needs to be turned off before migration.

Sorry, but could you please elaborate more on your second point?

Thanks,
Nanddeep

Jay said...

Sorry about the confusion...

I work exclusively in ASP.NET and have been interested in developing pages (I guess the terminology is layout pages in sharepoint) that work both within MOSS as well as WSS3.0. So the idea was to have one sharepoint installation (MOSS) and perform all development, testing, etc. with the MOSS-specific functionality turned off.

Normally I would need two environments, MOSS and WSS3.0 in order to ensure that any features work in both MOSS and WSS3.0. But with what you describe, I can do everything 'exclusively' in MOSS, w/ MOSS-specific features turned off, and have confidence that it will work in WSS3.0.

Hope that made sense.... sometimes I think one thing and write something else.

Nanddeep Nachan said...

Hello Jay,
No worries...!
Welcome to the SharePoint world!

Thanks,
Nanddeep

dooz said...

Hi, thanks for the info. Is there a way to determine if there is content using the feature before you deactivate it?

Thanks
Paul

Marcos-PS said...

I may need to count on this content soon...

Thanks for the info. Regards from Brazil!

Dave said...

Nandeep,

I'm also having to migrate from MOSS to WSS 3.0. I've got the site imported on the WSS box but have not been able to remove the librarys and lists created by the publishing feature. The MOSS install used Enterprise features and specifically the publishing feature.

Any ideas how to remove the publishing features. I have tried removing content types but I'm now stuck with Page which cannot be deleted because it appears to be being used somewhere.

Cheers, Dave

Paul said...

Hi Nandeep, do you have same kind of web part for SharePoint 2010? Thanks in advance

Shadowphone said...

Hi Jay,

If you want to make sure something works in MOSS and WSS, then why not just develop on WSS? Everything in WSS is included in MOSS, so you would never have to worry about missing features.

Cheers,

Peter

Roberto Figueroa said...

Hi, do this works on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0? The one shipped with Windows SBS 2010?

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