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