My team is working on a project to migrate a .com site into SharePoint.
After all our look and feel assets, master pages, content types, and page layouts are created, we need to actually "move" the actual site pages into SharePoint.
I'm trying to come up with the most effective way to do this. Our topology consists of an Authoring and a Production environment. We plan to use SharePoint Content Deployment to populate Production from Authoring.
However, we obviously need to do some sort of initial population of the Authoring environment. I don't want to use Content Deployment to populate Authoring from a development environment because I don't want to initially create Authoring from a Blank Site definition.
Here are the options I came up with, would love some feedback on which you think would be the best approach:
Create the site content in a development environment and use a tool such as SPDeploy to migrate it into the Authoring environment
Create the content directly in the Authoring environment
Use a technique similar to how you can provision List Item instances in a feature. We would create and populate all of our content using Features
I'm not sure if this is actually doable, but got the idea because of how I know you can create List Item instances when provisioning a List in a feature. After all, our Pages library is a list of Pages - however there are multiple content types involved.
Thank you for your suggestions!
If it is just a matter of migrating files, you could actually use the content migration framework. The core classes of this framework are the SPExport and SPImport classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment namespace. You can with fairly little code export individual files to disk and import them again to a new location. Alternatively, try the SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard on CodePlex here: http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard. It will save you the coding.
Backup and restore the content DB.
Can you clarify on why you don't want to use content deployment to create your initial Authoring site? Why do you not want to start with a blank site definition? It would get overwritten in the deployment process anyway. What about stsadm -export / -import?
I'm sorry, but I'm still not clear on the whole situation. You have a development environment (presumably where structure is created, but not any content destined for production), an authoring environment (which I understand as a locked down environment where content is entered and approved), and then a read-only production environment to which approved items are deployed. If this is the case, then I can say that I have a similar setup on one of my projects.
In my case, I initially developed the site structure in my dev environment, then backed up and restored to authoring and prod. Subsequent structural changes to both environments are made by hand. Authoring is structurally almost exactly the same as prod. Only the security is different. Several times per day content is deployed from authoring to prod. We make content changes directly in the authoring environment.
Related
We use SharePoint 2007 and have set up a web application with several site collections. One for each of our clients. We'd like to synchronize content in all of the site collections. Maybe having a central repository, then all other site collections get content from here.
I was looking at Lightning Tools Conductor web part and seems a pretty good solution. However, I'm wondering if this can also be possible using the Content Deployment feature to copy a site from the central repository to all other site collections.
I do not advice you to copy and thus duplicate the information from your central repository to the other site collections. You'll lose precious disk space, performance and scalability.
If you have content that is created in a common site collection, you should either use the built-in web services or create dedicated ones to retrieve the content within the targeted site collections.
I usually create cross site collection look-up fields that allows a contributor to pick an entity from my central repository in a visual way and apply the rendering of the content once the page is in view mode.
That might not suit every need but I don't think content duplication is a wiser choice.
Edit : re-reading your question, is there a specific reason why you want to copy a complete site (spweb I guess) rather than specific content inside ?
I'm creating a custom master page for my SharePoint 2010 publishing site. There are images, css files and js files associated with this custom master page. Where should they be stored?
I'm using the SiteAssets library for now - is this a good choice?
Thanks.
Yeah that is a good choice, also make sure you Provision all these files using Feature, this way upate of Files becomes easier.
In my opinion, you should store everything under the site collection libraries, this way you get:
Easy recovery in the cases you need to re-install the server[s]
Versioning and permissions on resources
Separation of resources between site collection
Simple deployment between environments, as you do not need to copy the files manually or design and deploy a feature to do it for you
The preferred place is of course Style Library, this is what it is intended for.
If you are creating and deploying your files through code, you can also use the _layouts directory to store your files. This makes it simpler to share files between site collections. Visual Studio 2010 makes it really simple to add a reference to the Images folder and any files will then be deployed to the _layouts/Images URL.
The only advantage of this is that a site collection administrator cannot make changes to these files, only someone with access to the physical server. (Although this can also be a disadvantage if your logos or images are changing regularly).
I usually store them in _catalogs/masterpage/ORGNAME/...
You can refer this blog for actual implementation
http://markviky.blogspot.com/2010/11/sharepoint-2010-web-content-management.html
-Vighnesh Bendre
I am new to SharePoint development. We have created a base site template and have used that template to start new sites in other locations on the same server. This works fine but the newly created site seems to "flatten" the custom content types created in the original site. I would think there would be a way to keep the original content type inheritance intact to help support any necessary modifications on the new site. They can still make the modifications but they take longer because you have to visit each list individually. Does anyone know how to fix this or know a better way to approach this?
The problem you are having is the move from your original site collection to another. The site template does not store the complete definition of a site - only the differences from the underlying site definition. Move from one site collection to another and you lose the underlying site definition and run into problems such as the loss of your content types.
Site templates and site definitions are two separate customizations you can undertake. You need to make a decision based on your requirements as to which is best.
Site templates
Pro's:
Easy to create and reuse through the SharePoint interface
Ideal for end users
A site template is a customization of the underlying default site definition
Con's:
Dependency on underlying site definition means SharePoint updates could break your site templates
Poor performance since the modifications are held in the database and are read from the DB and compiled on each request
Limited customization options
Site definitions
Pro's:
Harder to create: involves coding XML
Made by developers and site administrators
Independent of SharePoint default site definitions so not affected by SharePoint updates
Limitless customization options
Con's:
Difficult to modify when deployed
Can be cached on the file system so is fast to load
Check out Google for info on creating custom site definitions.
Hope this helps!
Jonny
The best way to do this is to create a site definition where the content types are within features whose scope is to the farm.
Tim
So, maybe I'm a bit old-school, but when we created websites in the past, we'd develop the site on a development server, then publish or promote the pages and files to the production server. This has always seemed to be a good way to go so that users didn't see messed up pages or (God forbid) a downed server because one of us screwed up.
But it doesn't seem that Microsoft had this idea in mind when they created SharePoint...at least, I haven't been able to find a way to do this in the infrastructure as it's defined.
Does anyone know if there's a management strategy for SharePoint development? I've read online that we can make a backup of the development environment and restore to the production server. That might work the first time, but any updates to the production server can't do that without risking data loss on the production server. I've seen some tools out there for migrating list contents, pages and documents from one server to another--although, admittedly, I've not yet investigated them.
But, another concern of mine is custom content types. It seems that once a list is using a content type, you can't update it without deleting the items from the list, disassociating the content type, and reassociating the content type. Shouldn't there be some way to UPGRADE a content type?
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for any of these current dilemas, I would LOVE to hear from you.
Thanks in advance,
Dan
Thank you for your quick reply.
We already have several features created for our site and a solution package bundling features directed at the fundamentals (content types, columns, etc), and another solution for features having to do with branding (page layouts, master pages, etc.)
But it seems like this is a one-time-shot...basically, it gets our server set up, right? Once people have started using the production environment, we're going to have documents, pages, list items all existing in our content database, and it'll be impossible to update things like content types, columns.
Features you have to deactivate and uninstall before you can install and activate the new feature, right? I've seen a Version property on the feature definition, but as near as I can tell, this doesn't do anything. Solutions seem like they can be upgrade by incrementing the version number, but it doesn't seem to modify things like content types and columns--especially if they're in use. Plus, I'm not sure how extensive the upgrade with solutions is.
There's precious-little documentation out there for this sort of thing. It seems like everything I'm reading is how to get your SharePoint server set up initially...not managing it long term.
Do you have any advice or suggestions?
Thank you all for your suggestions.
But we've been working on this site for over a year now. I'm pretty confident that we're already setup according to what most of you are recommending. We already have several features that install things like content types, columns, master pages, page layouts, and workflows. Most of these features are contained within solution packages. We have all of our development environments set up as VPC servers.
So, I have the initial deployment pretty much set. What I'm REALLY hoping to find out is how I can upgrade things like content types and columns and stuff down the road. Is it possible to change content types once they're in use? Because it doesn't seem, based on my initial testing, that this is possible. I'm not to worried about the assemblies because it looks like they swap out just fine, but the only way I've gotten a content type updated is by deleting any items referencing them (i.e. all the pages in my pages library), removing the content type, then re-adding it.
Do any of you know if there's a way to update a content type AFTER the initial deployment? ...when users have already created items based on the content types we've already deployed?
(The other part of my question was actually moving existing pages from the development server to production, but I can live without that. My major worry is the content types.)
The best way to go is developing with features. Once the features are done, you ca deploy them with Solution package (called WSP).
The only thing left to do is to reactivate those features. That way, you can progressively roll-out new features without having to do everything in production.
WSPBuilder is an application that helps you build WSP.
For automating all of this... good luck. There is a lot of work involved.
UPDATE:
Deploying Content Types and Columns are tricky. Once the website has been created, you can't update them anymore through features. You need to go through the code and recursively go through all the sites and modify the specific content type that match the name.
We've tried and it's not possible to do that normally with features. This need to go through something I call "deploying with code".
You really really need to define your content types using a feature because that way each content type will have a set GUID and will be stored in the database using the same name. This becomes important when running CAML queries over the site and there are a few other little gotchas when content types are created "will nilly" if you will.
I prefer STSDev for rolling out solutions using custom content types.
There are two ways to edit pages on the server. You can define the page library to have major and minor versions. This allows editors to edit the page and a defined publisher to publish them. This is good on an internal site, but is not recommended for a public facing site.
For a public facing site you will need to use Content Deployment
I cannot stress enough that before going ahead with a production release you make sure you have features for the content types.
As mentioned here, Chris O'Brian has a post saying that you should not use features unless necessary. One of his reasons is that it slows developement.
I disagree with this. Developement is slower if you are unfamiliar with features, but once a level of knowledge is reached, it is not a major factor.
Do listen to him about the backup and restore method of moving the content.
If you do that, all mess in the content types and fields and webs you may have created during developement (for me that is always quite a bit) will be moved to your production site.
Instead of having a nice clean site where everything is consistent, you will end up with little bugs and some areas of the site behaving differently to others simply because of old development cruft.
I recommend taking a look at Chris O'Briens most recent post, and his great Content Deployment Wizard: it's not all about Features!
Maxim is right in that most items should be deployed via features that are wrapped in solutions (WSP files). Your strategy should be to make sure your solutions and assemblies are broken into related bits of functionality. This is also beneficial in that features can be isolated at certain levels like sites and webs. Feature activation code, deactivation code and feature stapling should be used when updating any content updates. Content deployment can also make sense.
Once thing to remember is that if the updates are only in code then the assemblies can be updated without requiring the feature to be reactivated or the solution retracted and redeployed. All that is required is the Application Pool to be reset.
Microsoft has a couple articles on Dev environments and you can Google many others who recommend environments. We do development on virtual machines and deploy most items to an virtual integration server. Once we smoke test it we then deploy our solutions to QA so on and so forth. The benefit i sthat features and solutions are easy to retract. Once it goes out to production it should be thouroughly tested.
Developing in SharePoint has it's issues, that goes without saying, but so far I have found that the benefits outweight the problems.
Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
We developed a custom solution which would update content types and fields for a Site Collection. Underneath the covers, through code, SharePoint allows us to modify the Fields as well as values in the Fields and Site/List Content types.
For moving the actual content from QA to Prod we use Echo
One of the biggest challenges that I've encountered with SharePoint is that it doesn't lend itself nicely to the typical project environment, which, at minimum, contain development and production environments. The issues I've run into the most are that content and lists are so tightly coupled that it makes it difficult to perform design changes without performing a content freeze on the production environment. For example, if I have a list with calculated columns and wanted to add some new functionality, I would have to do a content freeze on the production server, create a list template (including content) from the production server, restore that list to the development environment, make my changes, then reverse the list template process. The same holds true for pages and just about anything else in SharePoint. It seems as though once the site is deployed, it's best to work directly on the production box, but that breaks a ton of best practices, for obvious reasons.
How are some of you other SharePoint developers handling this limitation?
There are really two (more?) levels to SharePoint "development". You have the code which gets deployed to the server, such as web parts, content types, workflow actions, etc. This works relatively well in terms of deployment and best practices.
Then you have your example, which is more of a customization of site instances. What we've done when we had to customize a calculated field in the Portal's Site Directory list, is to try and tweak the changes in development. Then write up detailed instructions of the customization to be made, and have a separate person with appropriate permissions use those instructions to make the change on an integration (staging) server. Then have the same person makes the changes live on the production.
I'm not sure if your changes are susceptible to this approach, but it's worth considering.
Then we have another site which is heavily customized with SharePoint designer, and that one we work live on.
You can use Content Deployment Wizard (http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard) to migrate things like lists and libraries quickly. You could also take a backup/restore copy of production, then make your changes on that, and then in the early morning hours, do a content freeze (hopefully no one will care then), import all the changed data from production into your copy, and then restore the copy over production. At least the freeze could be put off and would only be necessary for the duration of the export->import->restore procedure.
In practice, I just make my production changes by hand.
Use FeatureActivation code to deploy changes to the lists' fields. After the code updates the fields then you deactivate the feature and remove it. This allows results to be tested in a QA environment before hand.