Recipe for Moving a WSS Site to Its MOSS Site Collection

I recently had to move a bunch of WSS Sites to individual MOSS Site Collections, here is the recipe I used:

1. Backup MOSS - create a snapshot to rollback to if necessary
2. Export old WSS Site
   1. stsadm -o export -url http://OldWSSSiteCollection/OldSite -filename C:\Temp\Exports\Sites\OldSite.bak -overwrite -includeusersecurity -haltonfatalerror -versions 4 -nofilecompression
3. Manually create the new MOSS Site Collection. Keep in mind it must use the same template as the original site. So if your original Site used the Blank template, then you must use the Blank template.
4. Import old WSS Site into new MOSS Site Collection
   
   1. stsadm -o import -url http://NewMOSSnoblepoint/sites/NewSite -filename D:\MOSS Backup\Exports\Sites\OldSite.bak -includeusersecurity -haltonfatalerror -updateversions 2 -nofilecompression
5. Test Site for navigation and content
6. Change Top Site link
7. Fix any workflow issues

NOTE: Alerts have to be recreated after this process.

Steve Smith provides an excellent article on configuring Email Enabled Libraries in MOSS 2007 using Exchange 2003: http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/Moss07incoming_e-mail.pdf

Moving Databases

For some reason pointing SharePoint to a different database server requires the renameserver command for stsadm. Here is a link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512725.aspx

MOSS Tidbits

• MOSS = SharePoint Portal Server and MOSS Enterprise/Standard = SPS Enterprise/Standard
• stsadm.blogspot.com contains an stsadm extension
• www.codeplex.com is MS's Open Source site containing projects for most MS technologies including SharePoint
• SharePoint Page
  • Master Page in SharePoint contains the top and side navigation.
  • The content section of a SharePoint page is different than the Master Page.
  • At least conceptually, there is a class interface for a SharePoint page. This interface must have all of its requirements implemented. How you do this is irelevant, allowing you to use SP Designer or even some other tool to create a page that will run in SharePoint.
• http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/learning/help.mspx is a site for SharePoint Training
• Forefront - a Microsoft product that scans documents before going into a Document Library to verify they don't contain viruses.
• www.microsoft.com/office may contain some eLearning for SharePoint

Workflow Tools Beyond Visual Studio, SPD and Out of the Box Workflows

• Documentum
• Nintex (SharePoint integraged)
• K2
• Blue Spring Software (I am told this one works well with SharePoint)

MOSS Service Accounts

These are the various service accounts used when setting up a new two server MOSS installation

1. spSql
   1. This account is used by MOSS to access the databases. Additionally, it is used as the identity for the Central Administration application pool & the WSS Timer service.
2. spSearch
   1. This account is utilized by all of the Shared Service Provider to crawl local & remote content.
      
3. spAppPool
   
   1. Use this for all Application Pool accounts
4. spSsp
   1. This account is used for the SSP web services & the SSP timer jobs.
5. spContentAccess
   1. The default account for crawling content

Thanks to Chris Regan and his blog posting on MOSS Setup / Service Accounts for helping me understand how things work a little better.