By Edith C.

When you are working on a SharePoint site, you usually do it on a development environment, so you need to think (even if you don’t want to) about the migration of the project to a production environment. This could be a nightmare if you are not prepared, but try to follow these tips on the deployment phase, and things will go much easier.

Before deployment:

·         If you are deploying a publishing site, be sure you don’t have “Draft” or “Pending” documents or items. All unpublished items are not visible to anonymous users. A little tip: use the “Manage Content and Structure” option (for publishing sites) to filter all site items by “Drafts”, “Pending”, “Checked-out by me”, etc.

·         Use a “Blank site” template to create the destination site on the production server. If you use a different template, like “Publishing site” or “Team site”, all the features for those templates will be active by default on your new site, and if you don’t need them, they will be just slowing (a little bit) your site.

·         Be sure that all your custom features are installed, activated, deployed (whatever you need) on the production server. If you need the solution packages as well, copy all the files to the new server and deploy them, because they are not part of the content deployment.

Deploying . . .

·         Use a test environment before deploying to a production environment. This is very important when you have made significant changes to SharePoint out-of-the-box, so all the bugs on your changes can be cached and fixed, on a brand new site (and not direct into production).

·         Try to follow all the log entries when deploying.  And if you can, try custom solutions to log all export/import errors, I recommend you this blog to do so.

After deployment: 

·         Test the whole site, change the masterpages if necessary (sometimes if you have changed the master page for the site this might not get set in the destination site)

·         Turn on error messages for the destination site – If you are still getting errors and haven’t turned on detailed error message set the stacktrace attribute of the SharePoint/SafeMode element to “true” and the mode attribute of the system.web/customErrors to “off” in the web .config.

I hope this tips help you when you are happily deploying SharePoint sites.