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Sharepoint Portal 2003 Migration from one machine to another in a different domain
This is my story about a Sharepoint migration I recently was involved with in
moving from one machine to another. Hopefully my post can provide a couple of
tips/tricks for those who are tasked with performing such a feat. At a 10,000
foot level, the migration was to take an existing Sharepoint server running on a
single machine in an existing Active Directory domain and recreate this
environment on a new server in a different domain. The goal was to have users be
able to login with their existing user id, have their existing MySites, links to
documents etc. The goal was to provide as much as a *zero-touch* experience as
possible.
After researching I was unable to find any supported tool from Microsoft moving
an existing Sharepoint implementation to another domain. The closest process I
could find was in the disaster recovery documentation. (
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c2861881x.mspx
) However, this process did not mention anything about moving the Sharepoint
installation to a new domain.
After some further searching, I found a tool written by Keith Richie (
http://blogs.msdn.com/krichie ) that
appeared to help make this goal possible. The tool was *non-supported* by
Microsoft but appeared to achieve in migrating existing users, groups and the
profile database after a restoring the databases on a new machine running in a
different domain. This tool would be run after *restoring* the existing SITE,
SERVICES and PROFILE databases. Here is the link to information about the tool.
(
http://blogs.msdn.com/krichie/archive/2005/07/15/439453.aspx )
Note: This tool is NOT supported by PSS and any attempt to call in and get
support probably won’t get you anywhere, consider yourself warned. I used
version 2.2 and was an enhancement to help also migrating the profiles database.
Without talking too much more, the tool helped achieve what I needed regarding
the user, profile information. There was other items in the process I had to
handle in addition to *migrating* user information. Items like search settings,
custom web-parts also had to be re-registered on the new server.
My advice is to test the migration process a few times before going live. Have
some *power* users test everything out will help ensure everything works. Some
of the issues I ran into was the restore didn’t completely register *custom* web
parts. Another issue I ran into was the first installation I performed was done
under one administrative user but I wanted Sharepoint run under a different
domain *service* account. My suggestion is to create a user id, grant this user
id local administrator on the machine and perform ALL installations and
configurations while logged in as this user. This might not apply in your
environment but took me 2 complete rebuilds of the server to do realize this was
the best way to handle everything. Also, take a good inventory of all web parts
before moving to the new server. They might need to be registered in the GAC or
locally to the individual Sharepoint site. I used the ‘stsadm.exe’ command line
tool to register on the new machine. Also make sure you get the Microsoft Office
webparts if these are used in your environment.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/reskit/c2861881x.mspx
Other downloads are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/server/downloads/default.asp
In conclusion, it is possible but not only after many hours of testing was I
able to achieve my goal. This would have not been possible without the tool
written by Keith, this post is a *HUGE* thanks for taking the time to write and
make this tool available. Hopefully the Sharepoint dev team realizes the need for such a tool and makes it available in future releases. As
a result, I have many happy clients for being able to achieve this and most of
the users barely knew we moved to a new machine. The silence we heard days after
the migration proved the process worked, much to the success of the SPSUserUtil
program. I wish you all the best of luck in your Sharepoint migration!
At a high-level, here is the main steps I performed in the migration. This by
no means is a complete list and there are several days in each step but
hopefully this will provide some guidelines.
-Created an AD user and granted local administrative rights on the machine
running Sharepoint
-Re-created all the Sharepoint groups, users in the new domain
-Installed Windows 2003 Standard server
-Installed SQL Server 2000 with service pack 3
-Installed WSS and Sharepoint portal 2003 with all related hot-fixes, service
packs
-Installed all standard web-parts such as those for Office 2003.
-Used SQL Server functionality to backup the databases on existing machine and
restore on the new server
-Used Sharepoint Portal feature to *restore* an existing portal on the new
machine
-Ran the *special* hot-fixes that are related to the SPSUserUTIL. (this is
documented in the readme file) on the SITES, PROFILES databases
-Ran the spsuserutil utility to query and also migrate users, groups and profile
databases.
-Re-registered custom web-parts to the specific Sharepoint sites.
-Recreated or fixed search functionality.
-Logged into WSS, unchecked, clicked OK and re-checked the WSS functionality to
fix MSSearch that is used for MySites search.
Thanks,
Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – ASP/ASP.NET
ASPInsider Member – MCP
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