Migrating SharePoint Intranet from Central Administration

In my previous blog I talked about an improper implementation of SharePoint. I am going to walk through the steps I took to resolve the situation.

Steps required

• Move SharePoint to new SQL Instance
• Break Intranet out from under Central Administration
• Create a new site collection and content database for each department

1. Backup the entire farm, I did this using the Central Administration Backup

2. Export the Intranet and each department

Run a stsadm export on the Intranet site and subsites.
stsadm -o export -url http://yoursite -versions 4 -includeusersecurity
In this case I created a batch file to export each site to a seperate file since I would be breaking them out later.

3. Disconnect the Server from the Farm using the SharePoint Configuration and Technologies wizard.

4. Run the SharePoint Configuration wizard again and create a new farm point to the new instance, this will create the new SharePoint_Config database and the new Administration Content Database(which is why you needed to run the export before creating the new farm)

5. Start the farm services (search services, and excel services) because it is a new config database you need to add in your settings, so farm admin accounts, email settings, etc.

6. Do a Restore from the backup performed in step 1. This will add back the SSP and other Databases and all their corresponding settings.

7. Since we are going to be doing imports we will need to rebuild the intranet site collection because you can only perform an import into a blank site.

8. Import the Root site to the root site collection, this does infact restore all the sites underneath the root site as well. So once it is created delete all the additional subsites that you are going to create new site collections from.

stsadm -o import -url http://newintranetsitecollection/ -includeusersecurity

Being that I planned out my structure prior to this export I created another batch file to simplify the import process and set it to pause between imports.

9. Now we want to start creating new site collections with their seperate Content Databases, the naming convention I used was ContentDB_AM to correspond to http://intranet/sites/AM

• In Application Management go to Content Databases
• Set the current database to offline(this just means new site collections cant be built here, data will still be added for the site collection that exists in this database)
• Create the new content database
• Create a new site collection
• Perform the import for that site
• Repeat until you have done this for all sites (For me it was 10 new Databases and site collections)

10. Build a Search Center on the root site(or where ever, this is where I did it) then set the search settings for each site collection to point to this search center and modify the navigation to your needs.

I did hit an issue with the permissions not working correctly, I decided to do a fresh profile import and that appeared to solved the problem.