Why we need deploy contents to another SharePoint site when it is accessible to everyone over the web? This is because in some cases the SharePoint environment has been setup in multiple location or the contents have to be kept in multiple isolated stages. Example:
- Multiple farms configuration with isolated network or limited network bandwidth within farms. Speed up the response time by deploy contents locally.
- Staging/production environment, staging for internal and production for public (Internet accessible)
- Fail-over environment for SharePoint.
- And etc.
There are number of ways which allow you to deploy contents from SharePoint to another SharePoint environment, but today I just want to show you the approaches I had used most (free) and the advantage and disadvantage.
Here the approach for content deployment on SharePoint.
Content deployment is a feature of SharePoint Server which allow you to deploy content from source site collections to another site collection.
Advantage
- Free and system aware feature.
- Support schedule deployment.
- Support massive data deployment, but it depend on network connectivity.
Disadvantage
- No library or item level deployment.
- Very specific when setting up the deployment destination, e.g. the destination site has to be blank or empty site for initial deployment.
Xavor - SharePoint Migrator Free Edition (http://www.xavor.com/index.php/what-we-do/solutions/sharepoint-2010-tools/)
The third party migration tool which supports site, web, library and item deployment.
Advantage
- Drag and drop UI for content migration, support site, web, library and item deployment.
- Free but with limitation. (see disadvantage)
- Crossed platform supported, WSS3.0, SP2007 and SP2010.
Disadvantage
- 30GB limitation for deployment.
- The service application has to be installed on source and destination server.
- No scheduler.
