Content Deployment - What you won't find in the books...

I have been dealing with content deployment for some time and I think it's time to share some of my experience, especial tips and tricks and other stuff I found relevant that usually not in the regular documentation...

Content deployment is great but tricky... about the regular problems and errors you can read in the "great" Stefan's blog

Well... Time for the gussy stuff...

Content Deployment Tips from the real world...

1. Since Microsoft allows us to schedule the content deployment jobs only every 15 / 30 / 45 / 60 minutes or once in a day I created a cmd file that runs my content deployment jobs (in specific order one by one using stsadm -o Runcontentdeploymentjob "Job_Name") so this way I can do it whenever I want (4 times a day and one in the weekends for example with the windows scheduler).

2 When you deploy new solution / upgrade / sp / etc you should stop the content deployment, it is easier to do it that way too.

3. If you have a feature in the source and destination, be sure to activate it only in the source, the destination feature should be activated by the content deployment.

4. If you have event receiver / workflow connected to a list remember thagt it will be transferred ti the destination - meaning that usually you will need to remove the workflow / event reciever from the destination lists BUT every time you will do a full deploy it will be transferred again to the destination.

5. Start with blank site from stsadm -o command - don't use the blank template from the gui.

6. You can do 2 way content deployment - use DocAve tool for example.

7. CD is great way to transfer your data between domain's / farms (better then db detach / attach) because it is easier to set up the new permissions and not dealing with "cleaning" them after using db's backup / detach.

8. It's great way to transfer some or all your data from prod to QA if needed. You can script the creation of the new site collection and just get again all the data from scratch if you usually destroy your QA :-)