Sharepoint Content Deployment illustrated from start to finish

This article shows a start to finish process for setting up Content Deployment in a Sharepoint environment. Content Deployment can be useful in a number of situations including:

sharing information between sharepoint applications
deploying from a staging environment into a live environment
pushing content from an internal sharepoint intranet farm to an external sharepoint internet facing farm

Modify the default Content Deployment Settings

Open the Central Administration site and go to the ‘Operations’ tab and select ‘Content Deployment Settings’.

Make sure the default setting to ‘Reject incoming content deployment jobs’ is changed to ‘Accept incoming content deployment jobs’.

ContentDeployment Settings

On the same screen the default setting is to require the content deployment to take place over an encrypted https:// connection. Change this to not require encryption then click ‘OK’.

ContentDeployment Settings

Create the Site collection you want to deploy content to

An important gotcha to take into account before starting is that the content must be deployed in a separate content database so that no GUID’s are duplicated which can result in conflicts. To ensure the deployment site collection is in its own content database you can either create a new web application for it or use the STSADM.exe createsiteinnewdb command. For more information on createsiteinnewdb see the references section at the bottom of this post.

Another gotcha is that when you create the destination site collection you must select ‘Blank Site’ for the site template. This will not work with any other site templates.

Select Site Template

Create the Content Deployment Path

The purpose of the Content Deployment Path is to specify the source and destination web applications and site collections. You will need to specify the address of the central administration website that is associated with the destination site collection. Give a descriptive name to the path that makes clear what the source and destination are.

Content Deployment Path

Content Deployment Path settings

After the authentication Information has been entered click the ‘Connect’ button (see above screen grab). A ‘Connection Succeeded’ label should appear. Once the connection has been made you will then be able to select the destination web application and site collection.

Click the ‘OK’ button to save the Content Deployment Path.

Create a Content Deployment Job

On the ‘Manage Content Deployment Paths and Jobs’ page select ‘New Job’

Create Content Deployment Job

Give the Job a descriptive name and select the path you just created.

Content Deployment Job Settings

You can leave the other settings on this page at their defaults but you could also if you wished

Narrow the amount of content to be transferred by specifying which sites in the site collection you want to deploy rather than the default which deploys all sites from the source site collection.
Schedule the job so that it automatically deploys any content that is updated on the source site collection at regular intervals. You can create / change the schedule at a later time if you want to.

Run the Content Deployment Job to deploy the content

On the drop down options for the newly created Job select ‘Run Now’.

Run Content Deployment job

Refresh the page and wait for the Status to change from ‘Preparing’ to ‘Running’ to ‘Succeeded’.

Run Content Deployment Job

Once the job has completed if you click on ‘Succeeded’ you will be taken to the Content Deployment Report which details the processing of the job. Click on the Destination Server URL on this report and you should be able to see your content in its new destination location.

Now you have tested the deployment you can go back to select ‘Edit’ on the jobs drop down options (see two images back) to setup a schedule for the deployment so any new content added to the source site collection will automatically be pushed to the destination site collection at a specified repeated interval.