Administer content deployment
Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007
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Topic Last Modified: 2009-04-27
Content deployment allows you to copy content from a source farm or site collection to a destination farm or site collection. Most content deployment topologies include two or more server farms, to separate the authoring environment from the production environment. For information on designing a topology for your content deployment scenario, see Design content deployment topology. For information about planning and designing a server farm to meet the needs of your organization, see Book Excerpt: Design server farms and topologies (Office SharePoint Server).
Note
Although content deployment and the Stsadm import operation might appear to do similar things, mixing the two could cause content deployment jobs to fail or items to be duplicated during deployment. Do not use both a content deployment job and the Stsadm command-line tool to deploy content to the same content database.
Content deployment settings for both incoming and outgoing deployment jobs are configured on the Content Deployment Settings page, which is accessed from the Operations tab on the SharePoint Central Administration Web site. You use the Content Deployment Settings page to accept or reject incoming content deployment jobs for an entire server farm. You can also set specific servers within your farm to be used for receiving incoming content deployment jobs, or for sending outgoing content deployment jobs. This allows you to spread the load for content deployment jobs across multiple servers in your farm, based on the available server resources and the needs of your farm.
Note
Depending on the type of farm you are using, you may not need to enable support for both incoming and outgoing deployment jobs. If your farm is an authoring farm, you do not need to configure incoming (import) settings. If your farm is a production farm, you do not need to configure outgoing (export) settings. However, if your farm is a staging farm, you need to configure both incoming (import) and outgoing (export) settings.
Content deployment paths and jobs are configured on the Manage Content Deployment Paths and Jobs page, which is also accessed from the Operations tab on the SharePoint Central Administration Web site. You use the Manage Content Deployment Paths and Jobs page to create and manage content deployment paths and jobs, and to enable and manage Quick Deploy jobs. You can also specify the scope and schedule for jobs, and can manually test, run and cancel jobs.
Important
It is important to note that content deployment is a one-way process: content is copied from a source site collection to a destination site collection. The content deployment feature does not support round-trip synchronization from source to destination and back again. Creating new content or changing existing content on the destination site collection can cause content deployment jobs to fail. Because of this, you should consider restricting permissions on the destination site collection so that users cannot make changes directly to content stored within that site collection.
Before you can activate a feature in a site collection, the feature must be installed on the server that hosts the site collection. When you deploy content, the features that are activated in the source site collection get activated in the destination site collection. Therefore, make sure that the features that the source site collection uses are installed on the destination server. However, do not activate the features on the destination site collection. If you eventually deactivate a feature on the source site collection, you must manually deactivate the feature on the destination site collection. An incremental deployment does not deactivate any features on the destination site collection that were deactivated on the source site collection.
The following topics and objectives are part of administering content deployment: