I had occasion to move a SharePoint site (technically, it was a sub site) from one location to another today.  I am sure that there are several other folks that have put similar posts to this out in the blogosphere, but for those regular visitors to The Mack Page, I thought I would give you something small to put in your kit bag.

Scenario:  You need to move a SharePoint site from one place to another.  For the purposes of this exercise, I am moving a site titled SharePoint Training, with a URL of http://wss.tpg.local/IT_Team/SPTng from the “IT_Team” site to the “Training” centralized site, which is located at the same level as the IT team site.

Tool:  The quickest and easiest way to accomplish this task is to use the STSADM tool, specifically the export and import operations.

Steps:  Enough lead-in B.S.  This is a simple one, so let’s get right to it.

1.  Create a blank site at the destination.  For this example, I did the following:

a.  Navigate to the Training site

b.  Click Site Actions

c.  Select Create

d.  Select Sites and Workspaces under the Web Pages column

e.  Type a Title (“SharePoint Training”)

f.  Type the new site’s URL (“http://wss.tpg.local/Training/SPTng”)

g.  Select the Blank Site template under the Collaboration tab

h.  Click the Create button

2.  Logon to a server in your farm as a user with the appropriate permissions.  Since both the source and destination of this site are under the same site collection, I logged on as a member of the Site Collection Administrators group.

3.  Open a command prompt and browse to the “BIN” folder under the “12 HIVE”.  For default installations, it is found here:  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\BIN.

NOTE:  If you have not already done so, it is a good idea to set up an Environment Variable on the servers in your farm that you can use to navigate directly to the “12 HIVE”.  I usually set up a variable named simply “12” and map it to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12”.  After you create the variable, you need only type “cd %12%”  from the command line to go straight to the hive.

4.  Run the export using STSADM.  I almost always use the –includeusersecurity parameter when I do an export/import operation to preserve the user and group security settings for the site.  The command I used for this particular scenario looked like this: 

stsadm –o export –url http://wss.tpg.local/IT_Team/SPTng –filename E:\MOSS_Staging\SPTng_Export.cmp –includeusersecurity

5.  Navigate to the location where you saved the export file and make sure that it is there.  If interested, you can also explore the log file there as well.  It should be pretty easy to identify, as it has the format:  <<exported file name>>.export.log.  For my example, it was named:  SPTng_Export.cmp.export.log

6.  Run the import using STSADM.  Just like when exporting, I make it standard practice to include user security.  The import command I used for this scenario looked like this: 

stsadm –o import –url http://wss.tpg.local/Training/SPTng –filename E:\MOSS_Staging\SPTng_Export.cmp –includeusersecurity

7.  That’s it.  You are done.  As you would expect, the import operation will put a log file in the same location as the export log file, and it will also be very intuitively named.

If you have any issues along the way, you should be able to see what is happening in the command line window (as long as you do not use the –quiet parameter), as well as the log files.

For more information about the parameters available, you can simply type stsadm –o <<operation name>> (e.g. stsadm –o export) with no parameters.  Alternatively, you can check out the stsadm page on Microsoft TechNet.