STSADM

Update 12/29/2008: This command has been deprecated – the issues described below have been resolved with the August 2008 Cumulative Update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956056 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956057). I’ve been doing a lot of migration work these days and if you’ve ever had to migrate content from one farm (or site collection) to another you know that all sorts of things can go wrong (many of which have been documented in one form or another on this blog).

I’ve been doing some work on my gl-exportlistitem2 and gl-addlistitem commands so that I can support the import of web part pages. I thought I was about done until I discovered that I had an issue with pages and web parts that were using audience targeting.

If you’ve read my recent post, Fun with Variations, then you know that I’ve been doing a lot of work with variations lately. One of the things that I had to figure out a solution to was how to prevent the hidden Relationships List from getting out of sync with the pages in our publishing site when we migrated content from our authoring farm to our publishing farm.

If you saw my last post, Exporting List Security Settings, then you know what this post is all about. I needed a way to be able to copy the security settings from one variation to another or from one farm to another.

I’ve been doing a lot with variations recently and have encountered numerous challenges with keeping data and lists in sync between the various variations. One of the things that we ended up implementing on my current project was a simple event receiver which copied items from one variation to another when that item was approved.

I just reached a milestone – 100 commands!!! And that’s not counting the 6 additional that are code complete but just not documented yet! When I originally set out creating this thing I expected that maybe I’d have a dozen or so commands but who knew that I’d keep finding so many things to do with STSADM?

I’ve recently done a lot of work with my current client to get SharePoint variations working and as a result I’ve learned that you need to be very patient and persistent and keep a full bottle of Excedrin nearby.

If you’ve been using my extensions for a while there’s a good chance that you have one or more scripts written that use the extensions. If that’s the case then my apologies for this particular change – to prevent name clashes with Microsoft and other stsadm developers that are out there I’ve decided to bite the bullet and prefix all of my commands with “gl-”.

You may have read my recent post regarding a bug with SharePoint which occurs when you create or extend a web application using an invalid directory path. I found that the fix for the bug was pretty simple and just required updating the invalid path property so that the unextendvs or deletewebapp commands could work.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was doing a presentation at the local SharePoint user group meeting and wanted to create a simple command to demonstrate what is involved with creating custom stsadm extensions.