In the past I have released several blogs about the various problems that can occur with Content Deployment.

Thanks! This is timely and important info for all who ar einvolved with WCM in SharePoint!

One of the more mis-understood features in SharePoint is the Content Deployment functionality that was

Hi Stefan,

great post!

Just one question concerning problem 3:

if I modify BlueBand.master (the one provisioned with the out of the box site definition) to fit my needs and then I make a full deploy to an empty site, what happens? Will I have my modified BlueBand.master or the original one?

Today I have updated my Content Deployment - Best Practices article with additional common problems.

Stefan, thanx for this great compilation.

I have two things to add that may be worth mentioning. First of all people tend to forget to change the output location of the content deployment files. By default that is c:\windows\temp\contentdeployment. But if for some reason that fails, the content deployment files will appear under %tmp% which is often %userprofile%\local%20settings\temp\contentdeployment. If that is the case either change the content deployment output path through central admin or change the environment path variable of the export and import servers.

Second thing is that although you should precreate the web application and create the site collection through STSADM withouth applying the template, people forget to deploy solutions to the web application. Just a minor thing.

The third thing is about the message that 'Web part or Web From Control type could not be found, or is not registered as safe. The web part will still be exported'. In that case check if you have a content by query webpart which has an empty List reference. You can check that by exporting the web part properties and check the list property of the DWP file.

Hi Stefan,

Could you explain more about your last comment, "Regarding solution deployment: usually you should not do this before the deployment is done. Reason: solutions usually activate features on the site collection which can cause conflicts."

I understand the reason, but are you saying that deploying solutions should be done after content deployment? I thought the needed to be done before...what if they contain a feature that isn't installed yet, won't this cause content deployment to fail or am I missing something here?

Hello Stefan,

concerning the problem case 12 A:

Would there be a downside to just choose "Never delete the changelog"?

Would the logs grow uncontrollably? If yes: Are there ways to access/delete them manually aor automatically delete the oldest?

I'm at a position right now, where content deployments happen *very* sporadically. Ususally there are some weeks inbetween, but it can also be months.

Hi Stefan,

RE: Problem 13: Timeouts during content deployment.

I am getting the timeout and when doing a Check Status, see that the job has failed.

Drilling into this shows the following.

"The connection to the destination server was lost after the remote import job was started. The import job might still succeed. Content deployment will continue to attempt to reestablish a connection with the destination server."

Nothing is being deployed to the target server.

Does the error description refer to another "timeout" issue unrelated to the polling for the report? The job appears to be "running" for about 10 min 30 sec but the following suggests otherwise.

Objects Exported 1387

Objects Imported 0

Content Size (in MB) 7.86

Deployment Time 00:00:25

Start Time 2/23/2009 5:14 PM

End Time 2/23/2009 5:15 PM

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi Stefan, further to my timeout enquiry above, here are 2 Application errors from the Event Viewer on the Source Server.

The content deployment job 'XXXXX' lost its connection with the destination server after the remote import job was started. The import job might still succeed. Content deployment will continue to attempt to reestablish a connection with the destination server.

Failed to transfer files to destination server for Content Deployment job 'XXXXX'. Exception was: '(null)'

Any ideas?

Thanks

john