Moving WSS (sub)sites

Today, I was asked at the company I work for, "is it possible to move a site from one location in the Sharepoint hierarchy to another".

For example, say a site is at http://server/sites/sales/cars, would it be (easily) possible to move it to (say) http://server/sites/sales/products/cars.

Some searching of the documentation and the web later, I've come to the conclusion that yes, it is possible. But it's not all that easy, as you cannot easily drag-and-drop a site from one location to another.

So, what you do, is:

• make sure no-one is using the site.
• create a new (sub)site at the new location, but make sure not to initialise it (i.e. cancel creation at the point where you would usually choose and apply the template).
• back-up the original site, using smigrate.exe (use -h to get all the options).
• restore the site to the new location, using either smigrate or stsadm.
• delete the original (I personally would make it read-only, or admin-only, until it's certain the new one is working correctly).

Of course, there are other ways to do the same (using Frontpage 2003, for example).

An even easier way is to acquire SMove for SharePoint, a utility that takes the pain out of backing up, restoring and rearranging SharePoint Sites. Features include a UI for backup/restore, modifying SharePoint properties and other common SharePoint administration tasks. SharePoint sites can be moved and your taxonomy rearranged using Drag and Drop in a rich context sensitive TreeView. And at GBP 90, it's a steal.

Links:

• SharePoint 2003 "smigrate.exe" to backup and restore workspaces (note: site is having trouble)
• How to move a Windows SharePoint Services Web site from one server to another by using FrontPage 2003
• Triplewood - SMove for SharePoint