Architecting a Solution – Best Practice Web Applications Configuration for Content Deployment

Overview

Since SharePoint 2007, content deployment has been part of SharePoint.  Its not a commonly used feature in most collaboration farms, but its essential for web publishing farms.  Makes the tasks of moving data from Development to Staging to Production an automated process.

As automated processes go, its not bullet proof and the larger and more complex your site gets the more likely you will have to republish the full site to correct errors.   Depending on your infrastructure and the size of the site, this could take a long time and your site is essentially down during the process.  To keep your site up you should configure two Web Applications in production for content publishing: a Primary and a Secondary.  The Secondary should not be accessible on the internet.  Each of these Web Applications will have its own content Database and its own Site Collection.  Follow the steps below if you need to fully republish the website with quick turn around.

Steps

1.  Create a new blank site collection on the Secondary Web Application (to the Secondary Database)

2.  Pause all incremental publishing to the Primary Web Application

3.  Publish the site to the Secondary Web Application

4.  Disconnect the database from the Secondary Web Application

5.  Disconnect the database from the Primary Web Application

6.  Connect the Secondary Database to the Primary Web Application (Now the Switch is complete)

7.  Resume incremental publishing to the Primary Web Application

Remember that the site will only be down while you disconnect and reconnect the databases in step 5 and 6.  I recommend that you run a full crawl from your index server to make sure your indexes are fully up to date.