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My organisation has recently restructured, and as a result, we have to move a bunch of team sites in our Sharepoint 2007 Intranet (MOSS). This is going to result in changed URLs and broken links in plenty of documents. Not a good situation.

Does anyone have any ideas of how to best handle this?

So far I have thought of the following options:

  • Friendly custom 404 error pages for moved sites which give a link to the new site, and a search box with friendly text telling people to use it!
  • Redirection to the new location

Given that only the root of each site will change (e.g. http://intranet/site/old_dept/teamsite becomes http://intranet/site/new_dept/teamsite) it should be possible to do smart redirection for the rest of the URL which actually points at the documents, pages etc. I know this would be possible with Apache at least. However, the combination of Sharepoint 2007 and IIS6 is making it hard to track down the best way of achieving a friendly solution that keeps the user happy.

dunxd
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3 Answers3

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For your smart url redirection, check out the RDA URL Redirection utility.

MattB
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Two things - you will want a temporary workaround:

  • Use IIS to redirect requests for the old URL to the new - this will probably fail unless you also have an alternate access mapping for the old URL configured for the Web Application.

  • Next, re-write the URL's "on-they-fly" with a URL Re-Writer as mentioned above - though there is an official one from Microsoft available at http://www.iis.net.

Then, long-term you are going to want to scan and update your content with the new URLs - SharePoint Desginer has some reports/scans under the "Site\Reports" menu. But you may be better off with a custom utility.

Jason Kaczor
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  • When you talk about the long terms scan and update - are you suggesting there is some way of fixing links within Office documents stored in Sharepoint? – dunxd Feb 12 '10 at 10:53
  • Unfortunately, the rewriter at www.iis.net seems to be only for IIS7 - we're still in IIS6 land as far as our Sharepoint infrastructure is concerned. – dunxd Feb 12 '10 at 10:58
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I'm pretty sure that you will find the whole information about moving Sharepoint, content and database in these links. Hope it will help!

Regards,

r0ca
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    If you need more information, let me know, I'll give ya a hand. – r0ca Jan 29 '10 at 15:28
  • Those articles discuss moving sites between content databases, which doesn't necessarily result in changed URLs. We *want* to change the URLs so they reflect the site and organisational structure, yet make sure as few links as possible break (or handle broken links in a user friendly way). – dunxd Jan 29 '10 at 15:35
  • To the change the URL, this is in the sharepoint high level settings. You should need to backup your old site and import it in the new site. If you have a lot of space on your dbase, you can keep it alive. Basically, just create a new site name and import the old site on the new site... it's as simple as that. – r0ca Jan 29 '10 at 15:53