Exporting a Publishing site from SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and Importing Into Standard

I do a lot of development/configuration on my local SharePoint farm for all sorts of reasons. When  the content is ready I rely heavily on the stsadm.exe export and import commands to move content. However, this doesn’t always go as smoothly as planned. Usually site features that exist on the source, but not at the destination is the problem. When importing, you will receive an error indicating that a particular feature can’t be found.

Normally this is because of custom or third party solutions/features, but can also be an issue with out of the box deployments moving content from an Enterprise edition to a standard edition (but not the other way around).

There is some guidance for dealing with this out there for SharePoint 2007 but not much for 2010. Having recently gone through this in a trial and error fashion, I thought that I would share what worked. Essentially, you need to remove the offending feature before you do the export, deactivating doesn’t always suffice. My case below is for a publishing site, and your mileage will vary depending on the site template that you are using. First, the offending features are uninstalled:

stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name WACustomReports
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name BizAppsListTemplates
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name IPFSSiteFeatures
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name ReportListTemplate
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name DataConnectionLibrary
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name PremiumSite
stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name PremiumWeb

Then the site is exported:

stsadm –o export –url http://mysiteaddress –filename myexportfile

Once done, the export file can be imported. However, don’t forget to reinstall those features – the previous step uninstalled them from all application (read – use with caution)

stsadm -o installfeature -force -name WACustomReports
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name BizAppsListTemplates
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name IPFSSiteFeatures
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name ReportListTemplate
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name DataConnectionLibrary
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name PremiumSite
stsadm -o installfeature -force -name PremiumWeb

Your mileage may vary depending on what you have in your farm,but all you need to do is to add to the commands above with the features in question.