Limitations of Using Stsadm.exe for Content Migration

Stsadm.exe provides a quick and easy way to migrate the contents of one Windows SharePoint Services site collection to another site by using basic export and import operations. However, the tradeoff for this ease and simplicity are certain limitations:

· Stsadm supports moving only entire Web sites (SPWeb instances). You are not able to export selected items or lists. Therefore, Stsadm does not support selectively updating site contents. In cases in which you need to export only selected items, use classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment namespace.

· You cannot retain object globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) when you migrate site objects. New identifiers are added at the migration target.

· You can experience problems if you re-run Stsadm on site content that has already been imported. If that occurs, all list items that are not document libraries are duplicated on the target site.

· Other minor limitations are imposed by operation parameters. For example, although the migration object model provides about 25 export/import parameters, the equivalent operations in Stsadm provide only about 10. And in some cases parameters provided in Stsadm are somewhat limited. For example, for setting security, Stsadm offers only "no security" or "all security" options. You should become thoroughly familiar with the Stsadm operations and their parameters before using it for content migration.