Restore Point. SharePoint.

This is a bit off-topic for this blog… But I get this question quite often, “can we use your SharePoint recovery product help us restructuring our site collections?” Well, the answer is – you could do that, but if you are one of the lucky users of MOSS 2007, you have that out of the box! How? Oh, this is one of the hidden features there…

Small note before we drill into this: I actually learned about this in Barcelona at the instructor-led class that Joel and Todd gave at the IT Forum. All kudos go to these guys!

Okay, now here you go. You don’t have lots of permissions on the portal, but have at least Contributor rights for a top level site. Or maybe you are a site collection administrator. It’s that simple:

1. In your web browser, type your top level site’s URL, then type “/_layouts/sitemanager.aspx”. For example, the URL will look like this:

http://servername/sites/sitename/_layouts/sitemanager.aspx

2. There you go. This will open the Site Contents and Structure page. To the point of this post, you can copy or move any site within the site collection – options are in the drop-down menu linked to the site name.

Enjoy!

Sites Content and Structure page actually allows much more than just moving sites around. It is a very handy tool for lots routine management tasks, and I am not sure why this is hidden so deep in MOSS. Here you can read more about how to work with Site Content and Structure tool and what else it can do for you.

Few more notes about it:

• WARNING: Moving the site will change URLs for the site contents! MOSS will take care of the navigation within site collection, but links that you previously sent to your buddies in emails will suddenly stop working. Make sure to give a heads up to your users before you move the sites!
• The link to the Sites Content and Structure is by default available under Site Actions on the portal’s home page, but not for the lower level sites. (This may depend on the site template, not sure. Anyone knows?)
• The Content and Structure link will appear in the Site Settings under Site Administration after you activate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature for the site collection. Again, not sure why the SharePoint product team decided that if I’m not using publishing features I don’t need to manage my site hierarchy.

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SharePoint administration, IT Forum, MOSS 2007