SharePoint 2010 - Content Deployment Woes

Lately I've been working a lot with Publishing sites, which means I've been using Content Deployment jobs to move content between my farms. Unfortunately, I've learned the hard way that this part of SharePoint is rather particular about farm setups.

I have an Enterprise development farm that I use for consulting work. I built some pages on it and then wanted to deploy them to my customer's test farm, which runs a Standard license. This broke on me every single time. Specifically, I kept getting errors that features didn't exist on my destination farm.

One message I got was "Could not find feature IPFSSiteFeatures". Here are the screenshots from my deployment report:

These are all the features that existed on my Enterprise development farm but not on my Standard test farm:

• IPFSSiteFeatures
• WACustomReports
• PPSWorkspaceCtype
• PPSMonDatasourceCtype
• PPSWebParts
• PPSSiteCollectionMaster

To get my content deployment working again, I enabled them temporarily on the destination farm, performed the deployment, and then disabled them again. You might also be able to disable/uninstall those features on your Enterprise farm before doing the content deployment job and achieve success, but I didn't test that option.  
Note: Make sure you disable these features on your destination farm after deployment, or you may be in violation of your SharePoint license.

If you made the mistake of installing Excel Services and PerformancePoint Services on your Enterprise environment, your problems are more difficult. If you run Get-SPFeature, you will see more items in the list that will cause your content deployment to fail, such as BizAppsListTemplates.

You might be tempted to disable them on your source farm. Unfortunately, when I tried, I learned you cannot disable them with PowerShell because they are still in use. However, those features aren't activated on any of my sites. Because of my failure to disable them on the source farm, I did not test enabling them on the destination farm because I wasn't sure I'd be able to get rid of them and I didn't want to have to rebuild the entire farm again and lose my content.

I believe these features might be activated inside the service application itself, but I have not found a way to confirm this theory. I tried deleting the Service Application, but the features still couldn't be removed. If you figure this out, let me know.

Summary

In short, here are the things to keep in mind if you want to do a Content Deployment job between two farms:

• Source and Destination farms should be on the same version of SharePoint
• You must deploy solutions that exist on your source farm to your destination farm prior to running the job.
• Features that are enabled on your source farm will automatically get enabled on your destination farm, but if you encounter an error with a feature, verify that the feature is installed on the destination

There are some additional quirks if you receive the "Could not find feature X" for custom features that you have developed. I'll cover those in a followup post.