SharePoint - moving from Enterprise to Standard

Question

We've been happily running on MOSS 2007 Enterprise for quite a while. However, we're faced with the need to move our 2007 instance to a different farm running standard.

What should I be looking for in our existing implementation that would prevent us from accomplishing this feat? I realize there are charts offering comparisons between the two products, but I need to make this assessment quickly and I haven't needed to compare the two editions before this week.

Basically, I'm going to be looking at our critical sites to determine if they use anything that would prevent us from going to standard.

Also acceptable is a response stating that moving content/functionality from an existing MOSS 2007 Enterprise farm to a new MOSS 2007 Standard farm is not feasible (along with elaboration on why this is the case). I've copied our production content/functionality to a new farm running Enterprise but never to one running Standard.

Answer 1

You really shouldn't make this assessment quickly. If you miss something you could really be shooting yourself in the foot.

The major enterprise functionality is the BDC, forms, excel services and other specialized functionality. If you're not using those areas, you're probably fine, but you need a more detailed assessment.

Answer 2

It is feesible to move content from Enterprise to Standard, however, you will certainly receive import or restore errors and in my experience you are going to spend quite a bit of time hunting these errors down. For example, when you attempt to export and import a site, the source and target versions must have the same features; if a feature is not available on the target the import will fail. In the long run you can work around this by disabling or even uninstalling features on the source subwebs, however, you might disable an Excel Service or Forms component that you were using. Also, any third party products will most likely still behave in Standard Vs Enterprise but you will need to install them prior to importing to old sites.

The comparison chart is useful but what I usually tell clients is that they will lose InfoPath Forms Services, the BDC, and Excel Services. Some are willing to take the loss and others are not. With more and more companies leveraging workflow, they very often want to take advantage of Forms Services as the web front end so this is often the downgrade blocker.

Answer 3

Try doing a dry-run with a VM and figure out a reliable process until you've got the migration cold.

Consider Chris O'brien's SP Deployment Wizard, which might make things easier for you: http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard

Answer 4

KPI Web Parts is another one that is Enterprise only. There are a few Enterprise Features that will need to be disabled in the site collections that you want to move (and have their Standard analogs enabled) for things to work out correctly for the move.