Hello,
So, maybe I'm a bit old-school, but when we created websites in the past, we'd develop the site on a development server, then publish or promote the pages and files to the production server. This has always seemed to be a good way to go so that users didn't see messed up pages or (God forbid) a downed server because one of us screwed up.
But it doesn't seem that Microsoft had this idea in mind when they created SharePoint...at least, I haven't been able to find a way to do this in the infrastructure as it's defined.
Does anyone know if there's a management strategy for SharePoint development? I've read online that we can make a backup of the development environment and restore to the production server. That might work the first time, but any updates to the production server can't do that without risking data loss on the production server. I've seen some tools out there for migrating list contents, pages and documents from one server to another--although, admittedly, I've not yet investigated them.
But, another concern of mine is custom content types. It seems that once a list is using a content type, you can't update it without deleting the items from the list, disassociating the content type, and reassociating the content type. Shouldn't there be some way to UPGRADE a content type?
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for any of these current dilemas, I would LOVE to hear from you.
Thanks in advance,
Dan