Setting up Sharepoint Dev environment from exsisting site.

Question

We have a company SharePoint site that we paid a company to configure and setup for us. We are slowly taking over more and more of the administration of this site. We would like to setup a test environment so we can make changes with out affecting daily business.

How can we take what they have already installed, deployed, and configured and make a copy of it?

I know we can backup the database, but what about the stuff the downloaded and deployed into the system?

None of what they installed are paid applications from what i can tell. They look like the base applications from the Microsoft SharePoint site like Case Management, Knowledge Base, and a few others.

Thanks

Answer 1

You should take an inventory of the installed solutions, you can see that in the list of solutions under central administration. Then try to identity 3rd party solutions and get the WSP files (I bet they are stored in a folder on your server :))

Set up a new environment, make sure to install exactly the same version, including any service packs and/or hotfixes. You can get that list when you search for the version number in Google (the version number is usually seen in the Site Administration page).

After that, install your custom solutions and attach the content database, this should be it.