Hi I have a Sharpoint Publishing Site-Collection which I export entirely using stsadm. On that Publishing-Site there are four Varaiation-Labels and import and export works fine. So far so good. Now the problem is when I try to create a new Site (Page works) I get an error in the variation log saying: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." further investigation in the sharepoint log shows the following: OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0734) 0x1590 CMS Site Management 89vg Exception Unexpected exception occurred processing SpawnSitesJobDefinition workitem. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.IsSameUrl(PublishingWeb pubWebToMatch) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.CreateVariationWithDefaultTitleUrl(VariationSettings variationSettings, VariationLabel varlabel, Boolean isCreateHierarchies, Boolean skipSourceHierarchyAndLabelCheck, LongRunningOperationJob lroLogger) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.CreateVariationsDeep(VariationSettings variationSettings, ReadOnlyCollection`1 varLabels, Boolean isCreateHierarchies, Boolean recurse, LongRunningOperationJob lroLogger, List`1 errors) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Spawn... So what works is creating a new Page but it fails when creating a new Site. By the way the source system is fine - I can create new pages and sites. Any ideas?

Have you tried using stsadm -o backup / restore instead of import / export?My blog on WSS / MOSS development is found at http://jebass.blogspot.com

Thank you for your help. There is yet another issue with backup /restore the jobs which create the pages in the other variations are not backuped. So you have to create a new site-collection including the variations (which will create the jobs). Once you did that you can restore to the new site-collection (with overwrite) and the variations seam to be working. I am a little disapointed about the Microsoft built in features for content migration which should be a task in daily business for moving data from integration to production. Anyway it seams to be working now, thank you!