Restoring sharepoint to another environment/server(s)

I have many questions:

Is there a definitive guidance doc or checklist?

I've read a few things that say you should have a separate AD envrionment for each "SP environment" - Is this true? What do you do if you only have one AD envrionment? how do/can you manage dev/test/prod features and items?

Is there:

some "rename" script that can rename "sp_prod" to "sp_test" or something.

I noticed that our email setup was sending email from test as if it was production (and really confusing our users!) so I change the email "from to be sharepoint_TEST@domain.com, and this has helped a little, however I noticed that a lot of our infopath forms and some excel/word docuemnts are still "hard coded" to point to "sp_prod" - how is it recommeded to manage this issue?

Thanks in advance for any direction

August 17th, 2015 11:11pm

Hi,

1. Yes it is true, you could have a separate AD environment for each "SP environment".

2. If you have only one AD environment, you could use the users for the multiple SharePoint farms. All SharePoint server roles can only be members of a single farm. You could import the users from one AD group to multiple SharePoint farms.

For more detailed information, you could refer to the article below.

The article below is about architecting a SharePoint 2013 Deployment.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2131832&seqNum=2

3. How do you change the email? Do you change the email in the AD group?

If you change the email in the AD group, you could sync the user profile in SharePoint, then you could check if it can work. For more detailed information, you could refer to the article below.

The article below is about synchronizing user and group profiles in SharePoint Server 2013.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Ee721049.aspx

The article below is about managing user profile synchronization in SharePoint Server 2013.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Ff382639.aspx

Best regards,

Sara Fan

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August 19th, 2015 2:31am

Hi,

You can deploy SharePoint in both ways (multiple ADs and Single AD). It depends upon how your current environment is setup.

If its like your Dev/Test and Prod are completely separate domains and do not communicate to among themselves,

you should have different ADs.

eg : for Test you could have qa.abc.com and for Production you could have abc.com and both are under different forests with no connectivity.

However it looks like you are using same AD for Dev/Test and Prod. You can check From email address from CA however it need to be change manually if this is hard coded in the workflows and forms.

Thanks

August 19th, 2015 3:55am

Hi Vive...

Yes we are in ONE AD environment - so we have changed the EMAIL from to be more obvious where notifications are coming from for users, however FINDING the bizzarre cross referneces is proving challenging...

I don't suppose theres any way to audit or identify a sharepoint sites content for these kinds of hard coded things that might be pointing to another "environment"?

eg:

http://tstSP/... should not contain any references to http://prodSP/...  for example...?

or is this something we need to try to manage/control in some other way?

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August 20th, 2015 3:34am

Hi Sara,

We have only one AD environment (so its good to know that this is not totally unsupported!) and we are currently changing just the CentralAdministration "email configuration" so that its obvious (more obvious) that a message has come from a test server, rather than the production server.

However we are suffering from the following things:

  • the emails in some workflows appear to reference the production server, but are triggered by test item workflows.
  • the forms in the site often submit to the production server (I believe this happens after the content Db is moved from prod to test) is there a way to protect/fix/detect that?
  • there are other issues, so this could be more problematic than I realize...

thanks for your input.

August 20th, 2015 3:43am

Hi,

I find the two issues are all about the InfoPath form.

You could republish the InfoPath form to test server to check if it can work. For more detailed information, you could refer to the article below.

The article below is about how to configure and publish InfoPath to SharePoint 2013.

http://www.appvity.com/blogs/post/2013/06/16/How-to-configure-and-publish-InfoPath-to-SharePoint-2013.aspx  

You also could run SharePoint Production Configuration Wizard in the test server to check if the same issue will occur.

Best regards,

Sa

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
August 26th, 2015 10:36pm

Yeah, the issues we are experiencing are very forms related, however I was asking here because there are so many of them that I was wondering if there was a "wholistic" way of detecting this, as opposed to the link you provided that requires forethough and planning from the "publishing" perspective, and not addressing what I find myself inheriting, which is (I'm beginning to think) a poorly configured, poorly maintained, upgraded site with a lot of questionably configured legacy lists/libraries/forms and so on.

I was wondering if there are more "SHAREPOINT" centered "break points" (ie link checkers or something - blocking submissions from sources that aren't originating from that site... that kind of thing) - best I've found so far is the Central Administration site setting that allows you to tweak the email "configure outgoing email" so its more obvious where emails are coming from, but I was hunting for more such features...

I'll re-read that link to see if it gives me any brilliant ideas, but as some other posts have suggested, I might be required to rebuild a lot of these things from scratch.

Thanks for your

August 27th, 2015 12:09am

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